Fashion & Portraits

Its been couple of weeks since last photosession. Shout out to Antti for hanging with us, shooting video and to Daniel battleing the cold! Sorry about that, next time heaters on the location.. jeah right.

(Arias says that good location calls for kelvar and smells like urine. In Kotka the cold will do.)

More to come..

It seemes I do self portraits when ever I get gloomy, bored or worse  both.

I had to get out the flat yesterday evening and natrualy grabbed the D200 + SB800 combo. Someone could have told me it was snowing but I did not want to bail out on quest for another typical self portrait in the dark,cold, wet, spring weather in the streets of Kotka.

An elderly lady passed me and started to ask questions about what she must have thought was idiotic behaviour. A photograper standing out in the middle of the street with a freeking light stand..

Never the less Im pleaesed with result even if the jeans look horrible, and the coat, and the hat… Ah lets face it: wrong dude in the picture. Wheres the beckham/model/footballer- dude when you need him?

The prop I druled over and waited to shoot for better part of the month was the A-Ford. As it -of course- turned out the car was a pain in the ass to work around. With uncontrollable specular highlights and the blue paint job that sucked up all the light! There was no way I could have made my lightsource relativly huge compared to the  car nore have more power out of my SB units.

First I sat on Monica on the drivers seat and shot from outside, what a mess! Too much stuff in the frame and not enough lights (?.)  Monica was cracious infront of the lens and she made even the bad frames to look good.  It was obvious that  wasn’t going to get the pics I was after.  Asked if she would not mind to model for Janne on the seemless for some time and then come back to me. The arangement gave me time to sort things out wihtout having a model being bored to death by f-stops, flash ratios and diffusion..

She came back and I put her on the back seat of the car. One ezybox is on the drivers seat held by VAL (Janne) as a mainlight and the second ezy is back left in the rear window coverd with a scrim. Flare is caused by the sb80dx and sb600 3-4 meters from the windows zoomed out.

I felt awsome! I had to hold my self back not to scream when I looked at the image from the back of my D200! I made true comeback! Stuggeled,  bailed out on time and came back with one of the best images I have ever shot! “Shoot, suffer,die” says da man and I tell ya, I could have died happy after this shot.

Model: Monica Menniti
Make-up: Noora Hautakangas
Styling: Maiju Siekkinen

This social media stuff starts to pay the off! I wish it paid the bills thou, would be kinda cool to have Facebook paying the phone bills. But more of this after the weekend.

Here is couple of pics I shot of  Salvatore who Id like to call ‘the italian bon jovi.’ I was sure that John did a kakaoke gig at the Soolo when I first heard Salvatore sing living on prayer. Great guy in general too, always smiling, calm and relaxed. I feel like a monkey on a streroids compared to him..

The catch in the session was hard light. The shadows are our friends but its not always available. Thus I thought its better to practice then to shit on my pants when the its the real deal. So off we went to the park with Antti, reflector, ezybox and couple of SBs. Thanks to Antti for assisting, and to Salvatore for being so patient. He did not complain at all, althou the bright sun hurt his eyes and the frost bit his toes..

Little Metallica reference..

Fourth dress of the day and I  was feeling too good. Comfortable, and followed by a rude awakening (hey secod refernce of the post) results to a brain freeze.

The first three dresses worked like a charm  with my lighting but the fourth dress. Ouh, I could not get anything out of it. Nothing! Luckily I started with  easy going window light to save my ass (sloppy there as well and had to do a horizontal crop of the vertical image). I figured that if the model is dark and rock but the dress is not and lighting is it would all even out. It just did not work. Thus no decent images of the fourth dress.

I could have gone to the studio and shoot a second  butt saver too, but why do that when I knew Mika had one? If this was a client shoot I would have done something safe. No decent pic of the dress is not an option if you are paid for the pics. I wasn’t, so I let it go.

Joked about the whole scene to Suvi, and said “try to look like you are living in the States in the fifties and you are waiting for your husband to come home from work. Dinner is cooked and baby on the way.”  Clad she laughed, otherwise she would have killed me..