Fashion & Portraits

I haven’t done these in a while. Mostly because they are lame if there isn’t anything tricky in them. Got a funny comment a while back from a fellow shooter in flickr saying my strobist info is quite boring. “Ezy and the kicker” for a 100+ images its easy to see what he meant..

As I mentioned the whole photosessios was special but this image in particular. Here is the lighting setup for it. The powerlevels are maybe-as I forgot them as soon as they were done..

Couple of things in the pipeline developing nicely but too slowly.

After the couple of fashion sessions I’ve found my self shooting something more simple with Salvatore and now with Masha.  We went out to a blazing almost-spring sun which makes impossible for me to use my speedlights as a mainlight. Even if I double the power with two units its complitely useless to even try to overpower the sun when the sycn speed is limited to 1/250th of a second.

Ance held a scrim to diffuce  the  othwerwise way too bright and hard sunlight.For some images I bounced a speedlight from the snowy ground to provide some fill. Could not use a fill card because it was already used a scrim.

Postprocessing was done i a different way than usualy for practice and because the images did not call for heavy post production.  Clean portraits, clean post..

Quick post to pull everything together before moving forward.

The day in Espoo last week was amazing. One can only hope that it helpped everyone involved! My portfolio certainly got a huge boost.

Next stop, something simple.

There is couple of styles of photography I do not think much of. One of  them is these cars&babes kind of photos. You know exactly what  I mean! A-Ford, cool model,  stylish outfit, awsome hair and makeup they just had to go into the same  frame..

Model: Henna Mäkinen
Styling: Maiju Siekkinen
Make-up: Noora Hautakangas

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