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Okay, we
are about halfway through our allotted time, and so far,
Jessica was wearing something or another in every exposure
we had made. It's time to discard clothing and celebrate
Jessica's breathtaking figure.
This
was winter in the Pacific Northwest -- in a previous visit,
Jessica wore this hat around town to keep rain off her head.
When I saw it, I liked it, and we decided that we'd photograph
her with her hat at some future date. Well, we remembered,
and here is the hat.
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We immediately
trip over a problem -- this lighting, which we like, isn't
always good for the hat -- the brim of the hat forms hard
shadows across Jessica's eye, obscuring much of her facial
expression.
It was
immediately obvious that we need to make light & pose
adjustments.
But how
to "save" this particular image? My answer:
crop. Take a look at the image below:
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So, what
to do about the hat brim shadow? For one thing, we
can embrace it & use it to enhance the facial expression.
That's what we try here.
Okay
-- I promised myself I wouldn't talk about Jessica's tattoo
anymore, but I'm going to break that promise to make the
following observation: I can't tell you why the tattoo
in this image bothers me while the large & lovely beauty
mark by Jessica's rib cage doesn't.
I think
we made a slight/subtle change to the lighting yet again.
On the previous pages, the light was being distributed to
all three strobe heads equally. For these images here,
I think we directed half the light to the main light, above
the camera, and the other two strobe heads on either side
of the camera shared the other half. As such, the
main light created a strong shadow, but the shadows from
the other two lights were overpowered.
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Here's one
solution to the hat brim shadow challenge.
Here's
a full length, free-standing mirror in the next room, and
it usually stays there. For this sitting, at Jessica's
request, we pull the mirror into the studio space &
position it beside me to the left of the camera position.
That way, Jessica can see the light on her body & make
adjustments to her poses.
I do
this every once in a while, but I don't like doing it because
it slows the session down, and every once in a while, you
get an exposure where the model is looking at herself in
the mirror instead of looking at the camera.
Case
in point -- this image.
Whenever I see a picture of a model looking off into
the distance, I often wonder what she's looking at and why
the photographer isn't holding her attention.
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We briefly
revisit the idea of poses of Jessica leaning forward.
Nice. |
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We decide to
change things up. Jessica had a comfy robe that she wanted
to use, and I figure that I'd combine comfy with comfy by asking
her to pose on the big comfy chair. We do move the lights
around a bit, but the light sources are still "hard"
(i.e. without soft boxes or umbrellas or such). Here's
the first image. |
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I like the lighting,
especially how it clusters cozily around Jessica, but I didn't
like the background -- there's a little jog in the wall that's
distracting, and there's the various light switches & stuff
along the left side of the image. Easily addressed --
throw up the background. |
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Here's a
token color image with an alternative cropping & orientation.
Something
you have to be careful about -- I'm always conscious of
tonal separation, meaning that the tonal values of the main
subject should be distinctly different from the tonal values
of the background. Here's an example: Jessica's
hair is quite dark, and the background behind it is also
dark, but the background is light enough so that the viewer
can distinguish which pixels belong to Jessica's hair &
which belong to the background.
I should
mention that I had some kind of equipment failure around
this point. Jessica & I made dozens of exposures
with her robe, but these exposures just disappeared when
I downloaded the images from the camera's memory card.
The images were numbered sequentially, but a big chunk of
the images just disappeared.
Got to
be more careful when downloading -- I need to verify that
all the images downloaded before I delete them from the
memory card.
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I could
stand to have a little more tonal separation, but this is
enough.
I'm in
the habit of "deconstructing" the pictures that
I see -- by this I mean that I try to figure out how it
was done and in particular how it was lit.
So, I'll
leave it as an exercise for the viewer to figure out how
this was lit. Hint: there are multiple light
sources.
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I can't
underestimate the value of "chemistry" when it
comes to producing top quality images. That's why
managing the photographer-model relationship is so important
to me.
The big
advantage of making photographs with a close friend is that
we both can be comfortable with each other, and the connection
between the two of us comes through in the image.
I've
seen plenty of other images of Jessica made by other photographers,
and the "connection" here in these photographs
seems to be unique & special to me.
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I kinda
like this image, but I don't quite like it a lot.
This is something that I haven't heard from other photographers,
but I have a posing bugaboo: I don't like it when
a model's limb is pointing directly towards the camera lens.
Look at Jessica's thighs. Jessica has lovely &
proportionate legs, but this pose makes them look short &
stumpy.
Anyone
else feel this way?
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Another token
color image. I do like the contrast of Jessica's skin
tone against the olive green of the big comfy chair, and the
backdrop does provide both texture & color contrasts without
being overpowering. Having a good color monitor helps
a big lot, and my relatively new digital camera handles color
well. Further, with the new monitor, I think my photo
editing is improving. I still have a long ways to go,
but it's improving. |
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In the pervious
pages, I've selected an image for some digital manipulation
fun. I'm going to do that again, with this simple
image, a close cropping of a larger image (that's in the
Out Takes). Is it serious art? Who cares!
It's wicked fun! |
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Like I said
-- fun. Some days it's obvious that I have too much
time on my hands. |
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