On August 4th I had a shoot with Jessie out on my friend Ron’s farm. Ron is a photographer as well and Chris Tierney came along to shoot with us. Jessie came out with her fiance and several cute outfits fitting a nice country setting. Jessie grew up in a small town in Nebraska so she really enjoyed the rural location.
Like usual, I started off the night shooting ambient light to get creative juices flowing. Chris asked Jessie to stand near a fence next to an old white school house. The sun was coming in from camera left behind the school house. The light bounced off the white wall and provided very nice directional light on Jessie. For a few shots we also added a gold reflector about 20 feet from her on camera left to add just a little bit of golden light to her shadow side. I started off shooting with my Canon EF 70-200 F2.8L IS lens but was looking forward to using my new manual focus lenses for the first time on a shoot!
Don’t feel like you have to use speedlights in order to get a good portrait. Before you do anything else look around for an area that already has good natural lighting and start there. Once you see what the natural light is doing decide if you need strobes to create your vision. Sometimes you have a location with a giant reflector that is better than anything you have in your equipment bag!
We then walked around toward the back of the school house to where the saddle club’s old coral is located (I’m a city boy, I have no clue if that’s the right term!). I talked to Jessie a bit about posing and what I’d like her to do. Then I set up a medium 28×42 softbox to camera right, just out of frame. Next, I setup a bare flash behind Jessie to give her some rim light. I used my Sekonic L358 meter to get the light how I wanted it. For these shots I switched back to my 70-200.
When using a softbox don’t think you have to point the face of it straight at your subject. Often times it’s best to point it so that the face is perpendicular to the camera plane and to position your subject just behind rear plane of the box. By doing that you are able to use the entire softbox to wrap the subject. If you position them in the middle of the box then you’re only getting half of the wrap because a large portion of the box is lighting their back which your camera can’t see.
Afterward, we took Jessie over to an old bath tub sitting in the middle of the field. The area here was tight and I couldn’t use my 70-200 lens easily with the crop camera so I put the 50mm F1.4 back on. For this shot we used the speedlight in the softbox to camera right.
It’s important with portrait photography to focus on the eyes whenever possible. The eyes are the most important feature and it is especially important with close shots like this. If the focus is even slightly off it can ruin a picture because they eye will be drawn to the area in the most focus. It’s also important to use a small enough aperture to get both eyes in focus. In this particular shot I should have used a smaller aperture to get her right eye in better focus.
After we were all finished with the tub shot Ron asked Jessie to come over near another one of the fences and asked her to lean against it. Chris grabbed a weed and asked Jessie to stick it in her mouth. Weeds aren’t really my thing but I guess I’m not too country; I took some shots anyway! For this shot I also used my 50mm F1.4 manual focus lens.
If you don’t nail your focus the shot isn’t beyond redemption. In this shot the focus was more on the fence than on Jessie. To correct that I applied a mild blur to the fence while applying some sharpening to her. That brought her sharpness above the relative sharpness of the fence which provides me with a soft focus effect. The shot could have been better with perfect focus from the start but this was my first shoot using a manual focus lens!
I then asked Jessie to walk through a field area next to where the fencing stopped. These shots were also with the 50mm and were done with only natural sunlight. It was getting close to sunset and we had beautiful light. I processed two shots from this portion of the night because I felt they both have a unique feel to them.
Be aware of the “rules” of photography composition. In these two shots I placed Jessie in the third positions to give a pleasing composition. Once you understand the rules, such as the Rule of Thirds you can break them with the intention to create a desired effect. I also positioned the frame so that Jessie was looking in to the frame rather than out. Having your subject look into or out of a frame can provide completely different feelings for the viewer even if all else is the same.
We headed back toward where my truck was parked and Jessie changed in to her Tractor Inspector shirt to get some shots on Ron’s old tractor. Since I hadn’t used it yet, I decided to put on my Super Takumar 28mm F3.5 for these shots. I setup the light in the softbox again with a CTO filter and color balanced to it. That forced any areas in the frame not getting light from the flash to turn toward blue.
Using white balance creatively can give you unique lighting. If you set your white balance to tungsten and shoot outside you’ll have a blue color shift in your photos. If you combine that with a flash using an orange gel your subject will then have proper color balance while anything not lit by the flash will exhibit the blue shift. A similar trick can be used by setting your white balance to fluroescent and using a green gel on the flash. That will give you a magenta cast.
