This past weekend I met up with several photographers and a few models for a get-together that Larry Hayes had planned through Model Mayhem. We ended up having an over abundance of photographers and only a few models! Steve Gray called up a few models he knew and McCall and Kay came from Larry’s emails.
I walked around with Jim Ferguson, Roy, and Larry Hayes along with McCall and Kay and got some great photographs of them both!
In this shot I brought McCall over to a small out building in the park while Jim and Larry were over by the playground equipment with Kay. I setup McCall near the brick and used a hard off-camera light to give her some punch. I love what hard light can do when used correctly and in Nebraska it’s difficult to use an umbrella or softbox unless you have an extra hand to keep it from falling over in the wind!
Here I placed Kay and McCall on the steps on the East end of the park. I placed a flash behind them to give them some rim light and had Jim and Roy each hold a bare speedlight directed right at each of the models individually.
Beautiful ambient light! Not purely natural though, but using a 5-in-1 reflector to it’s full potential can give great beauty light in situations where the natural light isn’t working. I had one assistant wrap a 42″ translucent scrim just out of frame on camera left and had a second hold the white wrapping under her chin just out of frame. Using a scrim in this close gives fantastic diffused light and having the white underneath allows her skin and eyes to reflect something other than the brown stone below.
Now, this shot is 100% natural. Jim asked McCall to sit on the fence and I grabbed my 70-200, climbed up and balanced for a different vantage point and got some great shots of McCall from this position. I asked McCall to lower her sweater off her shoulder to add a little something to the image and made sure to place her head in the negative space created by the road for more visual impact. I also used the fence as a leading line to direct the viewer.
While Larry and Jim had McCall over on a bridge at the park I worked with Kay a bit in front of a nice looking stone structure at the end of a driveway of one of the houses in the park. I directed him to give me some natural unposed looks.
And, for the last shot of the day, I placed Kay in Larry’s old Cadillac. The car is actually classic gold but I felt that the gold car mixed too much with Kay’s skin color and jacket so I colored it blue and changed the brown trim black in order to make the color flow.
