Digitally Refreshing

Love photography but you don’t have a studio to hand?

Well, join the club – I spent all my hard saved cash on a Canon 5D and now I have to learn how to do things the ‘financially efficient’ way.

Step one
Find a beautiful model. Luckily for me any one of my sisters can fill this role and in this case Stacie Bowden helped me out. Ask her to apply the required make-up, hair apparatus and chose the appropriate clothing. In my case, Stacie was wearing a strapless top to expose her shoulders, very light make-up and her hair was left down.

Obviously the choice is your here, you don’t have to follow my lead. I was after a particularly natural shot with nothing detracting from Stacie’s smile, eyes and hair.

Step Two
Seek out a suitable background. Again, I wanted simplicity so a flat, painted, bedroom wall was perfect. I was also happy with the colour and the lighting conditions were good – but not perfect.

Step Three
Yep, make those lighting conditions perfect. The room I was shooting in had a large bright window to the right hand side of Stacie’s face. I needed to balance that light. I used a large reflector propped up against the wall to the left hand side of Stacie, reflecting light back into the left hand side of her face. With the use of my flash, pointing towards the reflector, I was able to lift the typical shadows out from beneath her eyes. This also had the added bonus of adding a little reflection to her eyes, just to bring the photo to life.

Step Four
The rest is up to you. Shutter, Aperture and ISO are your tools to bring a little magic to the photo. I used ISO320, in retrospect a little too high and an aperture of F8, keeping most of her face in focus. You should also be aware of what you’re doing with your lens. Too much wide angle and you will distort that image – I kept my lens at around 100mm, this also allows you to move away from the model, giving him/her space to breath and act naturally.

Oh one more thing, the reason Stacie was laughing so much in some of the photos was because she was holding a table top fan and trying to keep it steady enough to blow her hair away form her face! Always remember to have fun, and a big thanks to Stacie Bowden

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.