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July 25, 2011
Ulorin Vex – Hotel Monaco foyer (photo session 4)
During the same afternoon that I had the opportunity to photograph Ulorin Vex, I took several other sequences of images of her in other costume. Here we worked in the foyer area of the Hotel Monaco in San Francisco. (If only all other hotels had such a diversity of immediately photogenic areas!) With this image, I wanted a near-symmetrical image, with just Ulorin Vex’s posture slightly breaking the symmetry up. Just enough to make a stunning subject even more eye-catching.
A little more about the train-of-thought to getting to this image …
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June 30, 2011
multiple off-camera flash – adding some pop with back-lighting
Lea is a model I’ve worked with on previous occasions. With her striking looks and easy demeanor, she is just a pleasure to photograph. We spent some time this afternoon in down-town Manhattan, looking for interesting spots as backdrops. Jessica, (my infamous assistant with an attitude), spotted this dramatic gate and interesting glass front. It seemed like the perfect place to start the photo session, but it needed something extra to give the photos some drama.
The final image is shown here at the top, but let’s look at how we got there …
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June 22, 2011
photo session with the Fuji X100 – camera review
First of all, for those who haven’t heard of the Fuji X100 (B&H) yet, it is a beautiful retro-looking rangefinder-mimicking 12 megapixel digital point & shoot camera (with a fixed 35mm equivalent f2.0 lens), that gives remarkable image quality. That about sums it up.
For all those reasons, quite a buzz developed around this camera. Quite unlike anything since … oh, the Leica X1. Or the Olympus Pen EP-2. Or the Sony NEX-5. There was greater excitement building up around the Fuji X100 though than other cameras, specifically for its looks initially. And then when news hit about the incredible image quality, the excitement and interest became more substantial. It’s a hot item right now, and for good reason.
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June 6, 2011
eliminate & simplify – the first steps in composing your photograph
These two images were taken from more or less the same spot.
All that changed was my vantage point, and my choice of lens.
This vibrant park in Manhattan seemed like an interesting place to photograph, but when photographing a couple, I really want the accent to be on them. The best way to do this is to frame them so that the background is as simple as possible, but still complements the final photograph. I had the couple sit on top of this grassy mound, and I lay down on the grass, and framed them tightly against the trees in the background.
Even though I was working with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens, I was shooting around 90mm in focal length. But this was enough, coupled with my low viewpoint, to eliminate any distracting elements from the frame. It is essential to look at the edges of the frame when you compose. And that is the key here in the composition – simplicity.
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May 31, 2011
the next step – going beyond just posing people
With the recent post on a few guidelines on posing people, I wanted to add the reminder that when photographing people, our final destination isn’t just the posed photograph, but that we should try and capture something about our subject. Something about their personality, or showing some facet of who they are and their lives.
When photographing couples in particular, my accent is on photographing their relationship as well. In addition to the portraits of the couple, I want to show how they interact with each other – playfulness and intimacy. We need to create images which have emotional impact – images that have some resonance with their friends and family when they view them.
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May 21, 2011
using a macro lens for a photo session of a newborn
I had the pleasure of photographing the newborn baby of Jen and David recently. (David regularly follows the Tangents blog!) Aside from photographing the proud parents with their little one, I also needed to get detail photos of the baby.
With detail images, you see even more clearly just how small this newborn baby is, when you show the scale. A tiny hand clasping a finger. Tiny toes gently flexing against her mother’s hand.
For this, a macro lens is an essential part of my camera bag …
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April 27, 2011
Continuing the photo session with Ulorin, we worked inside the hotel room for the next part. The photo above is a candid shot of Ulorin fixing her hair between changes in clothing. Ulorin’s next outfit shown in this article, was more revealing than the previous outfits during the photo session. (Just a heads-up for the Tangents readers who are surfing from their workplace.)
Photographing inside the room, I initially tried to work with just the window-light, but hit a small snag. The indirect light through the window kept changing on me as clouds moved in and out. Instead of changing my settings continually to match the light, I decided to revert to using flash to mimic the window light. This would give me consistent light.
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April 26, 2011
Ulorin Vex was one of the two models that we used in the recent workshops in San Francisco. Having seen Ulorin Vex’s personal site and portfolio on Model Mayhem, I jumped at the chance of working with her again with a photo session the day after the workshops. Working with a model as professional and striking-looking as Ulorin, was an experience. We shot several sequences with different looks and backdrops and lighting, and I’ll share more of these over the course of the next few days.
The photographs shown in this article was from a sequence we did in the passage outside my hotel room. The lighting was surprisingly simple, but I had to improvise with the limited space we had …
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April 8, 2011
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April 7, 2011
It’s a great pleasure to present this guest spot by Angie Lazaro – a good friend from way back in South Africa. Angie is a fashion photographer in Cape Town. Angie and I became friends at a time when I was still finding my way as a photographer, doing all kinds of freelance photo shoots … and she was still a photography student at a university in South Africa. We’ve both come a long way from those lunch-time conversations at the Full Stop café in Melville, Johannesburg .. and I doubt either of us could’ve imagined where we’d end up over time.
So I really am thrilled to present Angie now where she describes the setup of two photographs during a recent photo session in Cape Town …
on a photo shoot – decisions, lighting, tweaking, ka-boom!
The two photographs shown here are from a series I shot for a magazine fashion editorial (Top Billing Magazine). The location is a new trendy hotel in the heart of Cape Town – the venue suited my needs in that it had great décor interest and enough space to work and move without disturbing the guests too much. The clothing was about using basics, such as the white t-shirt and classic white shirt whilst making it very fashionable in different combinations. During the first shot we realized the model needed a stronger look, the make-up artist added a fringe which suited the style and overall feel we wanted to achieve. A shoot is all about team work …
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