It’s usually hard to get children at this age to engage the camera and get good photos of them.  But that wasn’t the case with Kaida.  She is a wonderful baby who was happy and cooperative that day.   This made the photos much more enjoyable for all of us.

Kaida’s mother Mandy is a good friend of mine and I fully expect that I’ll be doing her senior photos in about 17 years.  Which is fine with me, assuming I can still hold a camera then. 

Be well,
Ernie

As you might remember, I’ve been experimenting with new lighting setups lately.  And for this particular one I thought it would be great for showing the contours of the body.  I figured the easiest way to see how well the setup worked was to do a swimwear shoot, plenty of curves there right?  So I asked my friend Erica if she was interested in helping me out with it… she was great, plus she brought her friend Lacie along.

The lighting setup worked pretty much as I expected it would, but my ring flash was casting a bit of an edge shadow around them.  I’ll need to get them farther from the background or use a more powerful background light to compensate for that.   If I turn the ring flash down much farther I’ll be risking under exposure… which would increase the noise in the image, and I don’t want that.

I tried to match suits to backgrounds, I guess just for the challenge of it.  Recently Brooke commented about something on Facebook saying I liked a challenge.  At least I think it was Brooke… Anyway, I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but I do love a challenge so she’s probably right. 

Once they switched to white suits my setup wasn’t appropriate for a white background so I went to my standard high key arrangement. We spent some time playing around with these.  This setup isn’t as restrictive on movement as the other setup.

Oh yeah, this is Erica.

And this is Lacie. 

The last set with the silver threaded bad girl suits was a third lighting setup, but somewhat similar the first but with a sofbox instead of a ring flash for front fill.  I actually think I like it better than the original setup.

Lacie has this nice little tattoo on her tummy that she wanted to feature, it may be a little over the top, but she liked it. 

I had a short, but very fun session with my friend Rachel a couple weeks ago.  I’ve been working on some new lighting styles and she was good enough to help me out as a subject without any guarantee that they would look good.

We didn’t go all out in poses and stuff, mainly just because I was more worried about how the light was going to look.

I’m very happy with these, the lighting set up worked excellently with the dark dress and black background.

I did maternity photos for Rachel a few months ago and those rocked, she’s a former Miss Missouri and knows how to look good. 

The River Monster is the dress, not Hannah.  It was a dress we found at the Goodwill store that was covered in seashells and fine gold thread netting over a lace over layer.  It had a smooth V shaped split up the front and a longish, wide train from the lace over layer on the back of it that looked very fin-like.  I could see this dress being perfect for some under the sea themed prom or something.  It was horrible, beautiful and awesome…. All at the same time.

As soon as we saw it, I knew what I wanted to do with it. I just hoped that it would fit Hannah.  If it was too small I would have gotten it anyway and used someone else with it but I wanted Hannah in it.

I had to take it in some at the chest but otherwise it was perfect…. And yes, I can sew.  Thank the old woman who lived across the street from me as I was growing up.  She was kind of like a 3^rd grandmother and she taught me to sew, long before I learned to read or write.  I have a sewing machine and as well as hemming my own pants, I have been knows to make my own backgrounds and other bits and pieces as needed. 

Hannah supplied some shells for the ground in front of her and a necklace that worked with the concept.  All we needed then was the water.  All right, I guess I should have called the Creek Monster, but it just doesn’t have the same feel to it.  I wish we had an ocean around here, I could have called it the Sea Monster then.

I keep referring to it in the past tense because it was so filled with sand, pebbles, twigs and the baby oil we used on Hannah to keep her wet looking when we finished shooting with it that I threw it in a dumpster.

Hannah was an excellent collaborator in this session, she is normally great at this, but in this case she was inspired.  She is extremely creative and imaginative.  She had great input in this session and helped make these photos absolutely amazing.

So what we were going for here was a beautiful water creature crawling out of the water.  I think we succeeded amazingly.  :)  Some of these are in both color and Black and White, I couldn’t make up my mind between which is better on some.  I like things about both.

And if you would like to see the dress a little better to see what I was talking about, here are two links to photos on my facebook page… Photo 1 and Photo 2. I shot those with my pocket camera right after I got done pinning the dress up so I could alter it to fit her.  :)

The first photo here is pretty much what I was thinking about when I was planning this particular set.  I really didn’t think much about it past that, I figured we could wing it for a while.

Winging it produced some very cool photos and I’m very happy with the results.  :)

I stayed with the warm and fairly hard light for these, it was perfect in the sunlight, but after a while we got into the shade and I wish I had used a softer light for those.  The softer light would have gone more with the indirect light we had in the shade.

And we got very lucky with the weather, it was a great day and there was plenty of water in the creek because it had rained a fair bit the previous two days.  I was out there a few days ago and there was much less water.

Overall, I think these photos have a hot summer look with a sexy feel to them.

I’ve been putting off putting these up on my blog because I didn’t know what to say about them.  I could tell you about how much fun I had shooting them or how much I love them or how much I love working with Hannah.  But I think I’ll tell you a little about what I wanted the photos to look like.  A few weeks before the shoot, Hannah and I paid a visit to the Goodwill store again and found several things that we thought would make interesting photos.

The first two sets we shot were in the studio.  She had a shorts outfit she wanted to use and then there was in interesting suit combo that I thought we make an interesting fashion set.

I had a very good idea what I wanted these photos to look like when we found that outfit; they had to be in B&W on gray seamless paper with very controlled light to get the feel I wanted.  I wanted a moody business noir look and I think we accomplished that marvelously.  I considered doing it with a lighter background and then pulling the saturation down some, but that doesn’t look so good with dark hair and I’ve got a dark streak in me that I have to let out sometimes.

After the studio sets, we headed out to Sand Creek for some location work.  We’ve shot at Sand Creek before when the water was high, but now that the level has fallen we were able to do photos from angles we couldn’t use before.  One dress we found was full of warm tones and I thought it would be excellent to use under the bridge with the sunlight streaming through the timbers under the bridge.

I wanted these photos to be warm and kind of organic so I went with a fairly hard and warm light that was very directional to match and emphasize the warm sunlight streaming in under the bridge from the late afternoon sun.  I set the power of the flash to fill the shadows from the sun but not overpower it.

Next we recycled the purple dress from a previous session.  I wanted to try it in a different setting, and it worked out very well.  I wanted something that would contrast vividly with the greenery down the stream and it was perfect.  I increased the power on the flash so it wasn’t just filling the shadows… it was balanced with the sun.  I wanted these to have a look of vivid frivolity about them.