A couple of lessons learned.

[radiorickm]

Even though I have been shooting for years, I am just now starting to do "portraits", so I am sneaking this into the beginners section, others may get a kick out of it.

My daughter asked me to come take a couple of pictures of her and her boyfriend. They live about one our away. So, two days ahead of time we began planning the shoot. Batteries were charged, gear was gathered up and packed into it's traveling bags. We did checklists, and everything we could think of to be prepared.

We arrived in her city and checked out several local parks to find a good shooting location. We found a beautiful park with a pond, and rolling hills. There were lots of trees providing shade; By all means, it looked like it would be a perfect location. We checked out several different areas, and even had a plan for the shoot at that time. All of my kids live in the same town, so I invited them to stop by also.

Well....we all know what happens to PLANS

My daughter arrived over an hour later than expected. We had planned for a later afternoon to sundown shoot (New Mexico sun is quite harsh). She arrived just as the sun was setting. This meant I had only about 20 minutes of usable light. The sun was now on the horizon and all of the beautiful shade was gone! For some reason, probably related to photojournalism days, I went into CRISIS mode at that point, and concentrated on "getting the shot" instead of following the plan, I guess because I knew it was just a matter of minutes until dark.

Well, I guess there are some lessons I leared that I wanted to pass on.

#1. Look at the location closely, but through the camera view. What I though was a georgeous location all of us sudden had trees growing out of everyones head, mottled lighting and I couldn't get the camera angles I had envisioned. I picked an area that had a great slope to provide a background, but without an actual body there, it didn't register where the head and shoulders would be in relation to the horizon.

#2. Be ultimately familiar with your equipment. I spent more time than I should have trying to decide if I needed the gold reflector, the silver reflector, or the white reflector. I just don't have enough experience yet to know instinctively. And then, trying to get my assistant to position things exactly as I wanted took more time than I thought it should have also. I wound up with several photos that were not balanced as to main light and background light.

#3 Have a plan, but be prepared for problems. I had an idea of what I wanted to shoot. When things got off track, I wasn't mentally prepared for it; which triggered the "crisis" mode. Slow down and take your time even though you are rushed. Think about what you are doing and what it is you want to do. I think it would have been better concentrating on getting one good set of images, rather than the 3 or 4 poses that I ultimately wanted.


There were a couple of images that I liked in the end, but I do plan on a do-over session.

 

[Robin Usagani]

Based on the photos, it looks like the time you are shooting is the perfect time to shoot but you just picked a bad background. Personally I would have shot #1 facing the other way toward the sun so the trees wont be bright. Also the IQ of the images arent great. #2 is out of focus.

 

[gsgary]

OCF is your friend for this sort of work

 

[KmH]

A keen awareness of light, and light use is important to all genres of photography.

All of these required supplimental lighting, either reflected or strobed.

it would have been nearly impossible to use reflected light in #1, but easily have been used in the others.

Investigate what is known as 'open shade' (and how to use it), and on youtube watch some video's on using diffusers in direct sunlight.