Photographing Laura

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May 11th, 2008 | By admin | Category: Technique

One model, a camera, a tripod, a Speedlite flash and a beautiful sunny day.

This is part one of the tutorial.

It’s been a long time since I’ve photographed a model. It’s something I used to do a lot when I was younger, but since then I started travelling and my photography shifted to a more documentary style.

Now, inspired partially by some of the amazing work I’ve seen at Flickr, I’ve decided to start photographing girls again.

I found Laura, we set a time and we met up in town to go take some photos.

I had several aims from the shoot:

Get used to directing and photographing a model again.
Start learning how my Speedlite flash works, which I bought several months ago but I’ve hardly used.
Play around with balancing flash and daylight, with the intention of taking some photos that illustrate these techniques for photography magazines.
Take a few ‘creative’ photos that capture the spirit of summer.

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day in early May, which at 10.30am meant harsh, unflattering sunlight. Great conditions for testing my flash, and we went to a local churchyard for our first photos.

I asked Laura to lay out on the grass amongst some daisies. She was in direct sunlight and this created extremely harsh and unflattering shadows. I set my Speedlite up to fill in the shadows.

The last time I took photos like this was in the pre-digital age and I have to say I love being able to see the photos on my camera’s lcd screen right away. I was able to see how the flash to daylight ratios were affecting the photos and I was also able to show them to Laura so she could see how we were doing. This helped get her into the shoot and we were able to analyse some of her poses and see how to improve them.

By the time we’d finished in the churchyard I knew I had two important goals accomplished: some good technique photos demonstrating how to balance flash and strong sunlight, and some very cool and creative summery photos of Laura laying in the grass amongst the daisies.

Then we headed to a nearby pub. Not for a drink, but to ask if we could take some photos inside. I wanted to try balancing the light outside by lighting Laura with my speedlite inside.

Permission granted, I was setting up by one of the windows to take some photos when two trucks parked right outside, completely ruining the view. But luckily, on the other side of the pub, there was a beautiful old brown leather sofa.

I asked Laura to lay down on the sofa and we worked our way through some poses and flash/daylight combinations. I had asked her to bring along some warm coloured clothing and they matched the worn leather perfectly.

Once again I managed to take the technique photos I wanted and some more creative shots too.

I’ve posted my favourite photos from this shoot below.

In part two I’ll explain how I set up the flash and what settings I used.

In part three I’ll talk about the post-processing and retouching techniques I used in Adobe PhotoShop CS3 on these photos.