Monthly Archives: August 2010

2010 has been an amazing year for us in part due to the influx of really, really good fashion photography sessions.  While I absolutely adore shooting in our new studio, I've always felt most at home shooting outdoors.  Natural light is unpredictable, flattering and the tapestry of an outdoor setting makes for a dynamic shoot filled with intense color hues and rich, moody shadows and eye catching backgrounds.  Best of all, working with natural light requires little setup and almost no downtime, allowing a photographer to focus solely on angles and zoom lengths. 

You'll often hear me gripe at how difficult it is to shoot outdoor fashion photography in Las Vegas.  Any type of portrait photography, especially fashion or boudoir photography (and even wedding portraits!), is best shot without an audience watching and the sheer volume of people in Las Vegas presents a challenge. To compensate, my locations tend to be a bit exotic and out of the way, but the payoff for a little bit of driving is huge and the only other people we saw during our entire shoot were a couple of folks on quads, riding across the desert almost a kilometer away.

We met our bikini model Melissa some time back for an in studio family photography session and the confidence and poise with which she carried herself was uncanny.  Shooting with her was like shooting a magazine cover with a top supermodel; the angles she made with her body, her expressions and the intense look in her eyes were beyond stunning and if it wasn't for the sun disappearing from the sky, I easily could have shot for another five hours!

There was so much traffic going out of Las Vegas that I was initially worried that we'd arrive to our spot too late in the afternoon, but my fears were allayed when I saw how the golden rays of the late afternoon sun complimented her skin tones.  There was also a bit of a breeze, which eliminated the need for the fan and generator I had brought along.  For most of the shoot, we stuck to 100% natural light, but for a few of the closeup shots, my partner Sarah made excellent use of 32" and 60" (5 foot!) reflectors to fill in the shadows a bit and at the very end, we even threw in a little off camera flash. 

I often say that color makes a shoot and the vibrant colors in Melissa's outfits pulled her out of the background and complimented every stage of the afternoon sun and into sunset.  A wonderful shoot with a talented model with the natural ability to brighten an entire room!

 

We're having an amazing time at our new studio – as I was just telling a new client today, after a couple of weeks being there, the new studio just today began feeling like 'ours'.  There's usually a brief period of awkwardness, as every shooting room has a decidedly unique light 'acoustic', but I have to say that out of every studio we've shot from, this one immediately fit like a glove.  Different sized or shaped rooms require smaller or larger lighting modifiers and it's actually been a good deal of fun testing out different lighting configurations.

The Norman LH500 strobes that we're using in studio are just wonderful.  Our older studios required humungous 2000 watt/second power packs and umbrellas the size of me to overpower all of the ambient light and the huge warehouse space we used to rent back in the day (which always seemed to result in a burned out pack, modeling light or flash tube every week), so the opportunity to have a scaled down lighting setup and still achieve the same results is a breath of fresh air (and please forgive my ever-present camera geekery – I promise I'll refrain next time and get right to the pictures )

If you're friends with us on Facebook, you may have seen my little tour of our new place and if so, our model Erica may be familiar, as the client in our makeup and wardrobe room, along with our amazing makeup artist Christa.  Before I get to the photos, I would like to give Christa a very big nod; the quality of her work is uncanny and her rates are excellent, but most of all, her personality has always left us and our clients with a very big smile!  Since we began working with Christa, she has provided flawless professional makeup for well over 150 of our clients and watching her in action is akin to watching a master painter or sculptor at work.  I cannot recommend her enough!

Not only was Erica beautiful, but she was made for the camera.  In fact, she even bears an uncanny resemblance to the famous model Carmella Decesare and I could easily see her career take off just as quickly.  Her personality could switch from pure and light hearted to sultry in the blink of an eye and throughout the entire shoot, we all chatted like old friends and had such a good time that I didn't even realize that we had shot almost until 10pm!  But in that time, we had the opportunity to try out a goodly amount of fun light setups and concepts, including a semi-duplication of the famous bar scene with Jessica Alba in the movie interpretation of Sin City (the name of which is ironic, as Las Vegas is often dubbed 'sin city').

While processing the shoot, I decided that a shoot like this begs for a fog machine to complement the colored background lighting and will be picking up a very nice unit in time for our next studio shoot.  We're hoping to work with Erica again, as the experience was just wonderful for all of us!