Oakland County MI Portfolio Photographers Mary DuPrie
I always tell myself to take behind the scenes pics, but unfortunately, the shoots been long over. Even if just for myself. Sometimes I look back at some of my images… hummm, I wonder how I shot that. It’s just not in my work flow.
I tend to get into repetitive testing. I’ll shoot a lot of flair, bare bulb, large softboxes. I figure if I keep doing it i’ll remember better at a later date. Problem is I often don’t remember.
I try and re-engineer my own images but I’m not always sure. This image was a phase I was going through last year. I was even doing quite a bit of Photoshop actions on the images. Lots of back flair, and bare bulb, (or maybe a 7”pan reflector)? The transparency of the nose shadow makes me guess “bare bulb”.
I change my set ups a lot during a shoot as I’m sure you do. We are all struggling to learn and thus keep tweaking. I don’t really have many “I do it this way” type set ups. Almost every shoot is “I wonder what would happen if I did it this way”. As model photographers we get to do that. As portrait photographers you need to have your formulas down a bit more.
Clients don’t seem to mind, I just say, “Everything I do is custom, so let’s see what will happen if I do this.” I figure I can test on their dime for a wee bit. If it doesn’t work out I’ll fall back on to something that I know works.
It is nice to nail it on the first image, it’s rare, but it “can” happen.
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I love your lighting-it’s encouraging to know you play around with it so much.
i pretend it’s play, but i’m really sweating my ass off… wondering when i will get busted for this stuff!
Hi Mary,
Sweet image! Nice to know that you don’t always nail it on the first shot 🙂
far from it… sometimes it sheer agony to watch me struggle