Went to one of those “pass the pocket wizard” style photo shoots the other day. You know the ones, where they basically setup the lighting and everybody takes a shot at, well, taking a shot. The model (seen here) was April. She was really very good actually, I liked working with her a lot. May have to hire her in the future, if I ever get my portrait project off the ground. She was preparing for a body building type competition and needed some shots for that so she volunteered to pose for us. Was a fun shoot.
The thing about model shoots like this is that, why, I sometimes feel sorry for the models. You could hear the clicking of the shutters, the impressions being made but, poor April, nobody was talking to her. I felt so bad, at one point, I had to just strike up a conversation. I tried to talk a bit, at least to try and give her some feedback. Luckily, she was good about posing and didn’t need a lot of feedback from us but still, talk to your models, people. Models are people too!
Another interesting take away from the shoot was that it wasn’t a true “pass the pocket wizard” style shoot in that we had continuous lighting setup, rather than strobes. Now, I’ll leave the discussions about strobes and strobists and how I feel about all of this for another day but, suffice it to say, I much prefer floods. I like continuous style lighting, what can I say? I just like it better, it fits my style more, and I like working with it so that was good for me. They had a nice portrait ring light that was only about a hundred bucks. May have to pickup one of those in the future, as it was a sweet light and not a lot of clams to bring it home. Of course, this is how they get you, this is how they get us all, right? It’s a crack house in there, they are just really dealers, and we’re the unsuspecting “user community.” (No, really I can quit at any time. Honest! Ok, so maybe not so much.)
Was a fun shoot and I managed to wrangle a few workable shots out of it. Nothing earth shattering but you know I met a nice model and all. Can’t think of a better way to spend part of a day really then playing with my camera, can you? Nope, didn’t think so.
For this, I used the Canon 5DS with the walkabout lens and the existing lighting rig.
Until next time…
