Autumn Shoot
Two weeks ago I did a shoot for a young man who's soon going to be 5 years old. Given the time of year, an outdoor Autumn shoot seemed to be perfect as long as the weather would be kind, especially given the client had restrictions on availability. The plan was to use the garden and fields here to rattle off as many images as we could before it all became a bit too tedious for our young model and so we'd penciled in 2 hours for the shoot from mid-morning. Typically, 24 hours before the shoot the Great British weather was looking dubious with rain forecast across the duration of the shoot and it was looking as if we might have to move indoors and turn the shoot into studio session.
On the day however, a window of nice weather opened up to coincide with the shoot and we were able to hold the majority of the session outdoors. With 2 hours scheduled we also had plenty of time to include some indoor and studio shots so to being with, we shot some studio portraits with a single softbox as the main light source. From there we shot some 'natural light' portraits in front of a window, bouncing a light back with a reflector. The reflector I had to hand was white on one side and gold on the other. I'd opted to use the white side to bounce light back into the scene but our model had a strong preference for the gold side - so that's what we ran with.
With the indoor shots complete we moved outdoors to continue. We now had a beautiful day with a cloudless sky and strong sunlight and I wanted to use the strong lighting conditions in different ways. Initially we used the sunlight as a back light, illuminating our subject from above and behind. The conditions were very very bright however and I had to bounce some flash into the pictures to properly light the face. For the shot above, I used the inbuilt bounce card on my SB-900 Speedlight to add some fill flash to the shot. As usual, I used the flash in manual mode and used good old trial and error to get the best exposure - it only took a few test shots to get it right in camera. For some of the other shots where we were in direct sunlight I held a diffusor over the top of our model to spread the light and remove some of the harshness.
With regular breaks thrown in we manged to shoot for nearly 2 hours and this young man was a real star to get through something in the region 15 location changes with or without a change in wardrobe. I was spoiled for choice for images to use in this blog post, so I'll post a few more in the future and perhaps put some on the homepage too.