I read through my blog for the first time last night and realized that I have been posting a lot of my HDR photos and neglecting to post other types of photos. While this would normally not be that big of a deal I think it is since I do not have my full portfolio online right now. I wish I could say that I have been working on it but I honestly haven’t. I’ve been spending the very little free time I have editing photos instead of programming the new portfolio pages. So, I am going to make an effort to mix it up a little bit when it comes to posting. The good thing is that I have a lot of photos already post processed and ready to post from old photo shoots so I can quickly throw together posts and get them online.

All that being said…

This post is going to be dedicated to some photos taken during two photo shoots I did mid-April with a new model named Janice. The planning stage for the two photo shoots was just like all my others; come up with a location and wardrobe, grab my gear, and go. Yes, I have invested heavily in the “Shoot From the Hip” philosophy as I explained in my post Don’t Mess With the Universe.

The first shoot was a swimsuit shoot and took place on the beach around 10am. I didn’t have an assistant or any stands with me so I knew right off the bat that I was screwed. I would either figure it out on the fly or crash and burn. It was already too hot so burning was not an option!

I pretty much guessed that the sun was going to be pretty overpowering. Not too hard to guess that being that the shoot was on a beach at 10am on the east coast of Florida! So I slapped my trusty Speedlight 580 flash onto the camera and jacked the power up a bit. I had no way of keeping my off camera flash out of the dirt so I didn’t even take it out of the bag. The on camera flash and available light from the sun was all I had. After shooting for a few minutes it became apparent that my 580 wasn’t going to be able to do what I wanted so it went back into the bag as well and I just worked with the sun. Too bad I didn’t have Joe McNally’s SB800 tree from his desert shoot in Dubai!

The second shoot was a little more planned only in that I borrowed a light stand and a soft box from my buddy Rob at Exposure PAS (mine were caught up in UPS hell and arrived a few days after the shoot). This time we shot closer to 6pm so that we could catch some warmer light and maybe even get a sunset shot or two in. This time I had my diffuser, Speedlight 580, Speedlight 550, a light stand, a soft box, and a few reflectors which gave me a heck of a lot more options than I had for the beach shoot.

We shot for about an hour at one spot along the tracks that I knew about. A few minutes after we started I saw the ominous glow of a trains light a few miles up the tracks heading towards us. I was really hoping that a train would go by so I already had some ideas on what I was going to do if that happened. I dropped the shutter speed, positioned Janice clear of danger, told her to hold as still as she could in her poses, and started pushing the little round button. I got some really cool shots of the train blurred out behind her showing all the motion.

After that we went to another spot along the tracks where I had taken my HDR shots of the train cars so that we could get some posed shots amongst the cars. Nothing really interesting happened during that time other than getting a little creative on where best to put the reflectors. I had a large boom stand with me but without someone there to hold it still it was nothing more than a giant wind sail. It got quite interesting for a while.

We finished up with a quick drive over to the bridge to catch some sunset shots with the river in the background. Overall both shoots went really well and we both had a lot of fun. If not anything else I at least learned that I need to take at least one assistant with me if not more.