The Hat & Comfy Chair

Okay, we are about halfway through our allotted time, and so far, Jessica was wearing something or another in every exposure we had made. It's time to discard clothing and celebrate Jessica's breathtaking figure.

This was winter in the Pacific Northwest -- in a previous visit, Jessica wore this hat around town to keep rain off her head. When I saw it, I liked it, and we decided that we'd photograph her with her hat at some future date. Well, we remembered, and here is the hat.

We immediately trip over a problem -- this lighting, which we like, isn't always good for the hat -- the brim of the hat forms hard shadows across Jessica's eye, obscuring much of her facial expression.

It was immediately obvious that we need to make light & pose adjustments.

But how to "save" this particular image? My answer: crop. Take a look at the image below:

So, what to do about the hat brim shadow? For one thing, we can embrace it & use it to enhance the facial expression. That's what we try here.

Okay -- I promised myself I wouldn't talk about Jessica's tattoo anymore, but I'm going to break that promise to make the following observation: I can't tell you why the tattoo in this image bothers me while the large & lovely beauty mark by Jessica's rib cage doesn't.

I think we made a slight/subtle change to the lighting yet again. On the previous pages, the light was being distributed to all three strobe heads equally. For these images here, I think we directed half the light to the main light, above the camera, and the other two strobe heads on either side of the camera shared the other half. As such, the main light created a strong shadow, but the shadows from the other two lights were overpowered.

Here's one solution to the hat brim shadow challenge.

Here's a full length, free-standing mirror in the next room, and it usually stays there. For this sitting, at Jessica's request, we pull the mirror into the studio space & position it beside me to the left of the camera position. That way, Jessica can see the light on her body & make adjustments to her poses.

I do this every once in a while, but I don't like doing it because it slows the session down, and every once in a while, you get an exposure where the model is looking at herself in the mirror instead of looking at the camera.

Case in point -- this image.

Whenever I see a picture of a model looking off into the distance, I often wonder what she's looking at and why the photographer isn't holding her attention.

We briefly revisit the idea of poses of Jessica leaning forward. Nice.

We decide to change things up. Jessica had a comfy robe that she wanted to use, and I figure that I'd combine comfy with comfy by asking her to pose on the big comfy chair. We do move the lights around a bit, but the light sources are still "hard" (i.e. without soft boxes or umbrellas or such). Here's the first image.

I like the lighting, especially how it clusters cozily around Jessica, but I didn't like the background -- there's a little jog in the wall that's distracting, and there's the various light switches & stuff along the left side of the image. Easily addressed -- throw up the background.

Here's a token color image with an alternative cropping & orientation.

Something you have to be careful about -- I'm always conscious of tonal separation, meaning that the tonal values of the main subject should be distinctly different from the tonal values of the background. Here's an example: Jessica's hair is quite dark, and the background behind it is also dark, but the background is light enough so that the viewer can distinguish which pixels belong to Jessica's hair & which belong to the background.

I should mention that I had some kind of equipment failure around this point. Jessica & I made dozens of exposures with her robe, but these exposures just disappeared when I downloaded the images from the camera's memory card. The images were numbered sequentially, but a big chunk of the images just disappeared.

Got to be more careful when downloading -- I need to verify that all the images downloaded before I delete them from the memory card.

I could stand to have a little more tonal separation, but this is enough.

I'm in the habit of "deconstructing" the pictures that I see -- by this I mean that I try to figure out how it was done and in particular how it was lit.

So, I'll leave it as an exercise for the viewer to figure out how this was lit. Hint: there are multiple light sources.

I can't underestimate the value of "chemistry" when it comes to producing top quality images. That's why managing the photographer-model relationship is so important to me.

The big advantage of making photographs with a close friend is that we both can be comfortable with each other, and the connection between the two of us comes through in the image.

I've seen plenty of other images of Jessica made by other photographers, and the "connection" here in these photographs seems to be unique & special to me.

I kinda like this image, but I don't quite like it a lot. This is something that I haven't heard from other photographers, but I have a posing bugaboo: I don't like it when a model's limb is pointing directly towards the camera lens. Look at Jessica's thighs. Jessica has lovely & proportionate legs, but this pose makes them look short & stumpy.

Anyone else feel this way?

Another token color image. I do like the contrast of Jessica's skin tone against the olive green of the big comfy chair, and the backdrop does provide both texture & color contrasts without being overpowering. Having a good color monitor helps a big lot, and my relatively new digital camera handles color well. Further, with the new monitor, I think my photo editing is improving. I still have a long ways to go, but it's improving.

In the pervious pages, I've selected an image for some digital manipulation fun. I'm going to do that again, with this simple image, a close cropping of a larger image (that's in the Out Takes). Is it serious art? Who cares! It's wicked fun!

Like I said -- fun. Some days it's obvious that I have too much time on my hands.

That concludes the images we had planned to do, but Jessica wants to do a favor from a friend -- she wants photographs of her wearing a t-shirt that he designed, and she asks if I would make them. I agree. Things happened. Go see.

This sitting concludes with Fierce T-Shirt.