A Touch of White

I set my little Pentax point and shoot on time lapse mode to get some shots of us working and strung it together in a little video for you all above.  

About a week ago I did a shoot with someone that wanted to have a theme of 'All White."  She had a white dress and we did most of the shots on high key.  Of course we put in some dark objects like the band around her neck and at some point I was bored of the high key so we did some darker images as well.  It was a lot of fun to try and stick with a theme though that was decided beforehand.  Props make for a fun shoot as well as it gives the subject something to do with their hands.  Hands are the hardest part of the body to pose in my opinion.  Badly posed hands can ruin a great image.  For me, clenched fists just don't work, I like soft hands.  I also avoid the backs of a hand laid flat.  The image below for example, I love it, but I find her right hand distracting because it is flat on her chest.  I wish I had caught it at the time and had her just turn it or at least cup it so it wasn't so flat.

The makeup for this shoot was a big challenge, which is why it is so vital to have a skilled makeup artist.  I still needed to spend a lot of time in Photoshop fixing areas of the skin that were painted white and just wouldn't look even.  

For equipment I used my Canon 5D mk II.  I used two different lenses, the 50mm f1.4 and 85mm f1.8.  The 50mm was used for almost all of the images with the 85 just coming in for a couple.  For the shots on high key we used a white paper roll and white tile board on the floor.  We had two Alien Bee 800's on the background and an Alien Bee 1600 up front with a large Octabox.  We used a video light for the darker shots, the Lowel Blender.  We like it because it can be either daylight or tungsten white balanced. It really isn't effective unless you have very little ambient light.  Our most favourite places to use it are indoors with dim light to add drama or at dusk or night time outdoors.  

Enjoy, and thanks for coming by the blog.  If you want to see all the images we did you can find them here.

Before I go I thought I'd share another blog I found on the internet.  I think I'm a little behind on the curve here, this blog seems quite popular, but just in case I wasn't the only one to not know about it, check the Phoblographer out.  It is a nice blog that reviews gear, shows some nice images and doesn't appear to be brand loyal to any camera manufacturer which is nice.