Thinking about location - photography

I returned to GLive the day after my scouting visit at about the same time of day. My wife had agreed to be my subject again. As mentioned in my previous blog, the modern architecture of this building suggested to me an "on location" fashion style of portrait, such as this page from Madame Figaro by Sonia Sieff.

I had gathered a few ideas in my mind on what poses might work for the locations, and I had chosen a top three of the six viewpoints. Unfortunately, the overcast weather of early morning had broken up, and the sky was a cloudless bright blue. This was not at all suitable for any of the locations that I had found because they were in full sunlight creating hard shadows and making it uncomfortable for her to look at the camera. It also made exposure difficult.

I went ahead and took some photographs anyway at the top three places: the settees in the cafe area, the balcony at the front of the building, and the acute angled space on the east facing wall.

After reviewing the results, I selected this photograph of Val on the balcony at the front of the building.

Val at GLive

Nikon 18-200mm at 36mm:Iso 160 f4.5 for 1/1250th seconds

I chose this photograph because the pose is more active than the other photos that I had taken. Furthermore, the white pole is reflecting light into the shadow side of Val's face providing a better balance of lighting than the photographs where she is standing away from the pole. The horizontal and vertical lines contribute to the photo giving a sense of the shape and style of the place in which she is standing.

As expected, this photograph needed some work in Lightroom, in particular to adjust the colour cast and to add fill lighting, as I had slightly underexposed the photo to avoid blowing out the bright white of the pole.

Conclusions

This was good practice for taking people photographs:-

- anticipating some poses that might work, rather than trying to make suggestions off the cuff. I found that I needed to come up with ideas from my own imagination and memory. I spent quite a bit of time on the evening before looking at portrait/people photographs on various websites: OCA student site, OCA Flickr site, Flickr photos tagged Portrait, Getty images on Flickr searching for Portraits. I was surprised that portrait photos are quite sparse, except for Getty Images. Even so, I did not find the sort of thing I was looking for there. I eventually located the Sonia Sieff fashion photos this afternoon after checking out the Wikipedia site of her father, Jeanloup Sieff.

- having to adopt to the different lighting conditions to those I expected.