I recently had the pleasure of shooting Christina and Laura as part of my time for prints project. I brought along my friend Jorge who is becoming quite a regular on the shoots I do! We went out to Dolores Park in San Francisco on a particularly nice day. Unfortunately the park was very busy because it was such a nice day, also when we arranged to meet I hadn’t noticed that it was the weekend the clocks go back so we lost an hour of shooting time. We started with some very simple head shots, for these we used a path that ran behind the park as it was in the shade and made it a lot easier to control the ambient light.
Once we were done we moved down the path about 100ft to a small bridge with a cool metal fence over it. We took a few shots here but were somewhat hampered by the high volume of pedestrian traffic. This shot was one we planned earlier in the afternoon when we scouted the location. In hindsight I think we should have done this first as there was some very nice golden light hitting the fence roof that was gone when we came to shoot for real.
Just 20 steps down the hill we came to a tree on a rather steep embankment. Below us was the railway line and a guy sleeping rough. It was easy enough to block out the guy sleeping rough with Christina but I was certain at least one of us was going to fall down the embankment! We spent about 5 minutes at this location before heading up the hill to catch the sunset.
This was the reason we chose to shoot at this park; a clean view of the city. I think most of the shots here were taken with the 70-200L, I love that lens…it produces great looking shots and the long focal length compressed the background really nicely. As the light fell I ran into the usual Canon 5D MKII AF issues which I “solved” by putting my 580EX II on the hot shoe, using the AF beam from it to get focus then switching to manual focus, trading out the flash for a Pocket Wizard and taking the shot! I’m going to buy the ST-E2 and have Michael Bass add a hot shoe to it. All because Canon AF sucks!
This was a really fun shoot, it was fast though. We only had about 1.5 hours to shoot and I’m pretty happy with the results. Everything was shot with one light, a Canon 580EX into a 60″ reflective umbrella. It was great to work with two such fun & relaxed clients. Thanks ladies, you made it seem so effortless!
Finally I want to thank Jake Reinig for the referral, I owe you one!