Young Love

I was recently fortunate enough to shoot Howard & Esther as part of my time for prints project. We went out into The Mission District of San Francisco and as usual I brought along Jorge to shoot with me. Neither of us had ever shot a couple before so it was a(nother) new experience for us. We started in an alley as it offered some shade and let us control the ambient more easily. We broke from our usual routine of starting with simple head shots as we were pressed for time (we had another location to get to across town). This threw us a little as the head shot routine I find eases you into a shoot & that was very much missed! In all we spent about an hour in the alley trying various things, some worked…some didn’t. That seems to be the way of it when you are learning.

Here’s a video of Jorge shooting in an alley in The Mission District. Again, not a great video but it does let you see the location.

I found this location to be a tough environment to shoot in, coupled with the fact that I still get caught up in the technicalities of the lighting I don’t feel I am getting the best out of my subjects. This is a delicate balance, it’s difficult to learn and it’s the main reason I shoot for free at this point. I want to be comfortable I can deliver before I ask for money! Luckily Howard & Esther were easy going but still, I need to work on that!

Once were done in the alley we drove over to Pier 1 in The Embarcadero. A great spot but bloody cold! Esther was a real trooper and braved the low temperature for about 2 hours! I liked this location better than the alley and we had a lot of fun here. At one point a yoga class arrived, 50 people strong and asked if we could take a group shot of them. Umm, we have 3 small flashes with us, not gonna happen!

For this shot I was shooting directly into the sun using my modified Gary Fongdom which I mentioned in my previous post. Once again the flash was at full power.

The sun dropped below the horizon before we were ready for it to, so we pulled out a second flash with a full cut of CTO on it and used it to cross light Howard & Esther. I think I saw this technique in the Strobist DVD’s, anyway I like it. It’s fast and easy.

As the light & temperature fell we had to really work fast and try and get some shots we were happy with before it was pitch black & before Esther froze to death. We continued to cross light, without the lens hood on and it gave me one of my favourite shots of the shoot.

The light fell very quickly and just before the last bit of orange disappeared from the sky I grabbed this shot using only the 580 EX in the 28″ softbox.

I’ll end with a shot I ended up liking a lot more than I thought I would when I first saw it. I love the way Esther is looking at Howard in this and that one side of her face is the only part of any face we see in the shot.

So, that’s the first couple shoot I have done. Would I do another? Yeah, maybe. I still haven’t quite worked out what I want to be shooting. I have a good idea of the style I like, of course achieving that style is the hard part!

Many thanks to Howard & Esther for allowing us to shoot you…and for buying us coffee!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 12:47 am and is filed under Blog, Portraits and tagged with Couple, Cross Lighting, Pier 2, Portrait, The Embarcadero, Time for Prints, Westcott Apollo 28" Softbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.