Putting it into practice

Having attended the Lovegrove studio workshop three weeks ago I set up a photo shoot of my own last weekend to see if I could put into practice all that Damien had shown us on the course.

I pooled resources with fellow enthusiast Nick Smith and enlisted the help of a couple of work colleagues, Sally Payne and Jade Nichols, to act as models. Tracey Parkinson kindly agreed to be our makeup artist for the day.

We decided to start with Damien’s four light set up using two lights positioned behind the model to act as kickers for the shoulders and hair. Another light was used to one side to illuminate the background and separate it from the model. Our final light, fitted with a beauty dish, was positioned directly in front of the girls. We angled this light into a forward position across the models face and fitted it with a diffuser to soften the light. Our background was a charcoal grey, half size, paper roll but more about that later. The lights were set up to allow us to shoot at f11.

First up was Jade and although the shots were looking ok on the back of the camera I wasn’t entirely happy with them. We swapped the honey comb hair light for a snoot but still things weren’t really working. After further consultation we decided to introduce a reflector just under the Jades waist and suddenly everything came to life. A few more tweaks here and there and the shots were looking really good. We decided to give a very patient Jade a rest and in came Sally.

Having used Jade to get the lighting just as we wanted everything we tried with Sally went really well. The introduction of some rainbow gloves that had been living in my loft for the last few years really lifted the shots despite their fousty smell and Sally's reluctance to get them too close to her face. On the day these were my favourite shots and even on the back of the camera looked really promising.

It was during this session, when I wanted to shoot in landscape mode, the limitations of my half roll width paper became obvious. I was losing about a third of the frame off the edge of the paper for anything other than a full head shot which was disappointing. It’s certainly food for thought and I’ll be looking to use a wider background next time, whether that’s a wider paper roll, canvas or a painted wall.

Overall the exercise resulted in a really good, fun, productive day. The girls really got into it and seemed pleased with the prints I gave them later. Tracey was pleased with the make up and again went away with some nice prints for her wedding exhibitions. Nick and I both picked up some useful ideas for poses and props and both agreed we need more lights. Something to look out for at the ‘Focus on Imaging’ show next month.