My First Paying Clients

Emma, Andy and young Archie visited the studio this week, my first paying clients. I think they were as apprehensive as me but once the introductions were over we soon settled on a plan of action.

I started by showing them some mood boards I’d compiled with some ideas for poses. I’d researched these the week before by looking through a couple of stock sites. The boards proved really beneficial and gave a bit of structure to the shoot.

I’d also had a last minute change of mind on my lighting set up for the shots of Archie on his own. Having watched a video tutorial on the phototraining4u site I decided to move my large softbox close into Archie, 45 degrees to his right and just above his head. I’d placed him on white card and used the Lastolite Hi-lite for the background. These shots worked really well and were my favourites from all I took on the afternoon. Archie was a bit overalled and wasn’t really up for to many smiles, despite everyones best efforts, but even so, I’m pleased with the shots I got here.

We moved onto to some standard family poses with Emma and Andy choosing those they particularly liked from the mood boards and after a short break took some full body shots using white paper taped o the bottom of the lastolite with white duct tape, another tip I’d picked up from the Phototraining4u site. The limitations of the small studio became apparent at this point and really, with adults standing, I’m going to need somewhere with a bit more height.

Come the end it was a really enjoyable afternoon. Little Archie had had enough but I’m pleased with some of what we came away with, Emma and Andy seemed happy after a quick review in Lightroom. Just a hundred or so pics to post process now…

Focus on Imaging

A busy week with a visit to the ‘Focus on Imaging’ show at Birmingham and my first paying clients at the small studio I’ve set up at home.

The show rolled round first. We picked on the last day for our trip to Birmingham which I think was a wise move given the numbers who’d visited the previous weekend. I was surprised how few dealers there were in the arena with most the space taken up with large printing displays, framing companies and photo book printers. This suited me as I was looking for a few options to offer my new clients, particularly with framing and book options.

Having quickly filled a bag with handouts and samples I suddenly found myself at the phototraining4u stand with Mark Cleghorn halfway through a photo critique of an apprentice working her way through a training year with him. I’d considered joining his the scheme earlier in the year after watching some of Mark’s tutorial videos on the Lastolite site. Normal price for the first year is £199 but the show price was £99 with a scratch card discount of £50. A clever piece of marketing here, me thinks, as someone else signing up with me had spookily won a £50 discount on her scratchcard.

I must say that since returning and using the site I’ve no regrets whatsoever. The video tutorials on lightroom alone have made a huge difference to the way I post process and the studio lighting demonstrations have been really useful. I’d recommend it to any keen amateur like myself.

Moving on it was time for a quick lunchtime beer (Smithie was driving) and then a trawl around the rest of the display stands. I resisted some of the studio equipment offers but did come away with some Ilford pearl paper which I’ve been really impressed with and I now wish I'd bought more. The show price was £12 for fifty A4 sheets.

All in all a really good day, outstanding value at £8 a ticket and I’ll definitely be going back next year.

Studio Gear

The studio has become a bit of a passion recently but I never seem to have enough equipment for the shots I want to replicate from other blogs and magazines. My two Bowens lights have been really good but I’ve had to supplement them with another borrowed pair and really three lights are a minimum for the sort of high or low key shots I want to take.

To that end I’ve been scouring ebay and similar sites for second hand equipment. Nothing has really come along until about two weeks ago when I spotted a post on the used equipment forum on the Bowens site. I contacted the seller who agreed to split the bundle he had for sale and to cut a long story short I picked up a Bowens Esprit Gemini 750 kit last weekend.

These supplement my 400’s really nicely, especially with the Lastolite Hi-Lite I’ve been using for my high key shots. I picked the lights up Saturday morning and had them up and running on Saturday afternoon taking shots of my work colleagues (someone’s leaving present). All seemed to go well on the day, the shots on the camera screen looked good but then despair when I checked them later on the computer, every shot had a horrible yellow cast. Eventually this was quite easily rectified, all to do with my white balance set up which I’d set to flash. Apparently flash heads have a tendency to yellow over time although taking a custom white setting sorts this. Taking the WB down to 4850 in lightroom cleared everything up.

Lesson learnt I had the lights out again Sunday afternoon for some baby shots in my small home studio. I’ve never really been that happy with my previous attempts with the high key stuff but after researching on the net and trying various settings with a stand in doll I finally came away with some shots I was really happy with.

For me the Lastolite works best one and a half stops brighter than my key light and I set the background to f13. My key light was set to F8 but I then opened the camera up to F7.1. Whether that’s a quirk of the camera or something else I don’t know but the settings worked well and gave me the skin tones I’d been looking for. Nice white card and careful placement of the key light gave me the crisp white fore grounds I’d been looking for and altogether I had very little to do in Light room as regards post processing.

I suppose that’s the advantage of having a set studio and hopefully I should be able to replicate this set up on Friday when I have my first commercial shoot.

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.

Home Studio

The new home studio is coming along really well. The combined bedrooms have now been re-plastered, painted through and just waiting for new carpet. As it’s going to be a dual purpose room I decided against laminate although that probably would have been more suitable for a studio.

We tried it out over the weekend. In truth it’s going to be a bit small for anything other than children or single head portraits and I could do with a bit more height for the lights but, having said that, I was really pleased with some of the shots I came away with. I think long term I might look at setting up a studio in the garage as this will give me a bit more shooting space and not impact on the rest of the house as much. It did become apparent that I’m going to need a couple more lights for the darker background stuff and perhaps something a bit more powerful to use with the lastolite light box.

Lovegrove Studio Workshop

My day at the Damien Lovegrove Workshop. I arrived at 9.00am and spent the first hour chatting with the other two photographers on the course. Both were full time professionals specialising in general photography.

It was great for me as an amateur to pick the brains of these two guys re the photography business. Throughout the breaks during the course of the day I got almost as much from these two as I did from the studio workshop. Day to day photography for them consisted of pre school nursery groups, nurseries, family portraits and for one of them, promo shots of Colchester Utd football club. Both were really good company, very open and generally upbeat about their work and profession. It did give me food for thought though as I’m being asked more and more for portrait work from friends and family.

Whilst we were chatting Vikki, the make up artist, was busy with our model for the day, Georgina, and then, just before ten, Damien breezed in and moved us all off to his home studio for the first of the workshops.

We spent a few minutes adjusting our cameras which for me meant setting up the viewing screen on the back of my 5D (mine had been in auto mode since I took it out of the box) and getting to grips with manually setting the white balance via the Kelvin number setting (I’d always used a custom white balance using a white card pre this) and the cameras colour/monochrome settings. All totally new to me. We then moved onto the first of the lighting set ups.

We started off with a dark room illuminated with modelling lights as flash heads were added, one by one, creating various moods and effects. Throughout the process Damien was constantly talking, giving little hints and tips and explaining the fundamentals of good lighting technique. He’s a big fan of harsh lighting and our initial scenario built up to a four light set up using light reflectors and grids plus a tri reflector which proved to be my favourite on the day. To this Damien added various coloured gels to the light the background (which was dark grey). This gave some great effects with various colours used to enhance Georgina’s dress. Damien knows his set up so well there was no need for light meters. With cameras on manual mode at 100 iso he suggested an aperture of f.11 at 1/125sec. This proved spot on and we then took it in turns to take several shots of Georgina before each additional light and gel was added to the set up.

Using a professional model was a new experience and certainly made life a lot easier. Damien did ask us to direct Georgina but initially, feeling a bit self conscious, I was quite happy for her to assume poses for me and in truth, she was probably far better at giving me a look than I would have been trying to direct her given my limited experience. Having said that, as the day wore on I did find myself feeling much more at ease with this and asking her to assume poses and looks I’d seen her doing with the others and had particularly liked.

With some great shots in the camera it was break time for us but a dress change and makeover for Georgina. We returned to the studio for a new lighting set up with the lights we’d used from the first session. The back lights were turned up to their maximum setting which produced some edgy, backlit, punk like shots which, again, was really good fun.

Suddenly it was dinner time and a chance for me to quiz the other two guys and another makeover for Georgina. Damien had disappeared to Twitter away his lunch break but returned with his ever present ipad to explain and show us how he used mood boards for ideas and displaying his work. I’d never really seen an ipad close up and it’s an impressive piece of kit, pretty essential I should imagine in Damiens world.

We moved back to the studio and moved onto continuous, daylight balanced lighting using one and then two Lupo heads. I knew nothing whatsoever about these lights prior to the workshop but really enjoyed using them and came away with some terrific shots. Again we used coloured gels and a large sheet of silver backed plastic (I now know to be called a ‘scrim’ in the lighting world) to produce some really cool background effects. I never thought I’d find myself shooting through camouflage nets but that’s another little trade secret we were shown. If I hadn’t already bought my Bowens flash heads I’d be seriously considering a couple of Lupo’s as an alternative. We moved onto using ‘Barn Doors’ and ‘Venetian Blinds’ for some really cool effects with the Lupos and then before I knew it, coffee time again.

Another break for us, another costume change for Georgina and we returned for the final session of the day using a large softbox and floor to ceiling background. By now we were running out of time and although we got some shots from this session they were my least favourite on the day.

I left with a pack of gels having thoroughly enjoyed my day and with lots of ideas to try out as soon as my small home studio is ready.

Overall, as I’ve said, I did enjoy the day. I leant a lot from the sessions with Damien and from just hanging out with a couple of professional photographers. Although the course isn’t cheap at £430 inc vat I wasn’t disappointed.

As an amateur I’m hoping to use some of my new found skills for a few of the prom shots I get asked to do from time to time or some simple glamour shots, just because I can. Having spoken to one of the other photographers on the course since, he said he also enjoyed his day but was struggling to see where the set ups we were shown might fit into his more commercial work. He did tell me on the day that he was fed up with shooting on white backgrounds but feedback from his clients suggested that white backgrounds are what they want and they're his paymasters at the end of the day.

Portrait Professional

After being impressed with the free trial of Portrait Professional I splashed out and bought the full package. It’s reduced at the moment and with discount vouchers freely available on the web £20 seemed like a steal for such an impressive piece of software.
It’s really quick and simple to use and you can be up and running with an edited portrait on your screen in about 5 minutes.

However, for me, the default settings are a bit over the top. I’ve found myself turning off all the face manipulation settings and skin controls just leaving the eyes and teeth correction and sharpening controls. These need tweaking but it’s worth the effort for a more realistic look.

I suppose purists will argue that all these features are available in Photoshop but I just haven’t got the time or inclination to get involved with post processing to that extent using Photoshop. For me Portrait Professional does a great job for a very reasonable price.