Autumn themed portrait shoot

Alex Autumn shoot by Neil Alexander

Earlier in the year I did this shoot with Natalie, an up and coming local make-up artist. I like the images on their own, but felt that there was a series in here somewhere. So Natalie & I agreed to hook up again with another model and do an “Autumn” themed shoot to go with the summer’s Ivy theme.
Preparations were all made for a weekday morning, and I was all set. Then I got a text to say that Alex (our model) couldn’t shoot until after lunch as she was needed for a casting. Fair enough as I was only offering TF. Though I’m now thinking that 2 hours for hair and make-up, get to location, set up and sunset at 10 past 4 doesn’t really leave us a whole lot of time. Then there was a mix-up collecting the girls from the station, my plan A,B & C locations were all out for one reason or another and it was all beginning to look like a bit of a write off. Add to that, by the time the make-up etc was done, it was getting windy, very cold and beginning to rain.
Determined to try and make something out of nothing, we headed out to the local park, with about 15 minutes of daylight on the clock, though by this time it was so grey and overcast that you couldn’t really tell anyway.

Alex Autumn shoot by Neil Alexander

I found a spot between two big conker trees that I figured would make a cool frame and proceeded to visualize how I’d like the lighting to look. Using my new light stand anchoring system (more on that in a future post), I set up a couple of SB900s, one grided behind Alex camera right to create a little rim light (grided because I didn’t want spill on the tree trunks) and another in front of Alex off to camera left. With this one I experimented with snoots and assorted grids to try and get the light suitably covering Alex, but again without too much spill onto the tree trunks.
Once we’d got some full length and headshots that I was happy with, we got Natalie throwing bundles of leaves into the frame to try and enhance the seasonal feel. It was all a bit rushed, we all agreed afterwards and I think the images reflect that. Anyway, these are the best two I think.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 4th, 2010 at 9:00 am. It is filed under Photographs, Portraits and tagged with autumn, make-up artist, off-camera flash, Personal Projects, sb-900. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.