for old times sake

having not shot since moving to chicago, i figured it might be nice to do a shoot again in LA when i was back for the holidays. i had set a couple up over thanksgiving break, but had to push them back to christmas due to a last minute decision to spend thanksgiving in prague and vienna. (yes yes i know - people have given me plenty of flak for running off to europe to go watch operas) but more on that later.

i was aiming for a very simple shoot both in design and logistics and working with j (the model in the photos) was great! easy, fast and laid back. a bit of technical info is below for the photo nerds.




for those who are curious as to how we shot the images, i used two nikon flashes with radio triggers. most of the time on one stand (since i was shooting alone - it was must easier this way). i used one about waist level (mainly for fill) and another higher up with a zoom as a spotlight. the one at waist level was on a clamp and when necessary the light was placed elsewhere for fill or cross lighting.

i think the iso was around 200 -250 and shoot in manual at f/5.0-6.3 and shutter speed of around 1/250. i should probably check the image meta data before i spout off numbers like this... but that sounds about right. i couldn't shoot faster cause of the flash sync on my camera (which is 1/250). the aperture was around 5-6 cause i needed to dim the background enough to not steal the focus from the model. the flashes were set a bunch of different power settings depending on how far away they were, but they were rarely higher than 1/4. usually the spot was often 2x of the fill.