A Photo A Day Project.
Day 20: I’m so excited about today as it is a full day of practical photography tuition, another Live in Love workshop, teaching my favourite subject – Portraiture 🙂
I have called on the assistance of two amazing and talented people; Aicha and Tamaha who will model for us all day and the lovely Meg, of Chance31ndustries, will be weaving her magical ‘make-up artist’ skills over the already beautiful Aicha.
Today is all about problem solving. My students want to fine tune their posing and lighting skills and understand how to quickly and effectively achieve different looks from one person at one location. The day is long yet rewarding as we cover everything from natural light, speedlite on camera and off camera, high key photography, low key photography and studio lighting. At the end of the day the images produced are fantastic and both photographers and models are happy 🙂 I grabbed a few shots as we went along (I just couldn’t help myself) and my favourites are below.
I’ll start with my photo a day image. It was shot under studio lighting. Camera settings: ISO 320; f3.5; 1/250th on 70-200mm lens. Bowens lighting fired through rectangular softbox. It was then cropped, processed and converted to black & white in Adobe Lightroom.
The image below was captured using natural light only. It was then square cropped, processed and converted to black & white in Adobe Lightroom and then taken into Adobe Photoshop where I’ve applied a series of textures and a frame (taught in tomorrow’s workshop).
In stark contrast to the above image, this next one was captured again in studio using Bowens light system. Shot as a low key dramatic image and very basic processing applied in both Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop programs.
Another image using natural light. 
The pose, the facial expression and sometimes even the processing can all determine the final impact an image has. Image below is again in natural light as we had a bit of fun encouraging, interacting and posing our ‘couple’ 🙂
My favourite images of Tamaha are below. The first one was shot in daylight with a single speedlite, off camera, to the right of frame (left of subject) pointed down acting as a spotlight. This was inspired by the smoking shot of Tamaha I’d shot 2 days earlier (and written about here). Everyone was keen to learn exactly how to recreate it for themselves.
And this one was taken in studio lighting conditions. I am loving these low key images (yes, as much as my signature high key images) 😉
If you’d like to learn more about portrait photography, lighting, posing or editing please do not hesitate to contact me for available one on one (private) tuition times or my next workshop dates.
Live. Love. Learn.
Sheryn Ellis, Portrait Photographer.
