The Gray Card

The first shot of a shoot is always the same with me, and that tends to be the only similar thing about my photo shoots, the gray card.

Well today I was doing a senior session, and I must say it started out roughly. My car battery was not starting, but luckily I had an assistant,Christian DiCenso, tag along this shoot and we took his car. On our way there i noticed some dark clouds so we hurried to get things set up quickly, so we could take them down quickly.

The lighting was fairly basic, a dyi beauty dish was our key light with a shoot-through umbrella as fill, and a bare speedlight camera right was added as a kicker later. The results...

I really liked the cross-beans in the back, I always enjoy intreating backgrounds

About another hour into the shoot and it started to thunder, but I wanted to try just one more thing (We also shot on this little pathway fyi). There is a nice little river running through this park, hints the bridge, and i wanted to incorporate it into a shot somehow. I have always enjoyed long exposure waterscape work with the smooth glossy water, so i thought i would give that a try, and after some brainstorming I came up with this.

We would put Sarah, the model, out on a rock in the river, then Christina would hold the beauty dish like a boom to get some light on sarah, camera left. 

Next I took a two second exposure of the exact same shot to get that nice glossy effect.

Finally, with the magic of photoshop, i took the water from the second photo, and layered it over the first photo.

The second after my shutter clicked we saw lightning in the sky, and hightailed it out of there just a quickly as aw set up, all and all a fun shoot.

And once again, another day down.