A few snaps of Jeff and Darren from a quick shoot last night. I never real­ized how much I need my new 70–200mm lens after get­ting a full-frame cam­era; 70mm is much too short, even in my small stu­dio room.

It’s strange to see so much nat­ural vignetting. I’m not sure if it’s the lens or the way the light falls off when spread across the back­ground from one direction.

 

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Aaron came over with Ryan for break­fast one morn­ing, and it gave me a chance to use them as mod­els to try some of the tech­niques I learned from Sid when I was in New Hampshire. I still had to do some work in Photoshop to keep the mid­point where I wanted, but it was still quite min­i­mal com­pared to my work with colour lately. This type of por­trai­ture is very dif­fer­ent from what I nor­mally do, where instead of using an out-of-focus back­ground to make the sub­ject stand out, I’m using the con­trast of light.

I turned on Chicken Run to keep Ryan occu­pied while we ate, and Aaron kept get­ting dis­tracted by it as much as he did. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if it was the son who took after the father, or vice versa.

I took these of Navid and Jess a lit­tle while back.

More recently, Navid called to let me know the child­birth went well, and now he has another adorable lit­tle half-Persian girl.

Rose is old enough to walk on her own now and give me kisses before she leaves.

Some por­traits of Tatiana. As a per­son into voyeurism (more specif­i­cally, on the end being observed), she’s more com­fort­able with her clothes off than on. I love work­ing with peo­ple who are com­fort­able with their bod­ies. You get total cre­ative free­dom, instead of the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to walk on eggshells, lest you offend a model’s sensibilities.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that when doing nude pho­tog­ra­phy, you need to open up the aper­ture so that a greater por­tion of the per­son is in focus than in con­ven­tional por­traits. If you focus on only the eyes, you lose the nudity and it becomes a dis­trac­tion. If you focus on naked­ness, you lose the eyes and it becomes vulgar.

Photographing peo­ple with darker skin is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than cap­tur­ing those with fairer skin. You don’t worry so much about the colour tones dur­ing shoot as after, when you’re post-processing the photos.

I also find that, in gen­eral, girls are nat­ural posers. They’ll change posi­tions on their own ini­tia­tive and play with the cam­era, which is very dif­fer­ent from guys, who will just stand there until you give them some sort of direc­tion. Each has their own advan­tages, as I can feed off the cre­ativ­ity of a model who wants to try dif­fer­ent things, but also work well with those who will be pos­ing dolls for me.

Taking por­traits of fam­i­lies is a lot harder than I expected. It’s not so much the amount of light and large depth-of-field required (although that does play a part), but the fact that there are so many things going on at once. Getting every­one to co-ordinate what they’re doing becomes expo­nen­tially dif­fi­cult with every extra per­son. And if only one per­son blinks, the photo is ruined.

One of the biggest assets a pho­tog­ra­pher can have is a sense of humour. If you can make your model laugh, you lower their appre­hen­sive­ness, which brings down their guard and pro­vides you with much more nat­ural expres­sions. Not to men­tion the fact that it’s a plea­sure to see some­one smil­ing or laughing.

 

Still play­ing around with black-and-white tones. This time, I went with less con­trast, so more of a low-key feel, not just in the over­all scene but in the fig­ures them­selves. In doing so, the tex­ture isn’t so blown-out as in my pre­vi­ous black-and-whites.

I love the dreamy look of high-key, but for more focus on facial fea­tures, I’m start­ing to turn to a greater range of light.

 

In return for mod­el­ing for some of my other projects, I agreed to give Agnes and Soph some por­traits. Siblings are gen­er­ally easy to work with. There’s a com­fort­ing famil­iar­ity that lets them act nat­u­rally together. To tell them apart, one sim­ply has to observe how dif­fer­ently each acts in front of a camera.

The last time I took pic­tures of Tyler was at the bike park. He looks very dif­fer­ent with­out his beard. I pre­fer with than with­out; it adds so much more personality.

Included is one for my body shot series.

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