I know how to take pictures of people. I’ve done a sunrise photo shoot. I’ve used my flash before… I should be able to put all of them together for one shoot, right?
Well, not so fast there… I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew that each thing I mentioned was going to be a challenge, even though I had done each one separately.
The first real challenge that I had was focusing in low light. Because we started at about 4:30 am, there wasn’t enough light for my camera to focus automatically, so I had to try my best to focus manually. Unfortunately, this is still extremely difficult with low light. Most of the first batch of pictures were slightly out of focus.
I used my Nikon SB-700 and an Amazon Basic flash. On the SB-700, I used a diffuser to disperse the light a bit more. At first, I had it on manual, but I found it too difficult to keep adjusting so I had the SB-700 on TTL. I used the Amazon flash as a backlight to try to fill in from behind.
Kim’s passion is dancing. She was nervous because she didn’t know how the shoot was going to turn out. I normally just go with the flow and see how comfortable people are in front of the camera and start there. There was a lot of communication, and Kim was really great about it.
Kim started off with some yoga poses and eventually started to dance. When I saw a certain position I would just say “hold” in order for me to get the shot. From there, I would give some minor directions if I needed her to move a little bit to one side of I needed her to adjust her body slightly.
Part of the challenge that I was excited about was that I had little time to get my shots in. I had to race the rise of the sun while using a flash. Once the sun was about to hit the horizon, things got a lot easier. I was able to use autofocus on just concentrate on framing the shot.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with what we were able to produce together. I do plan on attempting this again, but I think I’m going to bring the umbrella for the flash to give a more even distribution to the light.
I’ve been using lightroom to do light touch up work on the pictures. While I feel that the composition of the pictures came out great, there was some minor editing that I had to do. A lot of it was evening out the exposure which I did using the gradient tool.
