My Sunday Series on outdoor portraiture continues today with this portrait of Maria Cedar, making another appearance in this series. I’ve written four books on the subject of portrait and glamour photography, including one on Available Light Glamour Photography that nicely fits this series of posts.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. —Albert Einstein
Christopher Weed’s Ball and Jack sculptures—I’ve always called them Jacks and Ball—was an art commission that the artist created for Parker, Colorado’s Discovery Park and is located next to the Library. According to his website, the sculptures were “Inspired by a classic childhood amusement, the game pieces are translated to a monumental scale but remain grounded to the landscape and accessible to both adults and children.” How monumental you may ask? Each piece weighs three tons (2721 Kg) each and are made from stainless steel. Each individual Jack is 14-feet high x 20-feet (4.26 x 6 meters) in diameter.
And so you may also be asking? Haven’t you already beaten photographing the Jacks and Ball sculptures to death? Yes, I’ll gladly admit this is true and I even made some portraits there…
Making Outdoor Portraits in Discovery Park
Photographing models outdoors in a public place is always problematical and more often than not can attract the attention of local gendarmes. Enter the Olympus E-M10 Mark I. This mirrorless camera, like its later iterations, is a small, understated-looking camera and I thought using it would make Maria and I look like a couple of tourists out taking photographs, which essentially what we were. For this series of portraits, I shot all of the 95 images we made in RAW+JPEG mode, giving Maria the JPEGs for her social media use but processing and retouching the RAW files for other applications, including providing images for Maria’s annual calendar and the portrait at right.
The 16-megapixel Olympus E-M10 Mark I is a terrific entry-level mirrorless camera and the entire E-M10 series is an excellent introduction to the Micro Four-thirds system, although the construction of the third and later generations has changed the camera body’s construction from metal to plastic but with the Mark IV increasing the CMOS sensor’s resolution to 20.3-megapixels. So far. OM Systems has not created their version of this camera and is currently selling the E-M10 Mark IV with the Olympus name on it. Of course, that could change at any moment; update this post when it does.
How I made this portrait: I’ve always been pleased with the image quality from this small and affordable camera—used copies can be obtained for less that $300—and its IBIS makes it useful when shooting outdoors at modest ISO settings. Although it was partially cloudy most of the morning, the sun broke through during the 95 shots—she did four wardrobe changes—that Maria and I made around the sculptures.
Lighting-wise, I used my preferred outdoor portrait technique of posing Maria with her back more or less to the sun, side lighting her hair and using the E-M10 Mark I’s built-in flash (GN 19) as fill. Surprisingly this tiny flash did an excellent job with some assistance from the camera’s exposure compensation control. The lens was the wonderful M. Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 lens with an exposure of 1/250 sec at f/5.6 and ISO 320 and an exposure compensation of plus one-third stop.
My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography features information about how I shoot glamour portraits using minimal lighting equipment including inexpensive monolights such as those offered by Paul C. Buff. (Not a sponsor.) New copies are available from Amazon for $30.54 with used copies available from Amazon.com for around ten bucks, as I write this. Kindle copies are $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.