My Sunday Series on Available Light Portraiture continues today with a portrait of Ashley Rae that was made in the dining room of my former home using window light from a door in the back of the house. The reflection you see, is not a mirror but a large, framed poster.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.”—Arnold Newman (1918-2006)
I’m guessing that the late Mr. Newman might perhaps have the same thoughts about having a dedicated studio space or maybe not. When I started getting interested in glamour photography, I didn’t have a studio. In the distant past, I had a standalone studio that was located in a business park south of Denver. Then for many, many years after that and before moving to Daisy Hill. I shot all my portrait and model sessions on-location and most times that meant using locations in the house where I lived at the time.
Wherever You Go…There You Are
I might have a different way of choosing shooting locations, if I lived in Florida or Arizona where Mary would like us to live. I prefer New Mexico, she doesn’t. Living here in Colorado is more of a challenge, photographically speaking. It gets cold in the winter and sometimes it snows, lots of snow. As I write this we’ve had two days straight of snow but eventually the sun will come out and it will quickly melt, something that my readers back East might not fully understand.
When some photographers see the portraits, like the image at left, that I made in my previous home they sometimes would ask, “How big is your house?” My former home, where I made this portrait and many of the images for three of my last four books about portrait and glamour photography, was smaller than average and located in a working class neighborhood north of Denver. Houses built around 2010 typically had 3,025 square feet; that’s double the size of my former house. That’s why I believe you can make photographs anywhere by making the most of what you do have.
In more recent years, I’ve been shooting many of my portrait and glamour images in my 11×15-foot home studio in the finished basement of my current home but, if you’ve read some of my recent posts, they contain some thoughts on this studio’s future.
How I made this photo: As I write this, I have probably done more shoots and over a longer period of time with Ashley Rae than any other model that I’ve photographed. You can see a monochrome version of a similar image of her in that linked post. She’s a truly professional model and when I asked her to stand near the back door of my former home, this is almost exactly the pose she gave me. After just a few shots, the pose was refined to produce this image.
The original image was shot using only the available light from a window in a door on the back of my house, with perhaps a reflector placed at camera left. The portrait was made using a Canon EOS 10D with EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens (at 60mm.) Canon discontinued this useful lens but you can usually pick up used copies from MPB or eBay at a reasonable price. The exposure was 1/60 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 400. It also had a minus two-thirds stop exposure compensation, which sadly meant the image was slightly underexposed—not on purpose. I used the technique for working with underexposed images to correct it. The example shown in that tutorial was made in almost the same spot in my former home that’s shown in today’s post. The featured image was then lightly retouched and enhanced using the Glamour Glow filter that’s part of Color Efex.
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If you’re interested in learning how I use cameras, lenses and lighting in my in-home studio and on location, please pick up a copy of Studio Lighting Anywhere which is available used from Amazon.com for around five bucks, as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.