Technical:: Practicing Posing & Lighting

There are a few shoots and blogs that I have neglected to post in the recent months and have become inspired to start blogging with a little more frequency than, oh, twice a year....

It's that bad people...

But it's never too late to change that, right? Good, we're in accord.

So in the spirit of blogging, below is a shoot I did in December before the madness of Christmas and New Years happened. In order to become a stronger photographer, I put together a list of some of my weaknesses from a technical standpoint. I'm pretty comfortable with my camera and shoot totally RAW and Manual which I am pretty proud of to be honest. However, my three weaknesses are posing, shooting backlit, and shooting in harsh light. So how do you get better? You practice. So I grabbed my roommate and her boyfriend and took them to Tree Tops Park in Davie to practice 2 of the 3 weaknesses (can you tell I'm avoiding the biggest weakness? Harsh light= Voldemort).

Now let's go ahead and put this out there-posing is hard. I've worked with people before who used to be or are currently modeling so shooting them is....well, it's almost like not even working. It's so easy. But working with regular people...who aren't comfortable in front of a camera...who don't know what I mean when I say "Smile with your eyes!!" is pretty difficult.

I'm still working and improving and hope to tackle the demon of harsh lighting in the very near future but here is the result of my experimentation.

 

Umm....rawr Briana, rawr...

She is so yoga...

This one's my personal favorite. Set them up in a good pose and then capture the natural energy between the two people :)