Mika in the Studio
My shoot with Mika several months ago was one of the more successful model shoots I’ve done. I hope to post several more of her pictures in the coming weeks.
Working with a seasoned model is great. It’s sorta like being at Yosemite — all you have to do is point and shoot the camera, and you’re bound to get something beautiful!
The challenge I run into with model shoots is lighting. This was a group shoot, so I didn’t have much control over the lighting. I like to use a wider aperture to reduce my depth of field. However, with that wide an aperture, using typical studio lighting settings, the picture gets blown out. So the only thing to do is to go with ambient light. In this case, that worked out great, because of the beautiful shadows cast by the lamp. However, I had to increase my ISO to 800 because of the low amounts of light. This increased the noise in the picture. That’s not the end of the world in this shot. In fact, a little bit of graininess can actually make it more interesting. I also used several neutral density gradients to selectively darken and lighten certain areas of the photograph. Mostly, I wanted to darken the upper left portion of the picture, where the noise was most visible.
I’m off to Paris in a few days, and I’ll be blogging daily. I want to see how many views of the Eiffel Tower I can get in 3 weeks, but there will be so much else to photograph. It should be a field day!
À bientôt!