Monday was the day of the big shoot, and although I was nervous in the beginning, things went OK overall. The studio was a lot smaller than I expected, and by the time we’d gotten about halfway through I was getting sloppy –  for example, I noticed after the fact that when I switched to my 85mm lens for portraits, I forgot to change the camera settings so most of them were out of focus, stuff like that – but since we took over 600 photos, I was able to salvage plenty even when I screwed something up.

My right arm is killing me, because I’ve been editing obsessively since I got home around 5 PM and it’s 11:15 now, so I’m going to keep this post brief and just share the first little sampling from the shoot. I’m most likely going to be working with these photos for awhile, so as I get into more specific sections of the shoot in days to come I can talk about issues I encountered throughout the day. For now, let’s just look at the ones I processed initially (some of these I chose first because my friends really liked them, others because I did).

I think I mentioned previously that I had a vintage vision going on for the shoot, so I processed this one in a manner that gave it that feel. The poses were a little awkward here, because it was at the start of the shoot and it always takes awhile to get in the groove, but I thought the stiff formality of it rather worked in this shot. Of course, there’s the wreaths I spoke about in a previous post, and the costumes are all mine as well – you probably recognize some of them from other photos!

My friend Candace (on the right) has no shortage of crazy concepts, and she is game for anything – the posing here was her idea. It was a very crisp, clear shot originally, but to give it a ghostly quality (and to make it make some kind of sense) I added a little movement blur, and some subtle fog at the bottom, as well as some texture.

Tamara is very into yoga, so once Candace mentioned it might be fun to try out a few yoga poses in nightgowns (Tamara’s dress is actually an old ball gown of my mother-in-law’s) she started to loosen up a little too – literally as well as figuratively. I love this next move she executed (I can’t remember the name of the yoga pose) but I’m a little concerned it looks like she’s doing something obscene…? I swear she isn’t!

The yoga photos are pretty small,  because the truth is this studio really wasn’t big enough for full body shots – I actually have more width to work with in my little office! So I had to crop the hell out of them, which is a shame, because it makes them noisier and reduces size so much. Working with a paper background was nice as that’s not something I’ve done before, and it eliminates all the wrinkle and crease issues I have with my muslin, but there just wasn’t very much of it. Literally right out of the frame to both sides of Tamara in the shot above, the paper ended and we were just looking at studio. It’s really a place for portraits only, but oh well. We made do (and for added fun, it was clear the woman working in the office there was not used to photographers using her space for this sort of thing – I think it’s a family portrait type place only, being in the part of town it is – so she kept peeking around the corner to see what the hell was going on, in a nice way, but still I got the feeling we were freaking her out just a little bit).

True to the weird ideas she comes up with in shoots, Candace also chooses crazy shots to want processed, which is amusing to me because as you can tell, she is photogenic as hell (she has skin that gives meaning to the phrase “peaches and cream”) and she cannot take a bad photo, but she always wants copies of the ones where she’s half-blurry, or falling out of a tree or something (just kidding, no one fell out of any trees during this shoot). Anyway, she chose this one as a favorite, which I popped off without any real thought or focus while we were standing in the back alley after the shoot talking about what we were going to do next. Notice she is wearing that fabulous faux-fur vest I got at Nordstrom a while back; the owner of the studio also rents out props, and told me I should rent out that vest to people for photos because it’s so fabulous. Remember  who convinced me to buy it in the first place? Yep. Candace.

Obviously I Pixlr-ed the hell out of this one, because why not? Candace likes ’em crazy. If you look closely, you can see that I superimposed the photo of them facing each other into the trees. And yep, there’s the fur vest!

Soooo much more to come. Remember, over 600 shots people. In my mind, I will focus on a different section of the shoot in each post (yoga poses, jumping, levitation, portraits) but most likely that will not happen, and I’ll just work on a few each day then upload those results. Get used to these two faces though, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of them for awhile!