Shooting where the light isn't
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Shooting where the light isn't
I've been shooting in natural light as long as I've been making photographs. Over three decades as a pro, I've learned some key tricks for Mastering Natural Light. The genius is in the details.
I had an amazing session this week with a singer songwriter named Kyla Charter. What’s amazing is, she is the daughter of Celia Sears, the woman who gave me my first model to shoot. What’s even crazier is that Celia was pregnant with her back in ‘89 when I first stepped into her office. Celia really gave me my start in the fashion industry, the work I created back then got me into Photography school and gave me the confidence to talk about my work and share it with everyone.
When I approach sessions there is always a conversation about shooting in studio vs shooting on location, the pros and cons to each and what my bias is based on the ideas at hand. For Kyla’s session, there was no question that we would shoot on location, we just needed to get the right day.
We had a couple false starts with this session with our schedules not aligning with the weather, but last week we finally made it happen. Celia flew in from Milan to be on this session, it was amazing to be able to connect with her again after so many years. The day we chose was hazy but really magical.
We had 2 main looks we wanted to make sure we shot, a dark look and a lighter look both with a headdress made by Hanoch Drori. I was happy to learn that wearing headdresses is a style that Kyla has been doing for many projects, she has a new one made for every new project.
I started with an outdoor studio look with my signature black background, essentially a black on black with black skin which for me is a no brainer. I’ve created variations of this photograph with so many of my subjects, I’m happy this outdoor background idea worked so well. The open shade was perfect for the black background and I timed it perfectly. Any earlier would have direct sun on my west wall.
I could have easily stopped here with this look but I also wanted to mimic this look on location with a dark background but not exactly like the first idea. I managed to get quite a few ideas with this first outfit before we switched to the white dress.
With the second look I wanted to contrast the urban locations I chose for the first look and flip it. I decided to use green as a background to contrast the white and her skin tone and Kyla’s boyfriend spotted this tree in bloom while I was looking in the other direction. (I would have seen it eventually I swear).
I love using trees as backgrounds, I try to do this in creative ways, in this set I decided to use the texture of the bark as a background which I think worked so well. Later I took her into a more open part of the park where I was able to use the tree line as a background and shooter her more loosely, giving her more space around the frame for movement and to show scale.
After we caught this second look we were going to call it. It all depended on what clothing we had remaining that we hadn’t photographed yet. Time was still good, I shoot quite quickly and I felt if there was an outfit to shoot still, we should do it, if not, I was ok to call it.
I came up with the idea to shoot on my deck without the black background for the last set of images and I’m so glad I did. We managed to get so much out of this last look, I love it in black and white and Kyla and Celia were so happy.
We have massive Ontario wildfires burning currently and the smoke that day was the worst I’ve seen. If there is a positive side to our province burning, it really created a soft dreamy light. I photographed Kyla in open shade the entire time as the sun was still relatively high at 1-4pm. I spent the entire time making sure she was in shade and used a reflector to give her skin glow at points and to fill during other times. Overall I’ve very happy with how this session worked out. I hope you like this photoshoot walkthrough, if you did, please leave a comment. Maybe I’ll do more.
A little bonus for making it this far… I’m organizing a photowalk next weekend.
Sunday. July 9th. 4pm Trinity Bellwoods main gates. I’ll be giving free photo tips, tricks and location ideas as well as shooting portraits and live streaming the entire event. If you’d like to be a part of it, leave a comment here and say you’re coming.
See ya next weekend.
I did record BTS of this session which you can watch here
I also started doing IRL live streams last week and I’m very happy with how it’s working out! My set up is pretty simple but the quality and stability is amazing. Take a moment to check my latest In Real Life livestream here.
Shooting where the light isn't
Beautiful photos and woman! Thank you for sharing
That’s a cool session! And the photo walk sounds like a great idea. I’d love to join too :)