In essence I wanted to try out a number of poses from a recent book that I bought (Photographing Models:1000 Poses A Practical Sourcebook For Aspiring And Professional Photographers by Eliot Siegel). One of those that I saw used a classic looking chair.
I set up the lighting for high key which involved having a white background and floor covering, with two lights fixed onto the back wall and two further lights set up on the model. The settings for the lights at the back was F22, meaning that the power was turned up to allow a correct exposure at F22 on a speed of 1/125 sec and ISO 200. The settings for the lights on the model was F11 to allow a correct exposure at a speed of 1/125 and ISO 200. The camera was set initially to the settings matching the lights on the model. What this means is that the wall would end up over exposed and this is because the hole/aperture setting is smaller for the lights on the wall meaning more light is required to get the correct exposure and the camera setting is to allow only enough light in to correctly expose at F11 which is a larger hole. The effect is that it bleaches out the white wall at the back.
It is difficult to try and demonstrate the effect. Another way to think about it is that the two wall lights are independent from the two model lights and to get a similar, if exaggerated effect outdoors, it to compare a sunlit patch of ground with a patch in shade. If you take a picture of the two patches of light you will find that either the shadow will be under exposed or the sunlit patch will be over exposed. Outdoors we use fill in flash to get rid of the shadow or a diffuser to tone down the sunlight. More blogs to come in later! Anyway getting back to the shadow and sunlit patches, the wall lights are the sunlit part and the model lights are the shadow, it is the same effect caused deliberately in the studio.
Quite an explanation for that so I best move on to the photos. There were a number of images which I quite liked from this shoot for different reasons. All of them had to be cleaned up as the high key effect was not sufficient to leave the photos as they turned out. My aim was to show the curves and shape of the model. Although the camera was set to F11 at 1/125/sec and ISO 200 I adjusted the F-Stop to either 14 or 16 for most of the shots. What I maybe should have also done is adjusted the lights at the back to ensure that the wall remained bleached out.
I gave no particular direction about the clothing, but occasionally I would adjust the scarf, I like the combination of black and red against the white background. In terms of camera angles and poses I got the model to look down over her right arm and to cross her legs as I did a low level shot. I just like this image as it is a formal appearance but yet a thoughtful look.
With this image I turned the chair 90 degrees and got the model to look towards the camera, the hand struck me as being a bit 'lost' on the end and I took a further picture with it lying flat although I didn't process it as she was looking forwards with that image.
For this image I again adjusted the angle of the chair and then I stood on another chair to get a downward shot with the arms crossing over. In a lot of cases I waited until I saw the shot before getting her to pose. She would often keep changing her position without being asked, but this sometimes resulted in me liking a position and then capturing it.
I then set about doing some close in shots.
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