The Mitsuru Photoshoot
People who have Ashley Riot as a friend on Facebook have already seen a few of these, so you know where they’re coming from. People who have no idea who I’m talking about may or may not have seen these, and it is for those people that I offer the following background.
I was doing a photoshoot with Ashley this past Friday at sunrise on the western edge of Lake Michigan. Johnny Fowle was also around; this will be important later on when I mention how much I didn’t know about composition. The following is a small selection of shots I liked, shots I wish could like but found too much to hate in them (and why — if nothing else, writing that sort of thing down will fix it in my mind), and a couple of silly ones.
I’d like to put these under my standard Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, but I honestly have no idea how that works in the absence of model release forms. (My understanding is that without said forms, the photographer has no right throwing the images under CC BY-NC-SA. Hell, the photographer has no right to publish; I can only do that due to verbal permission.) Obviously I need to think the legal aspects of this sort of stuff better next time. Until further notice, consider these all rights reserved, if only because that’s the safe option.
On to the images. Click for larger size.
Ashley’s dressed as Mitsuru Kirijo from Persona 3.
I like this shot. You can see the platform we shot on (the blue blanket between her boots), and I need to either find some way of fixing that or discard this shot, but besides that annoyance I am generally okay with the way this turned out. I do regret not gelling my strobe to match the color of early daylight, though; my failure to do that results in some stark contrasts between her front and back, which is made worse by the choice to use the sun for rim light.
Another image in the same vein, but this time framed to eliminate all ground. The shadows on her face are too harsh, and make her look too old: the strobe was too far back, thus too small, thus too hard. I again failed to gel my strobe, too.
If you’re wondering why I even have a strobe in these photos, it’s because I couldn’t think of any other way to light her against the sun. Reflected sunlight didn’t work too well for me: I couldn’t get it intense enough to overcome either fast shutter speeds or very small apertures.
The composition in the prior two shots was greatly assisted by having someone else around (viz. Johnny Fowle), who showed me all sorts of things that I didn’t even know were suboptimal or flat-out boring. This is why I have not, and will not, write about composition of these photos: I don’t have the vocabulary to do so. Obviously I have a lot to learn here; thankfully, I now have a cache of some 4,100 example images to study, so that should be quite a help.
A more tightly framed shot. I don’t really like this one, so…
…here’s one I do like, which is a variant on shooting angle and pose from the previous image. And here’s some reasons why I prefer this image: the light in this one is much softer (because the strobe is closer); the light’s color is much closer to early sunlight; there are actually shadows on her, which adds depth… it’s just all around more visually interesting, in my opinion.
This is a fun and visually interesting angle (and I’m pretty sure J. Fowle shot this one), but the connection between my strobe and radio trigger went bad here, so the light is junk. I did the best I could in data recovery by playing with the histogram and curves, but there’s only so much that you can do.
Finally, a more humorous outtake. We were going for motion in the background, but it ended up just looking like some sort of really unusual flatulence. Perhaps if we had sand coming from both sides of the frame — and if I had captured it just a few milliseconds later — her body wouldn’t have masked the sand as to alter the emission point. Ah well.
