I recently attended a short course in studio photography and more specifically on how to setup lights and pose a model. The last evening of the course I managed to get two models and various props which could be used during the shoot.
Starting the Shoot
We were a small group of photographers each given a turn to take pictures of the individual models, posing them and playing around with light setups. While browsing through my images I noticed two of the photographers in the group more interested in talking about things not related to the shoot. I am not sure what they were talking about but it gave the impression there were some gossiping. That is when I got the idea of doing a gossip photo.
Making the Photo
After everybody had a turn to take photos and we came to the end of the class I called the two models and asked them to pose together and pretend they see somebody and then start talking about that person. I must admit, the models were playing together and acted brilliantly. They immediately understood what to do (maybe it is a girl thing). I took some photos and decided to add the umbrellas and masks. The idea was to give the girls the typical "rich-high-class" look.
For this picture, only one light, an Elinchrom beauty dish 72 cm was used. It was placed just to the front-right of the model on the right side of the picture. A small white reflector was placed just to the left of the model on the left. As you will see later, this reflector did its job but also caused some light on the background. I was limited in available backgrounds and for this particular image a dark grey background was used.
To get the background as dark possible, the models were moved forward so that less light will fall onto the background. The Elinchrom 500 Watt was set to level 4. The camera settings were ISO 100, f9, 1/125th.
Several pictures were taken but this one was my final choice.
Post Processing
The image required a lot of post processing like;
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Removing the white ends of the umbrellas
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Correct the reflection (over exposure) of the silver parts of the umbrellas caused by the flash
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Correct the over exposure and reflection of the masks on their faces caused by the flash and the very reflective masks
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The orange umbrella gave an orange reflection in the silver parts of the blue umbrella
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The backdrop was not black or dark enough
All of these were corrected using Lightroom 4 and Elements 10 en then cropped. I was happy with the final result but having a second look at the image a while later I thought of adding a sepia tone to it. For me the sepia tone gave an older look and contributed to the image and the "rich-classy-look" became the "years ago-rich-classy-look". The only problem was the clothing was to modern and I added an off-centre vignetting effect to highlight the faces of the model and not so much their clothing.
Final Image
The final image did very well for me in the club and gave me a COM, month winner and also best image of the year 2012.
Lessons learned
In terms of photography I realized again that we need to create / make a photo. I would never have thought of doing a "gossip" shoot as a theme but taking the immediate environment into consideration, taking notice of the two photographers talking and just think hey what if the two models were talking and not concentrating on the shoot resulted in a very interesting opportunity.
Another big lesson learned, was that backups must be made regularly. After submitting the image for the club evening I had a disk crash and lost some photos and this was one of them. It was only over the holiday period, preparing for another photo shoot that I found a memory card which was not used for some time and the original RAW file was there. I found the original image and had to redo the post-processing.
Summary
Although the girls were not professional models and have only done a few shoots, they were fantastic. Thanks to Francois Venter and Zoe Scholtz for arranging the models for me.
Francois Kotze
