Two weeks ago I arranged a photo shoot with Marije Louise. She’s a thoroughly trained aspiring stage actress and reacted to my call online for a TFP based shoot. This is the first time where I did a shoot for a total stranger.
She plans to use the pictures for her website which she uses to promote herself as an actress.
For the shoot I mostly used a 35mm F/1.8 on my D500 with a speed light to fill up the dark areas, and natural light coming in from the windows.
A little peek behind the processing scenes
I thought this would be a nice moment to take a little look at what I do to adjust the pictures I take.
I exclusively shoot in raw, this forces me to make a selection of the shots I take which I then process to get the end result. As the number of pictures I take during a shoot goes up, the ratio that gets selected for processing ranges from at least 10% to around 50%. So for a wedding that might be a few hundred pictures out of a few thousand, and for a short photo shoot that might be 10 out of 20 or rarely even all 4 out of 4. This varies according to the selection criteria which also depend on the type of shoot.
For this particular shoot I was slightly more strict but I feel like I could have been stricter.
So once selection is done I adjust the pictures to change them from raw files as the sensor picked it up to something publishable such as a JPG format.
In the example above I already applied the crop for better comparison. As you can see the most prominent change is the lighting. I tend to underexpose when it’s bright out, and then in post processing I like to recover a little bit of that light.
In this case I also removed a few spots that I thought were distracting. I didn’t do that much high end skin retouching because at the moment I like that natural feel.
An impression of the photo shoot
For the shoot she suggested a number of looks, and the main purpose of the shoot was in fact for one of my photography course assignments. However, it was also a great experience for me in general, and for her too, for the both of us to expand our portfolios. So with that in mind we did a number of different things and she put on a number of different outfits.
The first outfit she worse was this striped top with grey skirt and I had her read a book. This part was for my assignment, but I will cover that in more detail in a separate post.
The second outfit was this green knitted sweater with black jeans and black wide heeled shoes. The texture of the sweater made it interesting for me to photograph and the color is easy on the eyes as well.
The weather during the shoot was overcast so the light that came into the large window was quite soft which made it even easier to set up the shots.
The final outfit was this combination of green top with pink corduroy pants, and floral patterned wide heels. Marije suggested to use a different chair and standing poses, and I discovered she has a guitar which she also played for a bit.
All in all it was a very laid back photo shoot. A great first experience for me to do this type of shoot with a stranger. It was made very easy because of Marije Louise’s experience with photo shoots, as well as the decent weather that day.
I do hope I can do more of these shoots, and I wish Marije Louise all the best in her acting ambitions!
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