BAPC Field Trip—Portraits #2

My next portrait from the field trip is one of Amy.  This portrait may have been the most challenging one I took all night.  Why?  Well, Amy is so tiny and seemed quite shy that I had a hard time framing her—there was just not enough of her to fill the frame.  Part of my problem was that I really had no idea of how the image should look.  I tried various things, but did not like anything that I was getting.  In desperation, I started to study Amy’s face and think about how to photograph it.

Here, I must say that I think this is a habit that many photographers follow—keep shooting until you get something rather than seeing the image and then going about creating it. 

After studying Amy’s face I decided that I wanted to show-off that great completion, color and bone structure.  I took a high to low camera angle to simplify the image and help get light into her eyes.  Because she is so slight, I had no problem broad lighting her—lighting the largest part of the face.  In hindsight, I wished that I had moved her hair back on the left side of the camera so that her great cheek and jaw line would be set-off against the background better.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D3X, Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 at 52mm, ISO 200, f/5.6 and 1/60^th of a second with Elinchrom large softbox at camera right and feathered towards her right cheek.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom—set white and black point, increased contrast with a tone curve adjusted hue and saturation of various colors.