Paige Hassen: JRN

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Setup:

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My experience:

This experience was a little bit difficult for me and my subject. While I knew what I wanted to do location-wise (an old building with visually appealing framing), the timing was the difficult part. The shoot got postponed until a few hours before the due date, due to my subject going out of town the past weekend. I believed that this would have looked better if taken at night, where you could see the lighting techniques a little stronger than you can in the photos used.

I guess you could say I used three lighting techniques: two strobes, one to backlight and one to light shadows, with the third source technically being natural light from the cloudy sky. I tried using a red tint to make the background a little more appealing, but honestly the building looked perfect with what the subject was wearing already.

This shoot was hard to do outside during the afternoon. The description of the assignment says that the strobes must be the main source of light. While you can still somewhat see this to be true, due to it being overcast and cloudy but light outside, the strobes often blended into the natural light. For example, almost all of the shots, we shot in the shade. So, you can see that ulterior light sources were used, but they do blend. Maybe that’s a good thing instead of what I’m thinking.

Anyway, Lonnie was a great subject. Besides the sports portrait subjects, Lonnie was the only one who I didn’t reach out to from VERGE, the fashion magazine. Lonnie was actually in one of my Entrepreneurship classes, and one day we were partnered for an in-class assignment and he mentioned he is in the fashion merchandising programs and enjoys to model. He even has occasionally been asked by VERGE to be part of a few assignments. So, after that conversation, I decided to reach out and ask if he would be interested in helping. He said yes and it was set up.

I played around with editing a little bit more on this assignment. We originally really wanted to use red gel lighting for this assignment, but no matter what I did, it wouldn’t show up. I was even using the strobes on full blast, waiting for them to fully charge before taking the pictures, too. I was trying to point it on the white background, putting it close and directly on his face, but nothing was working. Honestly, the building had a green-ish tint to it, so I feel as though the red was basically just acting as a neutralization, taking out some of the green. In one of the photos above, though, I really edited it so that you could see some of the red, that actually turned out looking like rust. I removed the tint from majority of the subject, too, and I like how it turned out that way.