Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Posts tagged portrait photographer
Outdoor Portrait Photography
May 5th
The West Yorkshire region is finally getting a bit of sunshine and I keep getting inquiries about outdoor portrait photography. As a wedding photographer I try and get the subjects outdoors in all but the worst of conditions but for some reason I don’t do a massive amount of non wedding outdoor portraits. I am not a great fan of the formal posed group shots at weddings, I always stress to clients I try and get these out of the way asap so the bride and groom can get back to enjoying their day and we can do the informal shots that I think work so well. I approach outdoor portraits with much of the same idea, especially kids, I find you get a lot more character out of kids running around playing than sat on a bench. Although I must say, we sometimes have to sit them still for some of the semi formal stuff.
Informal outdoor portrait photography by Wakefield Photographer Pete Barnes
These two recent non studio outdoor portrait photos I have taken. The first one is of my girlfriend, who also helps me out at weddings. This one was done when I got the shots of the lake (a few posts back) the sun was nice and low so I wanted a back light effect with a little sunburst. I had to use a reflector (a lastolite trigrip if you’re interested) to bounce the light from the sun behind to light her face, other than that, no lights were used. The settings were ISO160, 70mm, f/2.8 1/100 sec.
Lighting in Portrait Photography
Mar 29th
Portrait Photographer Wakefield
A photographer I follow on twitter recently tweeted about a sort of lighting mega resource in a post called 20 Resources that will get you lit. I have only glanced at it but there seems to be a load of great links to anything related to lighting, well worth a look. So with this in mind I thought I would post a shot from a recent portrait photography shoot I did in my studio in Wakefield. We usually use a clean white background to provide the modern high key type look which works really well but I like to try and mix things up from time to time.
Glass Floor Portrait Photography
Mar 26th
Portrait Photography in Wakefield
I had a family portrait photography shoot recently and I wanted to try a technique I’d done a while back. My previous ‘glass floor’ shot had been done with 2 children (I had used my niece and nephew as guinea pigs) and I really liked the result but wanted to do it with a family group so when I had a call asking for a family portrait photo that was ‘intersting’ and ‘a little different’ this sprang to mind.
Modelling with my coloured backgrounds
Feb 28th
I’ve recently got some coloured gels for my studio lights as I wanted to do something a little different than the white background studio photography shots. The background is just grey but if you put a gel in front of the background light you can turn it any colour you like and as the colour of the background can really alter the mood of a photo, they are very handy to have. The lighting was a little more sophisticated than my usual lifestyle portraits so we couldn’t do a lot of moving about but as I was just doing test shots it was no big deal. So with the help of a very photogenic friend I did a few test shots and was quite happy with how they came out. Although she isn’t a model, she is very comfortable in front of the camera, I knew this as I covered her wedding last year (she was the bride going over the stepping stones at Bolton Abbey). It’s always easy to work with people who are very natural when they are having the photo taken, be it in the studio or out and about. I might look at doing some time for print shots with models looking to build up their portfolios as it’s mutually beneficial, but that’s probably a bit down the road.
Model portrait photography with colourful backgrounds
Model portrait photography with colourful backgrounds
Lighting wise I used a beauty lighting setup where there was a large softbox overhead providing top down lighting and a large triflector in front and below bouncing back up to the models face, there was also two lights to the left and right behind the model providing a little hair and rim lighting, these were small speedlights. The forth light was my background light with the coloured gels, the tone of the background depended on the power of the background light, if I wanted a light, hi key tone I put it up quite high, if I wanted a darker more saturated tone I lowered it, this gave me a good range with each colour. The shots were taken with a 70-200 lens at f/11, ISO 100. Thanks for looking guys.
Model Pose
Feb 26th
Another non wedding photography post today, It seems my only willing models at the moment are bits of fruit and, well, models. This strange old figurine looked to be striking an interesting pose and as I had the camera out I thought I’d try and get an interesting shot.
Photograph of a Figurine and a shadow on a blue background
I’m very big on coloured backdrops at the moment, I know for studio photography portraits the white out, high key look is still popular but as this was a hobby shot I thought I’d use a bit of colour. I have altered the colour in Lightroom, the original backdrop was a bit of a deep, dentist room green look which didn’t do the shot any favours. The great thing about the target slider on the HSL panel in lightroom is you can just set it to hue and click and drag the mouse left or right and it adjusts the hue you targeted, in this case I moved it over to blue and then adjusted the luminence slider up a little, I was going for a sky blue but this slightly darker tone seemed to work well.
Anyway back to the shot. I loved the pose of the figurine and it’s always good to try and remember interesting poses you’ve seen when working with real models just in case you need something a little different. Shadows on walls are generally avoided, especially sharp, harsh ones such as here, this is why it’s always a good idea to bounce a flash of a wall or ceiling as opposed to straight on flash but in this case I thought I’d include it. Having the flash just off to camera left also allowed me to position the shadow wherever I wanted, simply by moving the flash. Nothing else really to it, I used my ST-E2 to trigger my flash and the camera was set to 1/200, f/2, 50mm ISO100. Thanks for reading folks.