Art that captures life. Workshops for the modern photographer, by Shelby Lane.

Newest Set -- Winter White/Ballerina Babies

So here is this year's Winter White set.  We're running these special white sessions for the next two weeks, and we can customize the set for families and individuals.  We also have a special "add on" for little ballerinas that includes the barre and Tim Teddy in a tutu (Charlotte was very very upset that I would force a boy bear to wear girl clothes, but the promise of chocolate was enough for her to overlook the insult).

This is set up on our north light wall, and we're shooting everything we can with window light.  Sometimes, with a family, this isn't really practical so we go ahead and drag the softbox over.  We still get the nice, soft window light look, but I have to work harder to light the background to keep everything looking natural.  So for individuals, as long as we're getting enough light, we'll shoot with the window as our main light for these sessions.

I knew we'd be using a rough wooden barre for the ballerinas, so I wanted the rest of the set to be soft and flowy with shades of white and tan.  The background is netting curtains from Ikea on a background stand, pooled at the floor.  The barre is a wooden dowel attached to some old light stands, which are covered with soft white material as well.  This set still needs something for the little ballerinas... I think some pink rose petals and some satin ribbon will help finish it off for our sessions this week.  The background is set back about six inches from one window, and the barre is set back about a foot from what we're using as our "main light" window.  The barre and the background are about 6 feet apart.  I'm also using a 4x6 silver reflector for some fill on the shadow side.  I metered Charlotte's face and shot by those readings -- today was very darkly overcast, so my readings were ISO 320, 1/80th (shooting from a camera stand) @ 3.5, shooting with the D200 and the 85mm lens.  With a more active kid, I would have had to bump up that shutter speed to avoid kid motion blur, OR I would have used the strobes to make life a little easier.  Charlotte is a good model and knows to stay (mostly) put, so I knew I could shoot with window light for her, even with less than ideal lighting conditions, and still get sharp images.  Plus, I knew that a little grain would be okay, because I wanted these to have a handcolored, more filmy look.

I always shoot in RAW, so in Bridge/Adobe Camera Raw I added contrast and then opened them in Photoshop.  These have a Kubota BW action applied and then backed off to about 70%, and I brought back a tiny bit of additional spot color in the cheeks and lips.  Then I added one of the Kubota grain filters to complete that ambient light/high speed bw film look that I was going for.  I will post some family images using the strobes on the studio/client blog later on this week so you can see the difference in the overall look as well as in how we will process those.  It is very easy for me to move my equipment around in the studio, so if we decide we need supplemental/artificial light it's right there -- I just change my meter back to strobe, meter, change camera settings, and go.

A big thank you to the fabulous Jen Hillenga for the inspiration.  :)

Let's talk set design

We did our annual Pumpkin Patch promotion at the studio last weekend and so it's a good time to talk about set design.  What makes a set too busy or too sparse is often a matter of taste, but here is what I personally look for when I'm putting a set like this together.

1) I want everything in the set to belong there.  So color, texture, and style are very important.  I want everything to be keyed the same in color and in tone -- meaning, for this set, I want everything to be an earth tone and to be fairly low key.  If I had thrown a light brown/tan chair into that mix, it would have been okay, but you would have noticed the chair before you noticed the kid in earth tones who was sitting on it.  So the first thing I decide on is the key and the color scheme.  Will it be mid key with earth tones?  Will it be like last year's Christmas set, which was higher key and very very neutral?  Or will it be low key with deep reds and greens, like our Christmas set from the year before?  And in this particular set, can you see how throwing a small shiny metal piece would have competed for attention?  The style would have been so different, and the shininess would have really made it stand out in all that matte rustic fally-stuff.

2) I want it to look full and complete.  For me, this means layers and levels.  I need this to work with a grade-school kid as well as with a 6 month old.  So we set up different levels to add some height.  Next year, I'd like to put some fake trees in here so that we can have a leafy vignette for the tall kids.  We also create depth with the layers -- we have the foreround of leaves, the middle area with the fence (where the kids sit) and then a background of tin pumpkins, and behind that a muslin.  I shoot pretty open in the studio to create some depth in the images -- for this event, I shot with an 85mm lens at 3.5 (5.6 or so with more than one kid).  Becasue everything is in the same color family and nothing really stands out, I can fill in the spaces with leaves, berries, and pumpkins and not feel like the set will compete with the kids.  Some of you might say it's too much.  Some might say it's not enough.  But for me, this is the look I was going for.  For our Christmas set with the ribbons, I still had the same depth, but I kept it really really simple.  I still felt like it looked complete, but it wasn't the same type of "fullness" that we do for the pumpkin set.

3) I want it to be easily changed.  If I decide something's not working, or if we have three kids come in instead of just one three-year-old, or if suddenly an unexpected newborn shows up I need to be able to make changes quickly to adapt the set to the situation.  Nothing here is going to get too messed up if a kid runs over it and knocks it down.  Even the fence could have been set back up within a minute.  The whole set took me about 15-20 minutes to design and put together, and every year I look at it while I'm shooting and see things that I am going to do differently for next year.  We never do the exact same set twice, and that keeps things fun for me.

Here is a pullback of the whole set, featuring Supermodel Charlotte (Cheese).  She is always my lighting model.  Can you tell she's a photographer's kid?  I know someone will ask, do you even see the flowers on the sides?  No, usually you don't.  But I want it to be about as wide as the background because sometimes I get sibling groups, AND because I have a shooting plan (a few full lengths, a few 3/4, a couple of headshots, and then I take the camera off the camera stand and shoot from above, at a tilt -- and sometimes the sides of the background need to be there for that higher angle tilted shot.  I've added an example of that one too.  For more images on the set, check out the Studio Blog.  I'm also adding a shot from last year's Christmas set.