liza bam
Sasha is someone I’ve been wanting to photograph for a long time now and last Friday we finally got around to it.
It started out as a comedy of errors. I felt tired and had trouble focusing which was bad enough as of itself, and then, to top it all off, much of my equipment decided to start acting out. I had to duct-tape a loose light stand and took a long and painful time to figure out what was going on with a finicky synch cord, which I had to use because the batteries in my wireless trigger went out on me. On top of that, the lighting scheme I envisioned for this shoot, with a beauty dish key and on-axis fill was just not working for me at all. I don’t generally get frustrated when shooting, but this was probably the closest I’ve gotten in a while. Seeing this, I figured that it’s better to take a break, have a cup of tea and a glass or two of wine, and then try again later.
The tea-and-wine worked its magic. A couple of glasses in I decided that I need to really soften things up. Not only did I swap the beauty dish for my ginormous umbrella, but I also added extra diffusion by shooting through some wine glasses, and on top of that I threw on the lensebaby to wash things out even more with selective focus. I followed this with a lot of tweaking to get to this end result. I think I wound up with a second gridded strobe pointing at the glasses I used for diffusion material to get them to flare some and do double-duty to provide some framing for the composition and build on the whole whimsical theme I was trying to create.
