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| Outdoor session 1, black and white |
My sister and niece decided to have me do my niece's senior year photographs for the 2015 Jackson High School yearbook. Some of the more casual photos are just for sharing with friends while a studio shot was picked for the yearbook photo. The first set, a casual session, was done outside at two local parks during October of 2014. It was mid-morning (not my choosing but i had to work around my niece's and sister's schedules) so the light was a bit more harsh than it would have been earlier in the day (and it shows just a tad). To avoid extremely harsh shadows my sister and i used aluminum foil and a gloss white poster board to reflect light into shadowed areas on my niece's face. I took well over 100 photos during that session but only posted 2 to this blog.
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| Outdoor session 1, black and white |
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| Studio session 1, mild photomanipulation using GIMP program |
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| Studio session 1, black and white |
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| Studio session 1, black and white (mild editing in GIMP) |
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| Studio session 1 (mild blemish editing) |
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| Studio session 1, black and white |
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| Studio session 1, lightened slightly for printing |
The studio session was done on a separate day than the casual session. Not having the money to rent a studio for a couple hours, i got creative with a spare room in my house. After closing the windows and blocking the cool light coming in from them and after setting up a black sheet and the camera tripod, my sister set to work fashioning a black drape out of some velvet fabric she had purchased for the occasion. For the soft warm yellow/orange toned glow i used a lamp covered with yellow tissue paper while i had my sister hold a white glossy poster board to direct some of the light to the darker side of my niece's face. I took about 50 shots. My sister chose one out of the group after i had finished editing (that is the one at the bottom, lightened for printing--as a general rule i usually take some photos slightly darker if i'm going to be printing them because some printing companies and machines print lighter than the camera image--). My sister and niece were both please with the results of both sessions. The photos posted here from the studio session are mostly ones that i manipulated in the GIMP program for different effects. For the basic editing i used GIMP for blemish removal and hiding (no easy task in that program let me tell ya). I see a few things in the photos i would do differently now that i've had the chance to look at them often but generally, for these being my first two portrait sessions and having to do them on a strict budget, i am quite pleased.
