The moment it all clicked was followed by my shutter.

This past weekend I headed up to Maryland with Nathan and Ms. Jess Hawk for a meet and greet at Sly Horse Studio in Rockland. Upon arrival Nathan and I stole Rachel Dashae away from her liaison and preped for a low key shoot. I could find no hairstylist on site, so I resorted to a fan. Rachel is an amazing model to shoot, her poses are spot on and consistent from frame to frame.

The links we form as artists are one of our greatest tools. This shoot was made possible by my lovely and talented boyfriend Ryan, who did the hair on the second model. The moustache was just convenient.

This was a rather straight forward shoot. I had my speedlight on a stand to the left pumping out at full power. I positioned my back to the sun, and we began trying to balance this birdcage on my subjects head. It was a rather challenging thing to do, but Kimmy pulled through with her excellent modeling skills. The gusty wind worked very well for me as it blew her hair back and made her dress flow like a cloud. 

Here is the Shot.

Luck is probability taken personally. There is much thought gathered around the concept of a “lucky shot” and the volume of work that it takes to produce one. Photographers tend to look at another’s work along the lines of “If I were in that light, with that lens, I could have got the same shot”. Do it. Surround your shoot with beauty and light it to the best of your ability, and your making your own luck.

For this shoot I went back to an older technique of mine with a slight twist. My lighting of choice a year or so ago was a bare speedlight on a coiled flash cord. My umbrella being broken made me resort back to this nunchuck like setup but this time using a cheap cactus radio trigger to fire the flash. Keep in mind these aren’t capable of high speed sync, so I closed the aperture down to f16.0 (giving me just enough light for the background objects and the hair light) and then pierced through that darkness with flash in hand to the right.

The post processing to compliment this ambient/speedlight balance is also key to me. When in Raw conversion, pump the fill light to the right just until you see some noise in your shadows, then back it down a smidge. Compensate for the washout with a hefty tug on the blacks slider and then finish with a heaping spoonful of clarity. To get even crisper details mix up some sharpening paint. This can be done by cloning a copy of your master layer and applying approximately a 35 pixel high pass filter (under “other” in filters) and setting its blend mode to overlay . Then mask to hide it all and come back in to brush it where it need be. Viola! Sharpening Paint.