The Munchkin's Notebook

I made a large blue flower head piece last month, because I wanted to shoot with one and I did not want to buy one.   The head piece was easy to make, and consists of a wide plastic headband, a medium Styrofoam ball cut in half, three little Styrofoam cones, hot glue, and fake flowers (hydrangeas and wisteria). The key to making the head piece was having a basic picture in my mind of what I wanted, which was fluffy with long flowers dripping off the ends.   I used the leaves from the flowers to break up the blue, create a crown piece and frame the face when it is worn.   Now I did shoot with the head piece in April at the Spring Shoot on the Farm, however I also wanted to do a more studio centric shoot with it.   However, before the studio shoot I made a few adjustments to the head piece by adding more long flowers (wisteria) to the sides to eliminate the gap I was seeing during the farm shoot.   This made it larger and gave it a bit more length which I beli...

Last weekend I got to work with the lovely Vida Muerta on building her portfolio, with some standards.  Standard images are simple images with simple backgrounds (black, white, or gray) that encompass a head-shot/beauty shot, a ¾ length image, and full-length image that show off the model’s basic look.   I did a simple two light set up for these photos with a grey backdrop (see left).  I used two Phottix Indra 500LC Strobes, one in a square soft box with grid and the other in a socked beauty dish set to the sides of the model.  I shot using my Canon 70D, an 18-200mm lens, and a radio trigger to activate the strobes.  I thought about shooting tethered, so there could be some instant feed back for my model, but my in-home studio is not conducive to corded tethered shooting.  So, in lieu of shooting tethered, half way through the shoot we stopped and reviewed the images and reviewed them again at the end of the shoot. This is a note to models, do not...

On April 21, I participated in my first fashion group shoot hosed by Allie Taylor Affairs at Barr Family Farms.  This is group event was different then previous group events I have participated in for three reasons, one it wasn’t a cosplay event; two I had to schedule specific times with the models that were attending the event in stead of just working at random; and three the event lasted all day compared to about three hours.   I enjoyed the event, except for the weather which was rather cold, breezy, and cloudy with the threat of rain.  However, since the sky was cloudy, I was able to capture moody skies as my background in several photos.  Finally, one of the nice items about this shoot, is that photographers that participated can submit their photos to RealmMagazine which will be running a special issue showcasing the event.  I did submit photos for consideration but will not know for a month or two if my submissions are to be included in the featur...