Shooting Kai

We had a recent fun shoot with Kai, a model and artist from Pretoria. It’s unusual and challenging to get a guy in for a fashion/model shoot and so we had some fun with lighting and poses to keep his masculinity while letting his bubbling personality come through! A large number of the shots ended up using one light or at most two. I am particularly pleased with the high key white backdrop stuff we did.

Bjorn and Karien

On Saturday we met Bjorn and Karien at the Botanical Gardens in Pretoria for their e-session. The weather was typical for Pretoria at ths time of year – hot and bright with extremely harsh light even at 4 p.m.! We kept to the shade for the most part and got some wonderful pictures for them before ending up at our favourite little grassed platform and water feature for the last photos of the day.

These first two were taken early in the afternoon when we were still keeping to the shade. We used a flash shooting through an umbrella to give us some nice warm light in the shade. I’m really happy with the results – we’re getting better and better at this of-camera flash thing.

These last two were taken later on when the sun had dropped a bit. No flash here, just a bit of reflector to fill the shadows.

Thanks B & K – we’re looking forward to the big day!

Something Funky!

Chrystal wanted something funky for her model portfolio so we found a slightly grungy back alley and took some photos using lots of off-camera flash. This was followed up by some funky post-processing, mostly in Lightroom, and we have a result!

Portraits of a dear friend!

Corna came around for some studio portraits.

We stuck with head and shoulders and played with many different lighting setups. It’s such fun having a patient model who’ll let us fiddle with the techie stuff – it helps of course that Corna is a seriously good photographer who felt the urge to get on the other side of the lens for a change. Thank you Corna!

Rickshan

Rickshan came by to do a studio shoot. She would love to get into modeling so I offered to do a trial for her and to give her some basic shots for her portfolio. We had lots of fun and produced some great shots for her. Here are a couple…

Daniel

I guess I’m allowed to use this blog occasionally as a brag gallery and a portfolio? Well, It’s mine so I will – this weekend we babysat Daniel (our youngest grandchild and the only one living nearby) so we dragged him into the studio and took some pictures. This is an ideal age for taking photographs – he’s just learning to sit and is totally immobile once you’ve got him steadied!

For the technical readers, I used the Canon 70-200 f2.8L at f5.6 for this set. This lens is unbelievably sharp at that aperture, something that doesn’t show on a web page but will print up beautifully. Post processing in Lightroom 2 – awesome software.

Dominique and Bevan

Last weekend Dominique and Bevan tied the knot in a wonderful (and chilly) July wedding. At least they were spared the unseasonable rain we experineced here yesterday! The venue, l’Aquila, was great with very professional handling of the day’s little challenges and some great food!

Here are some of the pictures:

A surprise portrait session

Yesterday morning we were out shopping, our favourite Saturday morning occupation, when Khotso, Keloagile’s Dad, phoned to ask whether we could do a portrait session for his eye-apple cute 11-month old. So we rushed home, sorted out the studio, still in a mess from taking much of the equipment to last weekend’s wedding, and eagerly awaited their arrival.

The shoot was real fun with the aded bonus of being able to photograph mom and dad along with Pum’kin, as her mom calls her. We rounded it off with some sparky service, delivering the completed CD of low-res images to them yesterday evening before bed time (ours!)

Here are a couple of pics from the session:-

Julian and MJ get married

Well, we had the e-session and then the wedding day came along. It was on 12 April and it rained and the power went out for the whole day. People were running around getting generators sorted out and chaos reigned. In the end this was a memorable wedding in the beautiful memorial garden at Kosmos with an awesomely fun reception. Linda and I stayed too long and got some wonderful pictures. Here are some from the day:

MJ and Julian engagement session

Last weekend we did MJ and Julian’s engagement session at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. It was really hot out there and we sweated our way through the shoot. But we had a lot of fun and got some really nice pics of these two happy people.