Carnival Photoshoot - Fail?

The carnival was in town this week, so last night Emily and I decided to try to do some portraits there. Before I go in depth with our experience, take a look at the photographs below.

Looking at these pictures, I know that this is not my best work. However, as an artist you have to be willing to admit when it is not your best work, and sometimes you have to be willing to share it even though you know it isn't up to par. I'm sharing these shots because there are a few things I wanted to say about our experience during this shoot. Looking at them, you can clearly tell that Emily is uncomfortable and that is partially because I was uncomfortable as well. The reason we were so uncomfortable is because 1) there was a lot of people crowded together in such a small area and 2) a lot of those people were just watching us. I obviously had my camera with me and planned to shoot using that, but the amount of people staring resulted in us not wanting to draw any more attention to ourselves, so I pulled out my iPhone in order to try and get a few shots. Now don't get me wrong, it's human nature to be curious and want to see what someone is doing - especially if they have a decent sized camera with them and a model posing. However, it is a completely different thing when you stare and watch a shoot for longer than just a passing glance without permission from the photographer and model. It makes us uncomfortable and that results in our work suffering. Other than that, I obviously don't like having a bunch of random people standing in the background of our shots, but that was unavoidable here because of how crowded it was. I really wanted this shoot to work out because I love the look of carnival photography, but it just wasn't in the cards for us last night. Hopefully we can make it to a carnival with bigger grounds in the future so that the crowd is more spread out. 

Five Shot Only Challenge - Brady

The five shot only challenge is exactly as it sounds - you only get five shots to get a good image. I decided to really challenge myself by not only using Brady for this (who has a short attention span), but by also doing this challenge inside where the lighting isn't always perfect. I had him sit in front of my closet doors and waited until he was looking at me to get each shot. Of course timing was key because he could have looked away right as I shot the image, but luckily he didn't. The lighting doesn't look too bad in these shots either, so that's a plus as well.

This was an interesting challenge to do because I originally thought it was going to be a lot harder than it ended up being. I didn't think Brady would sit still for me, but he surprisingly did a pretty good job. I think I will end up doing this challenge again in the future with a human model to see if that ends up being easier or harder than using an animal model. 

Glow Stick Photoshoot Take 2

For this week's photoshoot, I wanted to revisit using glow sticks like I did a few weeks back. This time I wanted to try something different with the glow sticks though, so instead of having the model hold them, I held them in front of my camera lens. I wanted the feel of the photos to be rave like, so I used the glow sticks as a sort of light source directly in front of the lens in order to create the look I was going for.

When it started getting a bit darker out, I tried using my flash but I found that it ultimately took the color away from the sticks. I ended up moving to a spot where there was some lights outside in order to avoid having to use the flash. 

Golden Hour Photoshoot

Golden hour is what photographers refer to as the time when the sun is just beginning to set, which results in our photographs having a golden look to them. I recently experimented with taking golden hour portraits for the first time, and I think they came out pretty good! PS, does this outfit look familiar??

If you want to take portraits during the golden hour, here are a few things to keep in mind-

- have your model stand directly in front of the sun so that you can achieve the backlit golden hour look. 

- like I mentioned above, the golden hour look is best achieved when the sun is setting, so anytime from when the sun is just starting to set to when it is almost fully set should be ideal. 

Sparkler Photoshoot

In honor of the upcoming holiday, I decided to experiment with taking some portraits having the subject pose with sparklers. We decided to wait until the sun was just beginning to set, so it wasn't too dark but you could still get the right effect coming from the sparklers. 

If you guys are going to experiment with taking portraits with sparklers, obviously be careful to not set anything (including yourself) on fire! Hope you all have a fun and safe holiday.