85mm f/1.8 G

White Studios pt.3 - Samantha

 
 

Here's my last set of photos of Samantha, from our photoshoot at White Studios. It's been hard to choose only a small number of photos from the 500-odd I kept - but at the same time it's also been hard to decide on any which I think are 'good enough' to show! The more I look at my photos, the more I think that they're uninteresting or not good enough or the models will hate them!! Nevertheless, here are some photos I took.

I've been taking time in the retouching on each of these - portraits are a bit harder than my typical travel shots, as they require individual care and attention to small details, rather than the basic colour, tone, cropping etc type corrections i make to most travel photos. So it's important to carefully self-edit and select which photos have promise before you spend the time post-processing.

I'm still rather slow in Photoshop, as I've previously worked almost entirely in Adobe Lightroom, but i'm learning a lot. I'm not making any major changes of course - just touch ups - but i'm still testing lots of different techniques. Luckily there is no shortage of free instruction on the internet (of highly variable quality). One method I've learnt recently which is working well is Frequency Separation, if anyone is interested in trying some retouching!

I hope to create a consistent style as i take more portraits - but for now I'm just shooting and showing what I like at the time. I do like some things in particular though - using graphic and angular shapes - things that look not 'uncomfortable', but at least 'interesting'... and I like soft, diffuse light so I'm quickly building up a list of (expensive) softboxes and octabanks that I 'need' to use... anyone got a spare 190cm octa?

Thanks very much to everyone that helped shoot or be shot: Sven, Anupam, Celeste, Priya and Samantha! I learnt a lot from this exercise, and hope to do it again soon. We're currently looking for interesting locations, rather than a photo studio for next time.

So get in touch if you know of or have access to any sort of cool room / warehouse / dingy basement / abandoned building / lounge bar / anywhere fun :)