Between a stressful job, running the kids back and forth from one event to another as well as keeping my wife Cristy happy and editing photographs… keeping up on a weekly blog post has slipped from twice a week down to once every 14 days. September has been a pretty busy month for us between weddings, parties, charity events etc but I am not complaining because at least we are busy. Last weekend we had the pleasure of working with Michelle a model that we met on Model Mayhem. Michelle is a twenty plus year old student that really would like to pursue a career in modeling and we wish her all the luck. I have mentioned in previous post that Marcus and I have come across a lot of fantastic people over the course of the year and Michelle is definitely one of them. She was such a joy to work with so much so that the 1 1/2 hours that we scheduled for the shoot quickly turned in to 3 hours and we could have kept shooting lol. Michelle like me is a Redskins fan and at 12:30 we had to call it a wrap so that we did not miss the kickoff. Marcus is a Chiefs fan so frankly there is never a rush for him to get home lol. Actually come to think of it there should not be a rush for me to rush home either considering the last 4 years or so lol. Thankfully we will get the opportunity to work with Michelle again in November and we are really looking forward to it.
What I really enjoy about working with a model as opposed to doing an event – wedding is that you have some time to experiment a little. I mean you can experiment while shooting a wedding but I would not risk it especially if you are getting paid and frankly even if your are not because you don’t want to take those kind of risks on someones special day. I used the 85MM Sigma for the entire shoot and Marcus shot with the 70-200mm f2.8. I have always wanted to do a shoot with a really shallow DOF and for the majority of the shoot I stayed between f1.4 and f2.0. Yes there were a few photos where focus was not nailed but for the most part I was able to nail roughly 60-70% of the shots at f1.6 and at f1.4 ehhhhh close to 50%. We were pleased that by the end of the shoot we were able to deliver over 200 photographs which all in all means we had a successful day. Again thanks Michelle and we are really looking forward to working with you later this year.
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What a beautiful Smile!!! These photographs were taken literally within the first 45 minutes of the shoot and I think you will notice some subtle differences from the photographs here in comparison to the ones that I will share that were taken later during the session. Marcus and I have come to realize that we prefer to book 2 hour shoots due to the fact that typically the first hour is spent getting to know one another.. The feeling each other out period usually last for a good 30 minutes or so but for this shoot I think we were pretty warmed up within the first 15 minutes due to a few poor jokes told on my part and Marcus rolling his eyes at almost everything I said. As a matter of fact the more I type the more I recall that Marcus was hogging up a lot of the face time with Michelle. I would literally setup a shot with Michelle and the next thing I know Marcus’s big head would be in my frame setting up to take the shot!! Lucky I consider him to be one of my best friends and I digress. We will be posting quite a few more of Michelle over the course of the next week or so. In our next post you will see that Michelle has the ability when smiling to bring some color into black and white photos .