"Summer Day Smiles"

"Summer Day Smiles"
© David A. Ziser

Here is another image of the same young lady I featured in yesterday’s post.  I need to say that theses girls are not professional models.  In fact my Napa shoot was the first time for all of our models to do any kind of modeling at all.  I think that fact brings a certain amount of authenticity to the images.  It’s not the model making the image, it’s the photographer.

I actually posted another photograph of Megan in this very same location the week of my Napa workshop.  That image was made with just the naturally occurring light and is just beautiful – here is the link to that image.

This time around I wanted to use my off-camera flash to build the contrasts and dimension into the portrait.  I had my assistant move around the subject till just the far side of the nose disappeared from view form the light holder’s position.  It’s important that your light holder can still see the subject’s opposite cheek.  When that is the case and the light is in the correct position, your lighting will be perfect as it is in this image.

Compositionally I just had Megan lean against the column and return an easy smile to the camera.  When shooting with columns as your background, be sure all columns overlap each other to give you a solid background of gradient shades.  You’ll always get a great image like we did in this case here.

Camera specs: canon 7D fitted with 18-200mm IS lens at 178mm, F5.6 @ 100 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David