Now, we’re going to take advantage of some more direct lighting that’s coming through this window. I'm actually calling this reflective light because the sun is directly up ahead and it is reflecting off of these beautiful white buildings that I have directly across the street and that light has been bouncing into the studio and this is what we’re using to light Valerious face and her body.
And you’ll watch me in this session, I'll be moving her closer to the window and then I move her far away and I'm just trying to use this beautiful reflective light to create different looks. Adding a little more drama, I do that again too with the angle of my camera and I get close into her face and I move back and I'm also using lens baby. So there's a lot of different lighting styles that is really going on in this session.
Composition for me is it’s how you see it, it’s how you see the subject. I like angles. I think angles make things a lot more interesting so I'm going to take my camera and I'm going to turn it, I’m going to tilt it in one way or another until I find what feels right to me. I’ll sit down, I lay down on the ground, I sit down with my subject, I get up above them. I’m constantly turning and moving and trying all sorts of different angles to create that composition and when I see it, I know it and that’s when I shoot it.
Sometimes I don’t see it and I keep working with that person or with those people until I can find it. I shoot a lot and I shoot fast and it doesn’t always happen in the beginning sometimes you have to work it, sometimes you have to just play with it, you have to be with it, you have to talk to your subject, you have to relate to them, sometimes you have to put your camera down and you have to take a look at really what's happening and then bring that camera back up and then start shooting again.
It really does make a huge difference to shoot RAW so I am shooting RAW a lot more I don’t shoot JPEG anymore. I like the fact that when I take a look at my images if there are any corrections that need to be made, if there's a lot more data and I really understand the difference because we actually shot RAW against JPEG so that we could see the difference. So technically, I would say I shoot with two lenses, I shoot with the 70 to 200 4.0 and I also shoot with the 24105. I like both lenses but my lens of choice is going to be my 70 to 200, it’s a great portrait lens. It’s light with my 5D, this is all Canon equipment. It’s very light in my hands. I can move easily with it. I feel good about it. I'm familiar with it. I have mastered how to use that lens. And when I'm out shooting, I don’t have to think about my equipment. I don’t think I have to think about my lighting too much.
All of that after a lot of experience, a lot of shooting is intuitive to me so I can really concentrate on getting good emotion from my clients which is really lighting and composition, they're all extremely important but if you’ve got all of the beautiful technical aspects of your image in place but you don’t have good expression, it’s not a good image for me. So, it all has to be working together. And the best advice that I could give anybody in the business is to keep shooting into practice and just to keep shooting and just to keep practicing and until it become second nature to you and I think with experience that it does.
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