Up Early with Liv

I'm mentioned my model Liv many times.  We've known each other since she was in elementary school with my sister and is home from college for winter break right now so we decided to do a shoot.  Liv wanted something kind of vintage, which reminded me of a senior picture shoot I did over summer.  We decided to revisit that location with some great thrift store finds.  At sunrise.  Getting up early is not my strong point but something I really need to work on, plus the light is always beautiful.


Of course, switching between lenses made it difficult because I was using the f1.4 and the first frame or two after switching would be either too dark or completely blown out.  HOWEVER, there is this magical thing called camera RAW which allowed some saving.  Check out how awesome this before and after is!

The top is straight out of camera.  The bottom is after some tinkering around in LightRoom.  Sometimes mistakes turn out really well!!  Now for the intentional images....

I just had to edit this all old-timey.  The fall-off from the f1.4 is beautiful and I love how the necklace and lace of the dress look.  She looks straight out of the 19th century.

Love her poses!

The light and lines in this makes it a favorite.  Plus Liv has a stunning profile - having a good model can make or break a photo.


Of course, I had to go and love the vintage look in black and white which took out the lovely colors but there's an image on my facebook page from this shoot in color.  Go love it!

Liv and the Downpour

When I first started having an interest in photography, I was about 17 and recruited my sister and her friends (who are 4 or 5 years younger) to be my models.  It's always fun shooting with them again because they've grown from silly middle schoolers to beautiful college girls.  Today I photographed Liv, one of these girls and my "happy model."  She's always smiling!

She came by apartment and we picked an outfit, figured out her makeup and headed to the local ice cream shop/mini golf course, The Windmill, to shoot in their overgrown driving range.  I'm still on my 50mm f2 prime kick, so had that on my Pentax K20D.  It was bright but overcast, so the natural light was beautiful - no flash photography, please!

We didn't really have a set plan, mostly just "pretty pictures in a field."  But the weather decided to give us a more exciting shoot than we had anticipated when it started raining.  It had POURED earlier in the day but cleared up.  This wasn't as terrible, so we continued shooting and laughed about the rain and thunder and how the sky certainly didn't look all that bad!

Thankfully the storm didn't last very long and there was even a rainbow after!

Luckily we got in the car before the rain started up again, because on the way home it absolutely poured!!  Gotta love Pittsburgh weather.

Beauty Shoot

Today I had an "event" sort of thing that turned out really well!!  I'm quite proud of my organizing skills, actually.  My friend Jessica North is a hair stylist/MUA but due to health complications hasn't been able to do much recently.  To celebrate her recovery, we had a beauty day and some models came over.  She did hair and makeup and I photographed them.  It was really fun!!

First shoot of the day was with Alex.  I did her senior pictures last year, so it was fun to see her again and talk about how college going for her.  She brought her sister Kacie with her too, who was my helper in getting great smiles out of Alex.  Kacie also stepped in for a few cute sister pictures.  Jessica put Alex's hair in these beautiful soft curls and gave her bright red lipstick.  I think she ended up looking a bit like Sandy from Grease, when she gets the makeover.  It was great!

Second model of the day was Kelsey, one of my sister's friends.   I love Kels, she's an AMAZING model, despite the fact that she doesn't actually model much.  She's also a pretty cool kid, and works at the tattoo shop I got my camera half-sleeve at.  And where I need to go to get it finished.  Kelsey was, by the way, my vampire pin-up, which remains to this day one of my absolute favorite photoshoots ever.

Next was Olivia, another of Christy's friends.  I did her senior pictures, too, actually.  Liv is adorable, and can pull off the 80s look amazingly well, so we put her in a pink sweater I just finished knitting last night and Jessica gave her this poofy side pony-tail and bright eyeshadow to match the sweater.  The total effect was too cute.  At one point during her shoot, my punk rocker friend Adam wandered in to pick Kevin up for band practice and I made him pose with her for two quick frames.  He wasn't really sure what was going on, but it looked pretty sweet.

Last official shoot of the day was Kara, who is erich's DJ friend Trix (not my friend Trix)'s sister.  She messaged me on Model Mayhem awhile back, so I invited her to our event.  She has a super cool asymetrical haircut, so Jessica put the longer side in tight curls, slicked back the other side and spiked out the back.  It looked gorgeous.  She ended up holding Kaleigh's dog Mickey for a little bit and it turned out really cute.

Mickey also got his own little photoshoot, which was extremely difficult as he had no desire to stay on the background.  I managed to get a couple insanely adorable pictures of the little pokemon though.  http://www.serebii.net/pokedex-bw/506.shtml  <-- click this link.  I'm telling you, this dog looks JUST LIKE the pokemon Lillipup.  And yes, I'm 23 and still play Pokemon.  It is awesome.

Jessica left after Kara's session - she was exhausted after a long day!  I was tired too, but after taking a quick look through the day's images, got my energy back.  Trix (my friend, not Kara's brother) did makeup for herself as well as me and we had a dance party to Lady Gaga and Kesha and took pictures of each other.  It was was really silly and very fun, and we got IHOP after.  Definitely a good (and productive) day!  I am going to sleep well.

PS I'm super in love with this pic Trix took of me and my tiger rug with her iPhone (I WANT ONE!)

Bikini Bowling Promos

My family, as I've probably mentioned before, owns a bowling alley - Sheffield Lanes, in Aliquippa, PA.  It's summer, and business is slow, so Dad, being the, uh...interesting fellow that he is, decided what we need to make bowling in the summer attractive is bikinis.  And thus was born Bikini Bowling.  Our first one was 2 weeks ago and we haven't had too many people show up, sadly.  It's been 21+, 11pm on Friday nights, and the problem is that we've had a couple girls who are 19 or 20 interested in coming by but that whole 21+ thing...yeah, a problem.  So we're going to be doing it (still on Fridays) starting at 10pm and 18+ instead of 21+, so hopefully that will help.  Another idea to generate interest was promo pictures.

Today was my sister Christiana's high school graduation party.  You'll recognize her from pretty much everything I do.  She's my default model, and she's good.  Near the end of the grad party today, I set up my Alien Bee B800 (using the umbrella) and first my friend Nora posed as the test subject to get ideas for angles and compositions.

The last pic is Nora's brother Landon, who is hysterical and got in on the test shooting, as did some of the other party-goers such as Mike, who's in my summer bowling league.  I dig.  Anyway, I wanted Nora to be my Bikini Bowling model, but she said her body isn't currently bikini ready, which is ridiculous because she's totally gorgeous and, being Cuban, perpetually tan.  So Christy, Liv, and Kels were my models, which was cool, because it's always interesting shooting multiple people.  Olivia has done a little bit of modeling (plus I did her senior pictures), and Kelsey was recently a vampire for me.

I really liked the shot of Nora from above where she was throwing the beach ball up at me, but I wanted to get the bowling alley name in the promo images, so I ended up shooting from floor level.  Plus this kept there from being huge amounts of empty lane space, but still being able to see the pins.  I kept my light in the same spot (maybe 7 feet away from them, in height as well as floor distance and pointed downward, bouncing out of the reflective silver umbrella) but it was definitely more dramatic looking when I changed my vantage point so that the light was to my side instead of behind me.

This was one of my favorite shots, but of course I screwed it up and didn't get the Sheffield Lanes text in the original image.  I messed with combining other images with it in Photoshop for, oh, probably 45 minutes before getting the second version, which I'm still not entirely happy with, but is acceptable.  Lots of trying to get angles straight and not have heads from the other shot in the lanes.  It's going to get played with more later, I'm sure, though I may have to go shoot the alley without any models to have a blank canvas in case of any other alterations I might want to do.

We only shot for maybe 20 minutes because Kels had to go to her friend's house down the street to watch TrueBlood (a completely acceptable reason to leave, in my opinion) but Christy and Liv and I took a couple more images after.  I have 2 frames of my sister by herself, and she's super cute and happy-looking.  Awwww!

This shot of the two girls is definitely one of my favorites.  They manage to sip their drinks (cranberry juice for Christy and OJ for Liv) and still have great facial expressions.  Work those eyes!  As Tyra Banks would say, it's totally fierce.  I included both the LightRoom version and Photoshop edits to show what all I did in post.  Not much was done in LR, just some white balancing, exposure and a bit of my beloved clarity.  The detail work is in the Photoshop, especially seeing as the only beach ball we had was one a local "band" called guruguru and has their name all over it.  (I say "band" because they are "more art than music" - performance art, basically.)  I did some skin smoothing and toning, opened up some shadows, brought out their eyes and played with black and white versions as well as different saturations.  Definitely dig the color version, though the b&w is pretty cool too.  I'm happy with the way this last image especially turned out.  This is going on Facebook (and possibly Myspace, but who goes on Myspace nowadays?) and hopefully we'll have some Bikini Bowlers this Friday!!