As the cold weather settles back in over Northeast Ohio I begrudgingly find myself accepting the fact that I will almost exclusively be shooting in studio again for the next few months. It’s not that I don’t like working in the studio, but given the choice I think working outside or on location is always better… at least for my style of photography. That being said, I try to use the winter months in the studio as a way of testing new light and pushing outside of my norms. Here I’m going to cover a few images from this past weekend with Leanne Fabian of Heyman Talent.

Like many of my studio images these were taken on a two sided white cyc wall with a corner cove. I wanted to find a way to mix up my lighting a bit and add some interest to the plain white background that often bores me in studio work. Inspired by a few different photographers on Behance lately, I ended up testing out a new lighting set up using a window-like gobo built out of an empty flag frame that has pieces of gaff tape stretched across in the patter of a 9 pane window - a nifty trick I recently learned from a lightning grip on one of my video shoots that allows you much more control over shadow placement than if you were to use a real window frame - simply moving the tape around gives you the ultimate flexibility. Below you can see a diagram of the set up - basically one Einstein 640 with a reflector through the gobo as the key and a second Einstein 640 in an octabox above right for fill. A simple two light set up, but relatively effective. As my model stated when she saw the images on the back of the camera, “it kind of looks like 90’s fashion.” I’ll take that.

Finally, I figured I would toss some before and after Gif’s onto the bottom of this post to demonstrate a little of what goes into my post production workflow - something I’ve never really shared too much of before. I try to keep things very realistic when I’m retouching and stay true to the model. Here you can see some things that are consistent across most of my images - highly detailed skin retouching, adding contour and shaping light with some burning and dodging techniques and finally color grading the overall image. I work in very small increments and build my style slowly layer by layer, the aim being an improved image that looks high end but not like a completely different person. My process on retouching changes a lot and is pretty fluid as I learn different techniques, but this is a good look at a relatively simple retouch for me. 

Thanks for taking the time to read, and hopefully you find this information useful and/or interesting. If you have thoughts, comments or feedback on these images or my processes please feel free to shoot me an email. Thanks, and enjoy. 

I apparently fell way behind on my monthly Charlie posts. I did take and finish photos from each month though, so now I will treat you to one big Charlie super-post covering months 5, 6 and 7. Since my last update, Charlie a whole new person - sitting up, chatting away, army crawling like a boss (real crawling a few steps at a time) and even eating some solid foods (so far sweet potato’s seem to be a favorite). 

Now enjoy our seasonably themed photoshoots - “Back to School” - “Go Browns” (sorry kid, you can pick a real team when you grow up) - and of course -“Halloween - the Char-lion”. 

And as a bonus, I figured I’d throw in a family photo or two as well what we took the day of our halloween Char-lion shoot. Enjoy.

Sunday marked 4 months for Charlie, and we celebrated by shooting her 4 month photos on the beach. This babe loves spending time outside and looked like a natural soaking up the rays. 

This month Charlie is back to enjoying her baths, has mastered not only the front-to-back roll but also the back-to-front and she still tries constantly to sit herself up from the lying position. She’s an extremely smiley girl with lots of laughs and she loves to tell stories. Her new favorite tunes are The Itsy-Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle.  

And in case anyone was wondering what these shoots really look like - it’s not all fun and games. Despite the adorable photos I usually post, this is the look Charlie’s usually throwing me during her photo shoots. Her Diva game is strong. Enjoy.