We definitely changed things up a bit with last week’s Product Notification pictures at lululemon. We got away from our usual fitness inspired poses and played around with a more fashion portrait feel. I ended up being in some of the pictures while someone else used my camera. It was fun to model a bit. 🙂 This image isn’t one we used but it cracks me up because Maddy was just having fun hamming it up for the camera so I kept taking pictures. I love how she did the ’60s pin-up girl hand over the mouth pose with only a slight suggestion from me. 😀
For this week’s images, I wanted to do something to make the boring midday sky look more interesting so I used a special flash technique that I love using when taking ski and snowboard photos. You start by making the grey/daylight sky ultra blue by setting your camera white balance to tungsten. To get some deep colors in the sky, I also had to underexpose (darken) the sky. When you darken the sky, your subject gets dark as well so you need to supplement the light somehow. The way I did this was to use a speedlight flash set up to overexpose the subject, thus balancing her with the sky. The other important step is to put an orange ‘gel’ over the speedlight to make it the color of tungsten light. By doing this, the light that falls on the subject is the proper color while the sky remains the cool blue color.
This first image shows what the sky looked like without using the technique I just described.
The following two images show the flash technique in use.
When we went back into the store, I had Laura stand in front of this mirror for a minute so I could get this shot.
