Natural Light Portrait

You can do a lot in just a few minutes, especially if you and your subject have worked together before.

Most of my “planned” photo shoots are one to two hours in length, but some spontaneous shoots are just a few minutes long.  I usually have a camera with me and I am often asked to do something on the spur of the moment.

This photo shoot (according to the metadata) began at 1:01:11 pm and ended at 1:10:22 pm, just a little over 9 minutes. We used three locations (a bridge, a tree, and a bench in a park that were close to each other) and several different poses for a total of 36 images. I used fill flash for some of the images, but not for this one. This was the next to the last photo and one of my favorites.

Our families are friends and I have been doing portraits of this young lady for eleven years.  She has become at ease in front of the camera and she is used to the way I work. Without saying a word, if I tilt my had a certain way, she knows that is a cue to do the same. It makes for a quick, smooth flowing shoot. Sometimes a short shoot is as good as a long one. As her younger sisters have come along I have been doing portraits of them too.

An aperture of f/7.1 gave me enough depth of field for the features of her face. In the relatively low light levels I used an ISO of 800 to give me a reasonably fast shutter speed for the breezy conditions.

The mixed lighting in open shade created some color balance issues. I spent more time in post processing with Adobe Camera RAW and Adobe Photoshop than I did on the photo shoot itself.

Photo Data: Canon 5D Mark III. Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L lens at 60mm. 1/200,  f/7.1,  ISO 800.

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