Gift Voucher...she owned us for 2 hours

One of my clients gave her friend a gift voucher for her birthday and her friend said it was the best thing that they have done in ages.We set up several different lighting situations to create different looks.
Below Im using a gridded Beauty dish and a gridded spot to get seperation for the dark hair.The beauty dish is one of my favourites especially if the client has good skin.Jo Nelson our hair and make up artist is a magician with her craft.
Here in the images below you can see how I light with a 80x120cm softbox to get fantastic smooth transition from the highlights to the almost non existent shadows.I sit the subject behind the softbox and feather the light using the bounce from the inside of the box..I have a stylofoan sheet reflector camera right. I'm shooting a D300 Nikon using a pocket wizard to fire the 3 lights.I am using a black paper background.Paper backgrounds are fantastic, once you use them you wont want to use anything else.I CRINGE with those mottled green thundercloud bedspreads you see some people standing in front of.....We used a brown one for a while it was good with the skin tones but most clothing looked wrong against it.....personal choice.

There is a flurry of activity at times around the subject, her you can see maree almost losing it ...Why? I just tripped over a light stand !!As I always say sandbags are essential, especially around me !!

Here is a series on the white seamless.The shot far left is straight out of the camera.Maree is helping our Marilyn/Stefani look a like with the aid of the wind machine. The subject is wearing 3 meters of Spotlights finest red and several bull dog clips to keep it in place.The white background is a favourite of ours, the images pop.The image on the far right demonstrates the change in this portrait by adding a black matt.

The white seamless will go with any colour and so long as the ratios of the lights are right you can get great edge definition even white on white.You may not be able to see in this very low res image but the bubbles the subject is blowing are perfectly visible in the high res shots.I shoot in RAW and send tiff files off to photo lab. Did you know that some machines will automatically add contrast if your printing jpegs? The machine reads it as an image from a point and shoot camera which are usually "muddy" in the tonal range and automatically adds contrast.SO, if your editing your images and with your curser roll over your whites and they are reading 245 in the INFO box in photoshop ( 255 is paper white) and when you get them printed they are blown out...try saving your files as tiffs and give them to your lab...Oh year, my files are 20mg plus...so its all allot slower.. David at Pro Am on Brunker road is a wealth of information, he is an X commercial photographer and photographic tafe teacher.

Here are a few fun shots ( the finished images are cleaner than these).Many of our younger clients prefer images in mono rather than colour, if you have the right look in the images they can work well in either format

POST SCRIPT: I have just posted the proof galleries for the TEMPLE GOLD CARPET FASHION SHOW at Club Panthers last Sunday.Behind the scenes images will be blogged soon.

You can see these proofs in the NEWS section at www.ricwoods.com . Christie Belic and husband Garth from Temple Hairdressing at the Junction 02 4961 2277, did a great job on this event for 1st timers...cant wait to see the next one in 2010 !