Rachelle at a Crombie McNeill Workshop at Balderson

Rachelle's shoot followed Charlotte's for me, and was fairly similar. Rachelle wore a low cut black dress and heels, although I did not shoot anything with the heels. But my shooting partner that day (Barry) might have shot her full body, so she was forced to suffer a bit longer in shoes she clearly hated.

Meanwhile, I was having fun exploring the potential of added light ... hard light in this case since I did not have stands and umbrellas with me. There was no room anyway ... I have the flashes sitting on the floor much of the time, sometimes on a handy shelf, and for a while strapped to a shovel handle with a ball bungy.

Ball bungies are amazingly useful little tools ... I have 4, but Amazon.com sells 25 of them for 10 bucks. Here's a little tutorial on them.

Back to Rachelle ... we started in a little used corner with really dim light. We tried vareious lights on her and I started blasting away with the SB600 and SB800 with the D300 commanding them with its built in flash. If you have not tried this trick, go for it. Off board flash looks so much better, as it sculpts the face and body beautifully ... direct flash always flattens images and removes tone.

A note on brain farts. I shot all of these images at 2000 ISO ... this is a rather noisy level in this kind of light ... so much shadow etc. I pulled the images up and performed my new high contrast dreamy processing on them. I like the effect and it suits this shoot. I vascillate between color and black and white ... for the first image, I chose to stay in color.


I then switched for image 2, which was shot by the window for some reason. This one was really tough, as the light did not catch the eyes ... but I really like the pose so I thought I should stay with it. It was also a severe underexposure, so I threw a ton of extra noise into it.


We went back to the corner and I blasted some flash into her face, this created a decent effect which I chose to process in black and white again.


I had her try several poses where whe stretched her arms in the doorway in all sortf of directions. Most did not work, but a few turned out ok.

For this one, I kept the tones more intact. I wanted to retain more of the room's ambience, since the pose is more of an in situ thing.


Later, we had her in the doorway with her arms clasped behind her head ... a few of those turned out.


It is amazing the difference that elbow angle and eye direction can make. From an image that interests no one to a visceral reaction. Not saying any of these are the latter by the way ...

And one final image of Rachelle, which I chose to leave in color.


Rachelle has the nicest eye lashes I have yet seen. Huge and very dark. They look amazing on film. I really like these diamond shaped earrings as well ... they add a touch of elegance that is dissonant with the ugly building :-)