Muscles and Shadows

Audi came back to town last week and gave me a call to see if she could take a look at some of the photos we shot in the studio in February. Of course, I was delighted to show them to her and to get her feedback as the model during the shoot. Since I was headed out for lunch that day anyway, we just met at a local coffee shop and we went through the images on my laptop.

In general, Audi liked all of the images and the theme. Of course, she had the occasional comments such as "I don't like my expression in that one," or "that pose makes my legs look too short." She was critiquing her own posing abilities and trying to learn more about herself from the shoot.

During the shoot, I was having trouble with the wireless synch trigger on my key light. For a while it was firing about only every other shot. I eventually fixed it by moving the trigger to the fill light and letting the key synch off the optical slave, but before I did that, there were a number of shots where the background and fill lights didn't fire and the image was exposed using only the key light (which was a large softbox). I kept them because I felt the looked very good and set a different tone and mood for the images. Audi felt the same way, because she picked several of these shots as her keepers.

As you can see from the posted images, the large key light kept the illumination soft, but also gave us some deep shadows while the angle of the light help to emphasize the muscles tone of the model's body. That's what Audi liked about the photos, and I have to agree that the lighting here adds more dimension to the model's body, if not to the entire image.

So, during my next shoot, I'm going to experiment more with the lights and go for a more moody look in some of the images as a deliberate action rather than as a serendipitous result of a lighting misfire.

I'll be shooting at least one session next week, so I'll have an upcoming opportunity to try this with a new model, Sivonna. She's a painter and art student so I'm sure she'll have some ideas on how to set the lighting and I'm looking forward to that collaborative photo session.