A venture

A venture

Two years ago, I bought a new car, and one of the less-obvious benefits was a voucher for a portrait session at a local studio – I won’t name it because I’m sure many other businesses do the same thing equally competently. Covid delayed matters somewhat so that it wasn’t until this February that pictures were taken.

We went as a family – along with Mrs D (who hates having her picture taken) we had our children, our son’s wife, and Della, our 5-month granddaughter. A novel experience for all of us, with the formality of a large professional studio, and a hard-working photographer who shifted an amazing number of ideas in just over an hour.

We had a bit of a photographic theme to the day – all of us but Mrs D are, to a greater or lesser extent, photographers. What I hadn’t realised was that this might intimidate our photographer – she was in awe of my Exakta VX. But we all had fun photographer included.

It made me very much aware of how much energy a professional has to put into shooting. She was the power source for the whole session, with a number of excellent ideas for setups and poses that kept things moving along.

Technically, she used two or three lighting setups that were obviously tried and tested: and it was notable that she checked exposure with an incident meter after every change of lighting. She used a crop-frame Nikon with a zoom lens – 24mp is clearly enough under studio flash.

Both Emma (daughter-in-law) and I were surprised at how close she placed the lights, and sometimes how close she shot from: none of my own 85mm standoffishness! This was clearly a positive choice, as the studio would have allowed three times the separation.

For some shots, she used a honeycombed reflector on a flash unit pointed at the wall behind the subject – for a few frames, with a purple gel on it. Gels are much easier to handle, I realised, when you have lights that use LED modelling lamps (tungsten lamps run hot, and melt gels).

She talked and asked questions constantly – getting people to respond, to move, to interact. Whenever we just stood there, she intervened and restarted the momentum.

We have yet to view the results: I may well write more in a blog then.