The other day my friend Brian of BCr8ive asked me to pass through to a shoot he was having with the beautiful Surinamese model, Christa. I also go to meet the talented Shawn Fields. The concept for this shoot revolved around Christa looking badass riding a motorbike. We even used my sword for some shots 
I was also encouraged to take some photos of my own if I wanted.
After waiting for the motorcycles to show up and watching Brian fall off his skate board hard, we set up and got to work. Brian’s equipment includes a Canon 5d Mk ii, 2 Alien Bees strobes, an octobox, and assorted other light modifiers and stuff. The wind was high and one of the strobes fell over but it was good. The sun was also coming up fast but the lights helped him out a lot with that. *My* personal problem was that since I didn’t have the same kind of transceivers as Brian and Shawn, I didn’t have the benefit of the lighting setup unless I asked to use one of theirs which kinda sucked.
This was definitely a challenge and it reminded me of when I first started out with just a camera and nothing else. At the mercy of the sun’s unpredictable light. However, I think I did OK under the circumstances and I got a few shots that I kinda like. Shawn later sold me 2 of his transceivers (Pocket Wizard Plus II yay!) so I should be good next time Brian invites me out.
Every time I go out to a photo shoot, whether I’m the photographer or not, I learn something new. This time around, I learned that attention to detail helps a lot both on location and during post production. In some of my shots, the sunlight was reflected off of the motorcycle’s mirrors on to the model. Although this wasn’t a big problem for the others, my lack of a powerful strobe to balance the light meant that parts of the model were too bright. It took me way too long to correct this in Photoshop and this could have been easily solved by covering the mirrors with a piece of paper or cloth.
Well you know what they say about hindsight and it being 20/20 and so on. At least I learned a bit more about editing using both Lightroom and Photoshop! I even took the time to experiment with the way I edit but that might be the topic of another post.
