I never have been real big with working with models as subjects but ever since I started in Aviation the need arose to get better. It’s a common thread in photography to evolve or parish, thus is the same with life. At Bonnie Springs we had four great models, two cowboys and two saloon girls. The Marshall had his town well under control.
Melissa was one of our best models at the shoot. In my mind the saloon girls both had a unique side to them as far as where their background came from. Melissa seemed more like the east coast girl that just came out west, while Charmane (below) had already been out west for some time and had a harder life. With Melissa’s fair tone soft light was key. Here it was a diffuser on top to block out the hot spots from the sun and a gold trigrip below bouncing light back in.
Charmane was a lot simpler to light. She was on a covered porch that acted as our diffuser. With no hard light behind her the background faded away. The only light source that was desired was a simple gold reflector trigrip bouncing more light into here face and hair. The big trick with each of these two was feathering the light on them instead of full beam from the trigrip. It takes a little practice and is far easier with two people then just one.
The Marshall was the exact opposite of the saloon girls. Edgy, gritty and rough was exactly the looked needed to make the marshal seem like he has seen it all. Getting the desired affect here was real easy, a gold reflector on this backlit subject made him pop out and the background stay dark. All really simple tricks that can yield to some nice results. It’s fun to play with these things.
In the Camera Bag:
Nikon D3, 70-200 VRII, Trigrip Diffuser, Trigrip Reflector on Lexar UDMA Digital Film