Outdoor shoot with Kristen Marie

It was a gorgeously sunny day on Thursday. Good thing, considering that that was the day Kristen and I had picked in advance to shoot outdoors at a place out in the Elma countryside. It had been raining heavily a few days before, and luckily the rains held up, the sun came out, and the muddy ground dried up again.

The location was a large grassy/wooded field area tucked behind the house of someone my mother has known for years. After gaining the permission to shoot on the property, I scoped it out for a little bit and sent some photos of it over to Kristen. She agreed it was the perfect spot, and so we locked that day into our calendars. Fortunately there was an outlet inside the garage that bordered the field in case we wanted to bring some extra lighting equipment, stereo (gotta have music!), etc.

We arrived just around 1pm the day of and our makeup artist, Jessica Jean, got right to work on creating the look Kristen had envisioned. In the meantime, I ran about 150 feet of extension cable out into the field along with a stereo and a simple Alien Bees B800/shoot-thru umbrella setup. After a few test shots, I decided to hold off on the strobe at the moment (we used it later on near the edge of the field/garage) and instead just relied on a large 40'x60' white/gold reflector for adding fill. The sun was still very high and so I thought taking advantage of the hard, crispy light would be fun to start off with.

After Jessica finished up with Kristen's makeup and hair, we got her out into the field next to an old gnarly-looking tree to start off. I metered the light (ISO 100, F13 at 125th/sec) and had Jessica bounce some light in to fill the shadows with both the white and gold sides of the reflector. After a few shots, I actually ended up climbing the tree (I got to be 12 years old again! Yay!) and shot down for a couple frames. Then it was off into the middle of the field for some more shots, followed by a little break from the sun. At this point I had also walked into a cloud of pollen, which left my throat closed up coupled with fits of sneezing. Getting older only seems to increase the body's allergies, sheesh! I don't remember signing up for that! Heh...





Getting back into the shoot (and after my throat finally stopped closing up from the clouds of pollen in the back field), we headed to the rear of the garage along with the strobe to get some dramatic lighting. I metered the ambient light again (ISO 100, F13 at 125th/sec), then stopped down to F19 to darken it a bit, then added in the strobe at the same reading to use as my key light. A little bit of reflector opposite the strobe helped to add a little extra fill as well. Kristen's CD that she burned was pumping out some pretty nostalgic tunes that I thought I'd never hear again (hah!) at this point, and so half the photos in this segment actually were of her laughing.



Our final setup was just to the side of the garage next to a large pile of branches below the canopy of a very large tree. I metered for the shaded area: ISO 100, F5.6 at 125th/sec. I set the strobe to flash in at F8 and positioned it directly in front of Kristen.




After all was said and done, we headed out in our separate directions and I got ready for a late afternoon of editing. We didn't take a large number of photos because we captured some really good shots right off the bat. The heat and pollen also kept us wanting to keep things short and sweet for the day as well (my throat was happy it wasn't constricting anymore after we exited the field).

All in all it was a really successful shoot, with some great imagery and some more great memories.

Hope you enjoyed this brief post. :)

Cheers,
JoeyB