Hair shoot with Priya Chandra

Priya Chandra is a talented hair stylist that I've worked with her in a few photoshoot before. I especially love the shoot with her in CIT studio: http://lamtrancit.blogspot.com/2010/03/hair-shoot.html

This time she asked me to help her with her hair competition (again, another competition). I always love to do beauty and hair shoot so I worked it out with her.
We did a on-location shoot with 2 models, Ronise and Eden. We came to a large graffiti wall in Civic to do some of our first shots over there. But after tried with a few shots, I didn't really like that wall anymore so I asked them move to .... another wall.
This wall has some shadows on it, created by the sunlight went through the leaves so it might has the same effect with "cookies" or "gobo". Grab my chance, I quickly setup my flashes to shoot in front of this wall before the sun could be lower. And here is the lighting scheme:

I tried to make a nice sketch but I forgot to bring my Wacom tablet with me so I used the touch pad on my laptop to draw this haha it looks really bad but as long as everyone can get the idea about how I setup my flashes so it will be fine.
But here the explanation in words:
• SB-25 behind model left, shoot thru a grid.
• 580EX model right, bounce to a large white pillar over there (40cm each side I think)
So the main light was the sunlight coming directly on model face but diffused by the tree leaves above. The 580EX did its duty to be a fill light. The SB-25 did its duty to slightly add a little bit rim light. And the sun, once again, excellent in its duty, created interesting shadow on the background. With focal lengths around 180mm ~ 200mm and aperture at f/6.3 ~ f/7.1, I could make the shadow on the wall turn to be blurry.

So the result look like this:

Model: Eden (above) and Ronise (below)
Hair by Priya Chandra
Make-up by Kylie Bersinic


Bonus:
Large size of Eden's photo, I really like how excellent Kylie did with the makeup:

 (click here for 3810 x 5716: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3335/4601369688_558196499b_o.jpg)

Sam Rooney - Cricket Player

This shoot was for my assignment at school. We supposed to shoot a single portrait of a model to make it look like a magazine editorial. Most of other classmates try female model and do fashion. But I've done female models already in Group Portrait assignment (post will coming soon) so this time I decided to shoot a male model. And I ask Sam (he's boyfriend of Elizabeth Payne in the Ferrari shoot) to help me out with this assignment. And actually, Sam has been played cricket professional for a while so I decided to use that theme.

Here is the lighting setup:

Because I wanted to create a better wrap-around-highlight on Sam so I used 1 large square softbox on a boom and put it high above and on axis with the camera. I added 1 stripbox on camera left to add some more harsh rim light on Sam.
Please notice that we're not allowed to use flash for this assignment so all the lighting I used was only from modeling lamps. So basically, I shoot around f/4, ISO 400 and shutter speed 1/60th

And the results are:

For image processing, I only applied a little Burn and Dodge technique on this photo. Remember that the original photo should already have contrast in highlight and shadow to get more efficiency for this technique.




Next entry will be hair shoot for Priya Chandra, hair stylist: