Saturday, June 16, 2012

A Shoot in the Park

The British summer have yet to really start this year, but at least the temperature is starting to warm.  I made use of a break in weather this week and did a shoot with the beautiful Ema Sol.  She is originally from Slovakia.  I wanted to do a shoot in the park in late evening.

We met up in St James Park near Buckingham Palace for this shoot.  I decided to shoot with my 85mm f1.8 lens as wide open as possible while keeping my flash sync speed to 1/200s.  I was in luck as it was a cloudy evening and under the tree, I was able to shoot at f1.8 at 1/200s at ISO 100. This mean the images were over exposed by 0.5 stop and some highlight was blown out.  I had a polarizing filter with me in case I had to reduce the ambient light level, but did not use it.  When I saw the test image on the LCD, I was very happy with the results.  By shooting at f1.8, the bokeh was dream like and beautiful which complemented the slight over exposure.  I was traveling very light and I only took my camera body, flash trigger, 50mm f1.8, 85mm f1.8, a light stand and a Canon 540EZ flash with me.  I didn't even take any light modifier with me.  Ema needed the smallest amount of fill flash which I think was 1/64 power.

Ema was a delight to work with.  She arrived in immaculate make up and hair styled as agreed before hand.  She needed very little help with posing and I was very happy with the resulting images.  Here are a few of my favorite photos from this shoot.  I must use the 85mm f1.8 lens much more and wide open.