Adrienne

Adrienne, originally uploaded by austinspace.

With the weather getting better I'm not shooting in studio much, and I'm very happy about it. Mind you I like the control of studio lights, and the interesting light you can get on someone that would be hard to replicate outdoors, but nothing beats natural light.

Here we have the best of both worlds. We're in my studio, and Adrienne is looking out the window so natural light is flooding in on her. In many of my pix I up the saturation just a tiny bit to get the photo back to what I saw when I shot, but in this case I dialed it down to give it a different feel.

Adrienne is such a natural beauty that little other work needed to be done on this photo, except cropping it tightly so the Flickr police wouldn't flag it.

More Adrienne photos here.

Annie

Annie, originally uploaded by austinspace.

Annie asked me to photograph her with her boyfriend's guitars as she bought him a new one for his birthday (this one). Her idea was that she'd print out the photos, one of each of his guitars and he'd open up the photos, thinking the photos were his birthday gift! When he opened up the one with the new ax, she would present it to him from a side closet. I'm happy to say the surprise worked really well.

I was completely impressed with Ann's preparation for this shoot, our first except for a snap or two outside for a Mother's Day card the week before. She had researched online some photos of women and guitars to avoid cliche and get inspired, and we moved from setup to setup fluidly. Her roommate Cam helped enormously except when my cat George visited her, scaring her near to death.

The photos are shot with my Alien Bees 800s, though we're also using a theater light given to me by Sarha a few months ago. In this photo Cam's standing on a chair with it, and the Bees are basically used as fill. Annie's on our futon, and I've blackened the edges to even out the background.

We're planning our next shoot, which has to happen soon because she's graduating and soon she'll exit...forever.

(you'll notice her feet are chopped off in this view...the original on Flickr is the correct one. Seems Blogger's layouts don't allow for a complete photo so they arbitrarily cropped where they saw fit. At least it's not her head!)

Nicole

Nicole, originally uploaded by austinspace.

Nicole is a fellow photographer (Flickr: blush-response) and amazingly fun to photograph, which we've done twice now (here's her set on my Flickr stream) with great results. Here we're shooting at a small park on Spokane's south side that gets filled with wildflowers in May but we were a bit too early for that.

This shot was taken at the bottom of a huge rock/outcropping where we went to escape the wind. Whereas it was howling throughout the park, here we were protected by the rock and it was very peaceful there. Nothing special in processing here; nothing needed.

Alex

Alex, originally uploaded by austinspace.

Alex is a coworker who's dabbling in the modeling world. I helped her out by agreeing to a shoot at our most photogenic local park. Very little technical work needed for this shoot and postproduction is minimal. Alex is a natural and her athleticism makes for great definition in her poses (check out those calves!).

Amber

Amber, originally uploaded by austinspace.

Amber's standing in the freezing Spokane River in this photo (which was her idea, I must say in defense). This was a great shoot that started above the river at a local winery that has an amazing location and interesting features. The weather was perfect (finally!) and we got a number of cool shots. I chose this one because I really like the textures the branches creates, but there are a number of other pix from this shoot in Amber's set on Flickr that might be better.

Equipment-wise I don't have much to report except I'm happy I didn't use my flash at all during the entire shoot. That makes me extremely happy after a long winter of dark dreary days.

Stephanie

Stephanie, originally uploaded by austinspace.

Our endless winter does yield some different looks on campus and beyond. Stephanie is a student I've wanted to shoot with since last year and circumstances brought us together at a dance I was invited to shoot a couple of week ago.

What's cool is she obviously thought very carefully about what she wanted to wear, and where she wanted to shoot. We first shot here, on campus, in a grassy spot that's frozen over and now is melting so had a couple of inches of water covering it. I fired my flash above her head to get the light on her face, and using the 10-22mm wideangle lens forces the narrow view as you look down.

What we've shot so far is here. I hope we get another chance to shoot soon! She's fun to be around.

Shannon

Shannon, originally uploaded by austinspace.

More studio work. Shannon and I have shot together twice, once at Manito Park in the snow and once in my studio.

Simple lighting--one light above her and to her left.

The rest is all her. She's very expressive. More photos here.