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RAB's Tip Pad

~ Photographing History, Aviation and People

RAB's Tip Pad

Tag Archives: St. John’s

Getting the Most out of a Shoot

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by Rick A. Brown in Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Getting the Most out of a Shoot

Tags

bridge, lifestyle, Lightroom, Oregon, paddling, photo, photograph, photography, portrait, St. John's

The earlier shoot with a model and some planes at WAAAM, was a resounding success in all but one criteria. Thank you, Sami Van Der Westhuizen, Carrie Strahle, Ken Olsson, and WAAAM. That one criteria was the number of unique images brought home from the shoot. This was a result of the weather interfering with some of our planned shots, being late in arriving on location, and the lack of coming up with ideas myself. This blog post, I intend to tell you how I tried to improve on this last issue on a subsequent shoot.

Step one, and the best way to do it, is to plan many different looks while you are planning the logistics of the shoot. If you look at the gallery of the entire shoot, all of the images you don’t see in the slide show at the beginning of this article, were part of the plan from the beginning. This is the best way to plan multiple looks as you have time to consider them carefully, and not have your crew sit around bored while you think up stuff.

The other method is to be very observant while on location and use the surroundings and behavior of your model as inspiration for new ideas. The best example of that in this particular scenario is the images you see of Alex relaxing in her kayak. We took a break for me to think of new ideas and while I was thinking she used her kayak as a place to take a load off and relax. I thought it looked like a great shot, so stopped the break and started shooting.

Overall, I was ecstatic how this worked, the only thing I felt bad about was that some of the times I took a moment to think up some shots, I think I bored the crew a bit. The results are great though.

Take a look at the complete gallery of paddler at St. John’s Bridge, or my portrait portfolio.

Kayaker and St. John’s Bridge Shoot

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Rick A. Brown in Shooting

≈ Comments Off on Kayaker and St. John’s Bridge Shoot

Tags

kayak, Oregon, pdx, photo, photograph, photography, portrait, St. John's

Sorry I’ve been gone for a bit, some unexpected things came up just at the time I normally write my blog posts.

Several years ago, I photographed in the early morning at St. John’s Bridge in Portland and was blown away by its beauty; my favorite bridge in the Portland area, perhaps Oregon. One event that happened while I was there that unexpectedly made for some great photos, was a kayaker came paddling under the bridge. Since then, I had been trying to arrange for someone I know to do this in a situation where I could have the image fully released.

This turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than predicted. Sourcing a boat and finding someone willing and comfortable with what was required was quite challenging.

Well, fast forward several years later and I was in Portland photographing the skyline during blue hour and I ran into a photography student and she came up to me and started asking for some tips. (Can’t remember if I told her how challenging the business side is.) We exchanged cards and we both went on our merry way.

A week or two later, she calls me and tells me she has an extra credit project she needs to do, and asks if I could help. She says the idea she has is to photograph a friend of hers in her wedding dress, with some wild red boots, and we would be a bit reckless with the dress. So, we agreed to meet in the exact same location. The shoot was a bunch of fun.

I have since pretty much lost contact with the student, but the model has become a Facebook friend. Somehow, I had a feeling, she had some experience with paddling. Thus, one time when we were discussing shooting and saying we should do something like that again I brought up the kayak and St. John’s Bridge idea. Unfortunately, Oregon is experiencing a bit of a toxic algae problem right now, so we nixed the actual paddling part of the shoot, but still decided to shoot the portrait part of what I had in mind.

The kernel of the plan was to shoot the hero type shot that I’ve discussed here earlier. The one thing that’s changed is I am now doing the post processing with a little more nuance, having become well aware that high clarity doesn’t look so great with out of focus parts of an image. The other item though was that I wanted to really make the most out of this opportunity, since it took me so long to find it. So, I tried to come up with the widest range of images I could think of in the scenario we had placed ourselves. I am happy how that turned out.

I would like to thank Alex for her help with this.

Please take a closer look at these images, or my people portfolio, or portfolio of my heroic, people with vehicle photos.

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