If you go down to the woods today
You're sure of a big surprise . . .
On October 11, I went with Chris and Sarah into Settlers Cabin Park, not far from the Robinson Town Center in Moon Township, near Pittsburgh. I didn’t know much about the park, but I had looked at some photos and thought that it would be a good venue for late-afternoon shooting.
I was depending on the sun being visible, and relatively low in the sky. This makes landscapes much more interesting, though it can be challenging for portraits, as you can get mottling on faces (where the sun is coming through the leaves), or uneven exposures, with one person’s face in light, and the other’s in shadow. It helps to know the challenges in advance, and not to be smacking your head afterwards because you weren’t thinking when you shot.
I brought a couple of old cameras with lenses with me, so that we could pretend that they were taking photos of one another, of me, and of the surroundings. I also brought field glasses, again, to give something for the subjects to do besides look at one another and the camera. Accessories can be fun, and they free people up to play.
The sunlight behind the subject makes for some nice effects in women’s hair, though it can create the challenge of disruptive, specular highlights. (It’s amazing how the right tool in Lightroom can get rid of greenish skin tones from refracting light.)
We spent quite a while on the path down to the waterfall (which is one of the park’s attractions). The waterfall itself is modest — not a lot of water, and not falling from any great height — but it gives a nice balancing center of interest. The water has carved out the sedimentary rock nearby, and that provided a dark, organic background for some shots.
I brought my Lensbaby Spark lens. This is a variable-focus lens: you have to use two fingers at the front of the lens to press it back on one side or the other to get the focus there, and to let the rest of the image be blurred. It is really effective in black & white, or black & white with toning, but it works in color as well, as you can see from my shot of a cast-net fisherman in Surfside Beach, South Carolina.
I had some ideas of alternating the focus between Chris and Sarah. Our camera-phones and cameras produce great, reproducible images, but funky lenses like the Spark make for a one-of-a-kind image that couldn’t be duplicated exactly, even using the same lens for a second shot. You never know exactly what you’ll get, which generates some excitement, at least for the photographer. Chris came down one side of the path, and I caught him in sharp focus, while Sarah was obscured on the other. Maybe that’s a failed experiment, but it’s an interesting failed experiment.
I also thought of alternating the focus on each of them as they gradually approached each other, finally going nose-to-nose. Going nose-to-nose (rather than kissing) often makes the couple start to laugh, and you can get great images as they break away from the pose.
I encourage clients to think of things that they would like to do, and Sarah had a fun idea: as she was standing on a rock behind Chris she draped her hair over his head. It had us all laughing, and I fired away.
I went down to the woods today, and I was surprised!
Establishing a rapport is essential to good portrait photography, in which the client is clearly engaged with the camera and enjoying the experience. (With models in the studio, you can go for other “looks,” but for personal photos, most people want to look relaxed and happy.) Creating that rapport takes time, but it’s worth it. From my experience, Chris’s, and especially Sarah’s, “look” in the later photos would not have been possible in a 20-minute shoot.
At the end of the session, I had an idea: I would pose them as the “power couple”: feet apart, arms crossed in front of them, shot from a lower angle. Here’s the closest we got to posing experiments.
“And that’s final!“