My first studio shoot. ever.

So in Jan 2010, I heard about this studio where this model was coming and three photographers could shoot her, by shelling out a little dough. As I had absolutely no studio shooting experience, I wanted to use this opportunity to use studio lighting and shoot a real model.

Me and the other two photographers shot her turn by turn. Absolutely intimidated by all the lights and the pretty model in front of me, I had no clue on how to make her pose. I just told her to pose however she wanted. At the same time, I had no clue about what to do with the lighting. I had no idea on what lighting was good or bad. I just went by my gut feel and changed the power of the strobes whenever I changed by aperture. I had no clue what I wanted or how I wanted things. Reminded me of my cooking experiments! (read BAD!).

I hate the way cheap/badly wrinkled studio backdrops look like. I dislike studio backdrops in general. The backdrops – be it pure black or pure white or pure grey or gradiented (yeah you heard it here first) – just don’t look appealing to me. I prefer outdoor/on location shoots any day, atleast until the time when I am writing this post. Add to it, the backdrops here were extremely wrinkled and… ugh. Forget it.

Anyway, the other photographers knew that I was a first timer and they were pretty encouraging. I did some shooting and got SOME decent photos at least. I got one keeper – but only after cropping it and cross-processing it.

The most important lesson I learned that day was about HSS – High Sync Speed. With all the intimidation I was already facing, I noticed that when I was changing the shutter speed/aperture, parts of the photo had some sort of weird black banding. I just couldn’t figure it out. Sometimes it came, the other times it didn’t. After the shoot was complete, when I asked the organizer of the shoot what the heck was going on, he explained to me about HSS and it turned out that my camera can shoot at 1/200 sec only without the banding creeping in. (I bought a Canon 430EX II flash recently and just learned about the HSS mode in the flash and that I can effectively shoot at even 1/1000 sec if there is no/low ambient lighting). Below is a photo with the banding I was talking about. In spite of the banding, I still like the photo for some reason.

Few of the other snaps: