Michael Whitehurst Photography Michael Whitehurst Photography

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July 27th, 2018

Photo shoot with Jessie: 5 looks in 3 hours

I had the opportunity to shoot the forever amazing Jessie recently.  She is in the process of building 2 new businesses and needed several different looks for her websites and social media. 

To make sure we would have the room we would need I rented a studio space at FD Studios.  This was my first time renting with them and it was great.  The studio was clean and everything worked!  My only wish was that the space was air conditioned since that day was a scorcher, but we managed to wrap by 11:30am so it was tolerable.  

The first set-up was a basic clam-shell lighting with a giant round soft box above as the main light and a silver reflector below.  I also added a second light behind Jessie to hit her hair and create better separation between her and the background.  The scene looked like this:

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And here are some final images from that setup.  

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Next I decided to warm up the background so I added a couple of speedlights with CTO gels on them.  One of the speedlights is hiding behind a v-flat because it was throwing too much light on Jessie, and I failed to bring any black foam core to flag it with.  Here is the set-up:

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And a couple of final images from this one.  

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Jessie was keen to get some full-body shots so for the final set-up I built a huge scrim that was 5 feet wide and 8 feet tall and lit it with a bare strobe from behind.  I used the bug umbrella as a fill light, and left the hair light in place.  The set looked like so:

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And some final images from this configuration.  As you can see I moved in for some closer shots as well as back for full body.  

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After all the business shots were done we had some fun with this floral jumpsuit and gigantic hat.  These were my favorite shots from the session.  

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All in all it was a good day of shooting!