Environmental Portraiture, Second part.

Going to locations that a client likes makes for great portraits and can be a great amount of fun.  The downside, (there's almost always a downside) you have to travel and carry your stuff somehow.  I suppose the downside of an actual studio would be rent, an electric bill, insurance on the place and having to have regular hours to be open where you have to physically be there.

In this shoot, Erica Lucero's dad took us to the ruins of Abo, New Mexico.  It was a bit of a drive, but Erica's dad was my old First Sergeant from my Army days so I didn't mind.  This shoot was more of a favor to him and was very pleasant.

There are a lot of old buildings around so we did a series of photo's around them.  They fit her "cowgirl" image quite well.  I used natural lighting and a single, off camera flash for a little fill light.





Everywhere in the ruins were interesting backgrounds and we used as many as we could find.





I was on to something new when I did these and wanted to incorporate one photo for me as much as for her.  It's a technique called Multiplicity and it's done by taking several photos and layering them in a photo processing program.



This was her favorite photo and is the one her dad printed, framed and has sitting on his desk.

I put a camera on a tripod and used a remote to trigger it.  I locked the focus to manual so I'd get the same depth of field in all the shots.  Erica simply moved in the set and I took a frame at each position then layered them and erased parts of each layer exposing her in all the positions (I'll probably make a video of how this is done some time in the future.)  This was very popular with her teenage friends and landed me several more shoots.