Finding Shade to Balance the Sun
Another summer recruit session! This one with Harmony Andrade who de-committed to Oregon State after the Pac-12 fallout. While the previous session had us in the weight room and I took advantage of some cool window light. This session was scheduled to be in one of the meeting rooms, then had a surprise "Hey - can we go up to University Club before we start and get some photos up there?" For those who don't know, University Club is the beautiful space on top of Memorial Stadium that has a view of the entire bay. But what non-photographers don't understand is 1) You have to use a pretty small aperture to capture the subject in focus and not have the view of the bay be lost to a shallow depth of field 2) If it's a beautiful sunny day - that also means you are either staring directly into the sun, or the sun is behind you. While our eyes might balance those different exposures. Cameras do not. Thankfully, in addition to the Elinchrom FIVE strobes I had set up, I had also packed an Elincrom ONE in my backpack. I would not have wanted to carry my Elinchrom FIVE and Octobox up the first two flight of stairs, or try to navigate through the narrow doors, and bare bulb FIVE would have been non-ideal! What I typically try to do is not necessarily have my lights overpower the sun, but rather put the subject in the shade, expose for the sky and have my light light the subject. This helps prevent the subject from squinting and if you use the right combination of lens and angle, no one will ever know!
That said, I am SO excited for my Elinchrom THREE to arrive, because for the image of the coaches and Harmony, I couldn't quite squeeze them all into the doorway, and having a slightly more powerful light to get closer to overpowering the sun would have been helpful. PhotoShop is an incredible tool, but my preference is still to get it out of camera.
After that we walked back into the studio set up and all I had to do was swap out the ONE for the FIVE on the lightstand and we are back in business!
Also, for this one, I brought the canon R5 and the OM-1. Once they said that we were going to take the photos up at University Club, I opted for the OM-1. So much of this is just my comfort level with the OM-1, which in some ways I want to push myself out of, but man the OM-1 is SO reliable! Check It I need to clean my sensor and/or lens - opening up to f/22 definitely showed some spots 🙈 Check In Has a client ever given you an impromptu request which you did NOT anticipate and didn't necessarily have the gear for? How creative did you have to get?
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