Graffiti Background

There is a really cool looking brick wall of graffiti not far from our house that we discovered quite a few months ago. We have had our eye on it ever since and planned to get up early on a Sunday morning at around sunrise when the streets are nice and quiet. So, this morning, we crawled out of bed at 6am and headed there to see what we could do with it! Since we discovered the wall, the artwork has changed a few times and at present, the entire wall is one big mural. As you can see from the included setup shot, there is a creepy looking character in the middle but some great colourful art that works nicely as a background to the right and at the bottom centre.

My biggest issue with portraiture at the moment is posing the subject. I realised I have been limiting myself to mostly to head and shoulders or tighter crops because I have absolutely no idea what to do with arms and legs! I hunted around for a while for a decent book on posing but no-one seemed to be able to recommend anything decent. The best recommendation I received was to grab a few magazines and start ripping out things you like. Keep them in a folder and replace them as you find better ones. So that's exactly what I did. I finally started paying attention to what looked good and why and also what I liked and didn't like. Some poses I have come across even in high quality magazines look awkward and uncomfortable but there are some great ones to be found.
Admittedly, my wife turned out to be quite the little poser all on her own but I felt that I was able to suggest ideas and alter the poses that she pulled out so that they looked more pleasing from behind the camera. This is obviously something that is going to take a great massive amount of practice, not just a few attempts but I've made a start.

Some poses we thought would look good looked terrible, terribly awful or terribly cheesy, take your pick. But some just looked cool. It's a great credit to me that we are so comfortable together though, as I think it would be a lot more difficult with a stranger, but that's something I'm going to have to work on. Getting comfortable with the subject and getting them comfortable with you and the camera.

The lighting setup here involved two lights. Both on light stands (actually one was on my tripod as I need another bracket to mount my second strobe onto a stand.) To camera left, there is an SB900 fired through a shoot through umbrella, and to camera right there is a bare SB800 fired back towards her and spread across the wall.
The basic setup was the same for all of the shots that I took, I just varied the lighting distance for some of the different poses.
For the first shot up top, the umbrella is in nice and close, about a meter (3-4 feet) from Siobhan. The closer that you can get it in the softer the light will look. The bare flash was also moved in closer.
In the second shot, the umbrella is positioned about 2 metres (6 or 7 feet) away from her, slightly higher than her head and angled down at her face. This distance allowed the light to cover a good amount of her body but it is still relatively soft as you can see from the shots. The bare flash at camera right is at about head height, zoomed to 105mm for the tightest beam it could achieve.
Thinking back, I could have swapped the two flashes over and use the SB900 as the bare flash as it is capable of producing a much narrower beam but I am very happy with the results I achieved regardless.

In Photoshop, I did quite a bit more work than in the previous post. I used the dodge tool to bring up her face just a tad and her jeans and boots to a level that I was happy with. I also added a vignette to my four favourite shots from the series to center the viewers attention as the background, although cool, is extremely busy.

Thanks for reading my blog and I really hope you enjoyed it!
I am very much looking forward to hearing some feedback.

Until next time,

Benen