Golden Hour and Portraits

It’s no secret that the final minutes of light right before sunset are often the best moments to make photographs. You have to be swift and decisive because you don’t have a lot of time before the sun dips below the horizon, but if you have your scene set up and get you get a little bit lucky with your exposures, great things can happen.

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Photographed with a Sony A7c and Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lens.

When COVID was in full swing and everyone was being incredibly cautious about where we went and who we worked with I did quite a few photo sessions in my living room. I have west facing windows that tend to get very dramatic light in the final minutes of the day. Sometimes the light is just way too harsh to work with, but on this particular day it was perfect. Probably because it was the fall season when the light tends to be a bit more subdued, yet full of color.

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Extreme Light In The Studio

It’s been an incredibly hot and bright summer here in the Pacific Northwest. To spare myself, and the people I work with, the pain of dealing with extreme heat I’ve been booking work in local studios instead. This has been rather fun for me as I don’t work indoors all that often and exploring the slow pace and creative freedom of being indoors has been nice.

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Photographed with a Sony A7c and Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lens.

For this particular session I booked the studio at 8am thinking I should get some nice soft morning light to work with. I was quite wrong!! Despite the early morning hour the light was harsh, bright, hot, and incredibly intense coming in through the studio windows. So really I had no choice but to try and embrace it and use it to my creative advantage.

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Photographed with a Sony A7c and a Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lens.

I exposed a few rolls of film for this scene, but to cover my bases I also figured I would expose some frames with the digital camera. I haven’t developed the rolls of film yet but I do think these digital “test shots” came out pretty cool.

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Photographed with a Sony A7c and Zeiss 5mm f/1.8 lens.

There are times when I’m really impressed with the dynamic range digital cameras are capable of these days. Naturally I photographed these images in RAW format and brought up the shadow details just slightly in PhotoShop. They didn’t take much editing though which is good. Sitting on my laptop with PhotoShop opened up for hours on end is never going to be my thing.

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Fall Colors And Zeiss Lenses

It’s kind of a thing with people who own Zeiss lenses that one of their main selling points is the way they render bright colors. That fun little factoid comes to my mind when I look at this image.

Every so often when I make a digital photograph the image comes out perfectly right from the camera. No photoshop. No fancy color adjustments. No nothing. Just pop the image into photoshop, resize it for the internet, and there you go. This was one of those times.

The wind was blowing something fierce on this particular day and we couldn’t work for more than a minute or two at a time before the model felt like she was freezing from the cold. I have to give her a lot of credit. She stuck it out in short spurts for a couple of hours and we walked away with some rather glorious work. I was in particular happy with the opportunity to get the bright oranges and yellows of the fall foliage captured in an image.

I almost didn’t bring a digital camera with me for this session. Looking at the results I’m really glad I did.

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Zeiss Lenses and Fall Colors

One of the reasons I decided to go down the path of Sony cameras when I purchased a digital camera (for me that would be the Sony A7c) is the availability of Zeiss lenses. In the case of this particular image we are looking at an example from the Carl Zeiss 55mm f/1.8.

Anyone who is at all familiar with Zeiss lenses knows they are legendary for the way they render color. I think this image is a perfect example. It may be hard to believe, but this is straight from the camera with zero post processing or editing. Just a simple re-size from the full resolution image to something a little more web friendly and that is it. Simple as that! The way the colors just pop in the frame is blowing my mind a little bit. This honestly may be one of the few examples I’ve done with a digital medium where I’m anxious to make physical prints.

I was lucky to be able to get outdoors when all the gorgeous reds and oranges of the Pacific Northwest fall season. Not only is it cold but typically very windy as well - more or less the worst possible weather to be photographing nudes. Thankfully this particular day wasn’t too bad and the woman I was working with was a real trooper. We didn’t stay out for long, but we managed to make some great images in a short period of time.

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Into The Storm with the Sony A7c

It is officially feeling like summer is over. I honestly could not be more grateful.

I went out for a photo session over the weekend and it started to rain more than a little. It feels like it has been months since I felt any sort of significant amount of rain. Highly unusual for the Pacific Northwest and the moment I felt raindrops hit my face I realized how much I missed it. The model I was working with clearly felt the same way too. Typically if it starts raining during a photo session we both go running for the car. On this particular day we both wanted to stay and revel in the wet weather for a little while.

I was thankful I brought my Sony A7c with me. Trying to change out rolls of film when it’s raining pretty hard can be a dangerous proposition. I’m always paranoid about getting water on the glass inside the camera and with the digital I don’t have to open up the camera at all. Just wipe off the front of the lens every few shots and I’m good to go.

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