This past Sunday I had the chance to do my first Beauty/Portrait photo shoot with Terry as a Make Up Artist, whom I can say is quite talented. Since she is just getting started in the “online world”, the goal of this shoot was to create a set of portfolio photos to showcase Terry’s make-up skills and my photographic skills. And of course to make three beautiful girls look even more beautiful in the photos.
Before the shoot, I needed to think it through – location, gear, lights, background. After the break you’ll find more details.
one of my favorite pictures of the day
Location: Initially, I wanted to have this photoshoot outdoors, but there were some issues – it was a bit windy and cold, and logistically it would’ve been a mess. We decided to transform a living room into a makeshift studio – I used an Impact Background support system with a 10′x12′ white muslin as a backdrop.
Lights and lighting: Since this was a beauty photo shoot, I couldn’t rely on natural light. In the absence of studio lights, the obvious choice was to use speedlites – 3xCanon 580ex IIs and 1xCanon 430ex II. Two of the 580s were used as main lights, on lightstands with 45″ convertible umbrellas, used as reflectors in the beginning and shoot-through later on. The 3rd 580 and the 430 were used to light the background and overexpose it a bit. The triggering system was the built-in flash commander of the 7D and CyberSyncs as backup.
Gear: For gear, the choice became quite clear and simple – Canon 7D as main camera (with the 40D as a backup), Canon 17-55 2.8 IS as main lens, but I also had the 85mm 1.8 and 135mm 2.8 with me. After arriving at location, it was clear I would be using only the 17-55, because I needed to put the model a few feet away from the background to prevent unwanted light spill, and I was running out of room behind me. I ended shooting most of the time with my back to the wall anyway 
I started with the flashes on e-TTL, and the umbrellas set up as reflectors, but that didn’t work too well, maybe because I couldn’t really anticipate how the flashes will fire, so I turned the umbrellas into shoot-through and went into full manual mode. I went for flat lighting, one umbrella camera left and one umbrella camera right, same power for the main flashes (one quarter) and one half for the background lights. The shutter speed varied between 1/160 and 1/250, while aperture was between f/5 and f/8. The distance between models and lights varied a bit, so I had to adjust. ISO speed was at 100 all the time, to have the least amount of noise in the pictures. You can see the lights set up in the catch-lights in the eyes.
As you all know, shutter speed controls the level of ambient light, and the aperture controls the level of flash light. In some pics, as the one below, I turned off the background lights, so the background would turn grey, and I used a shutter speed of 1/25o. The space was too tight, so light from the main lights still spilled a bit on the background. (we also used a fan – “the eyeball drier” – to get the hair moving a bit)
I was very fortunate to have such beautiful models and such good make up – the retouching was a breeze, just clean up the background, small blemishes and the rebel strains of hair – no need for liquify filter or major adjustments.
For post-processing I used DxO v6, which I believe is one of the best RAW converters out there (oh, yeah, I’ve shot RAW only ), and DxO did a very good job fixing up the lens distortion for wide angle (the pic below was shot at 17mm – 24mm in FF) and also keeping the skin tones natural despite the small adjustments in vibrancy and saturation.
I have a few thanks to give – to Heath for lending me an extra 580ex II, to Terry, Betty and Christina for being such great models (not to mention they were crazy funny, we had a great deal of laughs during the photo session). Terry is a very good make up artist, as you can see in the photos – go and fan her on Facebook.
As a conclusion to the shoot, I can say that I love the 7D – whoever says it’s not sharp enough has no clue what they are talking about, I love the 17-55, which is one of the best lenses in the Canon lineup – too bad it’s not an L lens, doesn’t have any weather sealing, and it’s prone of gathering dust inside it, but otherwise it’s at least as good as the 24-70, if not better in almost all aspects. As I mentioned before, there were some slight issues – using the built-in flash commander extensively can lead to a “busy” message on the camera display, as the flash gets too warm and goes into protection mode, but i was ready for that – I had a set of CyberSyncs – 1 x CST and 2 x CSRB, and i will need maybe 2 more CSRBs. In the future I need to start thinking of getting at least 1 studio flash, like an Alien Bess AB800 or similar, and some softboxes. I could use the AB800 as main light, and the 580s as fill/background lights.
Here are some more photos, showing how crazy these girls are …
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