Nothing beats taking professional photos of your friends!
~ Arboretum Tropical Greenhouse | Ottawa, Ontario ~
https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5d5eHK6qAEeFcps63FKCJZ3M8hfP3ubWqbCTqCayFBp
Most of my photo shoots are often done with strangers who get in contact with me through my website, however, every once in a while I have the pleasure of going out and taking photos of my friends.
On this occasion, my girlfriend Danielle and her house-mates asked me to do a group photo-shoot to celebrate the year which they had spent living together. For the location, we chose a little greenhouse in Ottawa which I loved because of the colorful plants and flowers which it holds all year around.
The shoot started by us finding a nice group composition in the greenhouse and taking a couple of easy going photos so to make sure that everyone felt comfortable in front of the camera (the result is below).
This also gave me an opportunity to test the lighting as well as seeing how I could incorporate the surroundings into the photo shoot. While I liked the photo of the four ladies standing, I felt that they might feel a little more comfortable sitting together. There was a little bench in the greenhouse and luckily it fit four people. I managed to find a composition I liked; with the bench perfectly centered and I took about 20 photos over the course of a minute in order to make sure I captured everyone smiling.
After taking the photos and showing a couple of my favorites to the ladies, I thought it would be nice to take some time out to grab a couple of individual snaps of everyone. This also gave me the opportunity to try out a bunch of different compositions in this area.
By getting closer to the individual subjects, I was able to maximize the ability of my Fujifilm 56mm f/1.2 portrait lens. This allowed me to get some beautiful bokeh on the photos (out of focus background) which isolated the subject from the rest of the scene.
In the photo on the right I used the four leafs to act as a natural framing and I was lucky to capture some nice lens flare from strong light hitting my lens from the side.
For the next image below, I made use of the beautiful flowers which were scattered around the greenhouse to add a little more to the portrait. Again, you can see the importance of having a lens with a low f/stop ability, a photograph is often improved by being less busy and thus removing distractions from the background really helps to improve the minimalism in the photo.
The next portrait which I took, pictured on the right, highlights minimalism in photography through manipulation of color. Before editing, many of the plants in the photo were colored with drastically different variations of yellow and green which I thought took away from the main subject of the photo.
To counter this, in lightroom, I used the hue sliders to manipulate the greens and yellows in the picture to become more similar in color. In this way, all of the parts of the photo which were not the subject blended into a cohesive background. This allowed for the subject of the photo to really pop and stand out as the most important part of the photo.
In this fourth and final portrait for the group, I tried to use the strong light which flooded through the roof of the greenhouse to my advantage. While some photographers prefer to always work with a flash, I often like using only natural light as it forces me to be creative with how you use it in your shots.
What I found beautiful about this photo to the left, was that the light allowed for the face of the subject in the photo to be illuminated in two different ways. I felt that this extenuated the facial features and almost made it look like I was taking a photo of two different people in one shot. As a general tip for any up and coming photographers, this photo highlights the importance of photographing in RAW camera profile. This allows you a lot more leeway when editing to manipulate the light in the photo.
In this particular shot above, I had to drastically reduce the highlights and increase the shadows in the photo to make sure that the natural light did not create an overexposed photo. If I had photographed this in JPEG, the final image would likely not have been as good!
A change of scenery
Once we had taken a couple more group and individual photos, we moved outside the greenhouse to change the scene and try a couple of different compositions. Interestingly, from these outside photos, you can actually see the old white, concrete and glass greenhouse which we had previously been shooting in. The photos to the above and below were my two favorite groups photos from outside!
All in all, this was one of my favorite photo shoots of the year not just because it was done with dear friends of mine, but also because I just loved how the photos turned out!
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Until next time,
Tristan
Check out my last week's extended photography post here.
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Read through my introductory post to hear a little more about me.