Dark Places on a Sunny Day

19 Jun Dark Places on a Sunny Day

Ventured to Bellingham last weekend, mainly to shoot Myrriah. She’s working heavily on her modeling portfolio and luckily she likes my work, so over the past few months we have been working together to give her port a wide variety of styles.

Myrriah is a great model, always on time, always willing to do what it takes to get the photo, no questions asked. This girl can’t take a bad picture. This last weekend I told her she could be picking her nose and the photo will still turn out somehow, but… we didn’t put that to the test.

We started the day on the train tracks, using a retaining wall for a unique background as well as a tunnel to play with shadows and backlighting. Even though it was a beautiful day, 70+ out, we were shooting in the shadows of the trees and in the tunnel, so it felt about 40 degrees out with the tunnel funneling a constant slight breeze into a focused 20 mph wind.

I had to use combinations of natural light with the one light I had set up. I would have loved to have set up more lights, but if a choo-choo were to come through we wouldn’t have had time to get all the gear out of the way before the train would squash my gear like a bug on a windshield. Varying my aperture and shutter speed, I was able to bring more or less ambient light into the capture. Next up for the day was the rock foundation.

Now, this location was cool. Once upon a time, this really old 3 story building was literally built around a 25 foot tall boulder. As a result, the back foundation wall is the boulder itself, with concrete poured on each side to make way for doors and corners of the structure. It is a quite a sight by itself, but having Myrriah pose in front of it gave it a bit more flare. In a few of the following pics you’ll see the boulder and where it meets the concrete wall.

I shot this set with a 10-22mm lens, so very wide angle, allowing me to create dramatic perspectives. Also shot with a single light, large octabox, making soft light for my subject as well as lighting a good portion of the rock wall.

I love this last shot. The contrasty cold blue filter applied gives it a very Batman, Gotham City feel.

The on-location shooting has been extremely fun, challenging, and I never know what I’m going to come up with last minute. With the better part of the year’s weather ahead of me, I look forward to much more of it!