Seventies

The biggest problem I had was the light. It was pretty cloudy outside and the sun was just above the house, so not much light was getting in. If I think of it now I wonder why I so desperately wanted the windows to be totally white? The problem when shooting pics like this is that if you are not using any internal light-source, the windows burn the image with their whiteness and the contour of the objects gets very very soft; so if you don't specially desire that, avoid it.

The light settings: to my disposal I had a big soft-box, a big reflective panel and a on-camera flash. So I placed the soft-box lightning from right to left. And on the left I've placed that big reflective panel. For additional top-light I used the on-camera flash facing upwards.

This way I obtained nice light for the models, but the corner in the back is very dark. If I think of it now, I should have faced the soft-box to that wall between the windows, and the reflecting panel besides me, shining on the model... it would probably have worked better.

Because of the pretty bad light conditions I had to shoot at f3.5 average (which was not so bad) but speeds of 1/20, 1/30 which is very slow, so I used the tripod for all shots.

Conclusion: if you don't have any competitive lighting solutions, don't start shooting inside on a clouded day.

Brown Dress

The theme that I wanted to use for this pics was something like sorrow or anger. For that I insisted on dark eyes and the hair like after a fight. I've also darkened the pics in the post-process to strenghten this theme.

It was one of those perfect days for shooting: the sky was just a little bit foggy such that the sunlight wasn't harsh anymore. And it also was about 5:00PM. So I had perfect natural light conditions. Nevertheless I also took my on-camera flash and used throughout the shoot, which was not very good I assume (I used it fully automatically - ETTL mode). On the first 3 pictures the harsh flashlight-shadow can be seen... while the sunlight-shadow is soft and nice... i'll note id down for next time.

What else... ah right! The f number. I've again set my camera to Aperture Priority and shot most of the pics with f2.8. I don't know how to punish myself for continously doing that... I always regret it after the shoot because the focus area is simply too narrow for such near pictures. So the pics underneath are of those shot with f4.5 or above. I'll try to use f2.8 only in "controlled" situations, when I have enough time to set the focus right and also check the Depth of Field.

Here are the pics: