G'monay and her Narrative {30 photoshoot speedlight challenge #13}

G'monay is lit with the orange glow from the brightly setting sun.

I met with G'monay shortly after my visit with Devery. I asked to meet her at Miramar Lake and we ended up at this amazing grassy patch near Scripps Lake instead.

She came up with the concept and clothing and I all i contributed was the camera equipment and a feeling of exhaustion from my previous shoot. Looking at the photos later, I realized that we came up with sort of a funny narrative. A beautiful woman gets dressed up and heads to a fancy dinner party. She stops at a grassy region on the way and decides to live in the woods.

G'monay is an excellent, beautiful model.

Click here for more photos from our shoot.

G'monay surrounded by treacherous sticks.

I had a hard time manipulating my surroundings because there were sticks all over the ground. It was slippery like whoa. I was hesitant to move my light stand from location to location because it was too much for me to manipulate without fear of falling and breaking my camera. My camera was on the line, and that is a risk I couldn't take. I was also rapidly running out of battery without replacements. These shots definately ended up less illuminated than I normally like.

I had the rapidly setting sun as an illumination source, but you can tell these photos have less subject separation than most of my photos.

Excellent modeling with poor subject separation makes a photo that is about 75%

A neat effect that I played up in lightroom was the different colors between ambient and direct lighting. The setting sun cast a bright orange glow while soft blue light still diffused through the tree leaves.

I thought the competing light sources made a lovely effect.

Then we sat in the direct sunlight where we got some iconic looking photos. The overall brightness was pretty low on this set, but I decided not to pump it up to preserve the details on her face.

Very pretty natural direct lighting.

The sun had almost set by 5pm so I decided we should venture out back towards my light source. At this point, I felt much more at home and in control of my surroundings. The photos were crisp, the subject separation was good, and the directional lighting cast beautiful, unreal shadows.

And the yellow setting sun started mingling into my ambient blue light to create a green cast over the entire set.

This one is my favorite from this shoot.

In Summary,

I think G'monay's skill vastly overshadowed my own. It didn't help that I was in foreign sticky territory. I just wish I had a lighting assistant for this shoot because I felt overburdened with making sure my lights were charged, loaded, and moved into the position I wanted. It was just too much for me to do alone. The shoot was definately worth my time because the resulting photos were just gorgeous, I just think I could have done better. Alex still says my Rose Garden Photoshoot was much more beautiful.

The 30 Photoshoot speedlight challenge is a Self Challenge where I attempt to learn as much as I can about lighting. Read more about the 30 photoshoot challenge and follow my journey by clicking on the links below.