Portraits of a friend (4 images)

[texxter]

Today my friend Salma invited me to come over, have dinner with her and her family and create some new images. She's an actress and has beautiful eyes!

#1. Before dinner we started out with a beautiful white sari - I didn't bring a background with me and the walls on her house were typical offwhite. I placed a sheet against the opening between the dinning room and a living room and did some images shooting a bit of light thru it so that I could control the tone of gray. I liked her direct and welcoming expression here. Done with the 5ft octabox only.



#2. I improvised this other background by hanging one her saris between two light sticks. The decoration on top was actually cloned from another photo, as the sari was hung such that there was no golden pattern horizontally. I like the little shimmering glitter on the black and the framing, as the image seems to have been created against a dark starry night. The octabox was to camera left and there was a bare SB-24 speelight to camera right acting as separation light.



#3, We did this one after dinner - Loved the saffron and green tea colors on this black sari, and also the earrings and her hair - I used more postprocessing here for a more glamourous look. The background was the same sari as above - the band on the right was pasted in from another photograph. Lighting was like above but the octabox was to the right this time and the hair/separation light to camera left.



#4. Right before dinner I did this portrait of her in the kitchen - to balance the tungsten light there I had to use full CTO on the two flashes I used. The key light was an umbrella mounted on a SB-800 to camera left, and the fill was a barebulb SB-24 bounced off the ceiling. Sorry I left the EXIF out of this image, it was 1/2s f/10.0 ISO200 70mm on a tripd obviously. The ambient light required 1/2 sec exposure for proper exposure.

[loosecanon]

What a beautiful girl and wonderful images.

[texkam]

Nice. Wonderful idea on the border on #2.

[tml]

Loverly set of photos of a beautiful woman. Tri

[texxter]

Thank you for the kind comments - she's indeed beautiful and a great person.

[mmuhlenkamp]

Wonderful images, Paco. I don't really like the background in the last one though, you can see the display panel on the oven and I think it's distracting, the countertops are little blah too (much nicer than my kitchen though). I really love her in the white sari, I like the contrast with her dark complexion and the pose in #2 is very elegant.

Great work as usual!

[Phisch]

Beautiful images! My favorite has to be the first one. It looks like you really enjoyed this session, and she loves the camera as much as it loves her :)

[sheencheere]

Love them all but those colors and lighting in #3 are amazing!