personal

Here’s one frame from a shoot with a local model named Andy Barr. We cruised around the western part of downtown Milwaukee and a little in the Third Ward around sunset a few weeks ago to make some contrasty portraits. This shot, and definitely a few others from the session, are intended for some marketing materials I have in the works.

My pal Katie Jozwik and I cruised around Bay View the other day to shoot some portraits. (Another one of those mid-day-sun shoots I mentioned here.) My favorite frames were made at the lakefront in Bay View’s Cupertino Park, thanks to the wind. Speaking of… the wind, like that mid-day sun, can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your goals. All that blowing can toss around your subject’s hair, making for something spontaneous and unique. Or it can mess up that perfectly coiffed hairdo. Or prevent you from lighting the scene with strobes. Or perhaps slam your lighting gear into the ground, which happened to me during a Milwaukee Magazine shoot last week. But more on that later.

Consider this a Bay View hipster’s take on the classic shoes hanging on a wire motif. Back in the day (doesn’t matter which day, as long it’s back a few decades) these Chuck Taylors probably would have been a faded red or black, I’d guess, rather than this light gray colorway.

I have a love-hate relationship with that harsh mid-day, directly overhead sun, whereas many photographers just hate it. The way I see it: We frequently have to shoot when our subjects are available — i.e. in less-than-flattering light — so why not embrace it? At least a little bit. With that in mind, I scheduled a couple of a personal shoots for this time of day just to keep me sharp. Above, that’s one frame from such a portrait session, with Dallas Kilpatrick a couple of weeks ago. Here I used the sun as a faint rim light and one strobe up high in front of Dallas as the key light. Using the sun as rim light can be helpful in these situations, but my favorite way to use the mid-day light is this: Expose for the brightest areas and make those pools of shade pitch black. If you find the right shadows — usually the kind that make some sort of shape or texture — you can run wild and create some pretty cool environmental portraits. Alas, we didn’t do that on this outing.