Well, it happened.
I had my first senior portrait session. I learned a poop ton and I think I did alright. Some things I wanted didn't turn out, some things I wasn't expecting to work did.
Firstly, I was under prepared. Not with the equipment but, with the shoot itself. I practiced a lot with the equipment, but almost no practice went into an actual shoot. It was a free shoot and I had all day so time and cost to the client weren't issues. However, I only went into the shoot with two exact locations in mind and one look that I would have to find a location for. With that kind of time and resources I should have had closer to 5 - 8 locations picked out. If it were for a paying client, perhaps that's all we would have had time for, but It's probably a good idea to have more locations in mind than you think you'll use.
Secondly, I didn't prioritize. One look I was specifically going for was a sunset against a field or sky. Since it was a priority, I should have had an exact location picked out. I didn't, so when sunset time came we were scrambling to find a place that would work. Valuable time I could have used to get camera settings dialed in. I ended up getting lucky and we found a field just off the road that worked pretty well. When we got there though, it was already late and the Sun moves fast as hell when you don't want it to. I should have had this shot more well though out.
Thirdly, I needed help. I was prepared to do everything myself. I got sandbags to hold stands down, stands for my lights, stands for reflectors, and stands for my stands. Lucky for me "Mom" was extremely willing to help. Not only hold anything I asked and push any button I requested, but had loads of suggestions and input. She had locations to try, wardrobe input, and had an extra pair of eyes to spot anything in frame I might miss while focusing on getting the exposure right. I would have gotten less than half of what I did if I didn't have any help.
Lastly, this is so much work. I took almost 800 photos and the work started with weeding out the bad ones. I was probably over attached to a lot as I was only able to weed it down to around 70 photos. Unfortunately for me, The clients eliminated 5 of those 70. Now, if this were a paid gig, depending on price, 70 is way too many photos. A more realistic number would have been 20. Let me tell you, without the benefit of this being my full time job, I don't have the time to edit 70 photos, especially as a novice to the task. I need to let more go and focus on only the strongest work.
Overall though, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. I was able to use pretty much everything I had learned leading up to this, techniques to blur the background, off camera flash, balancing ambient exposure with my flashes and composition. Editing was a whole new ballpark we can get into next time. 'Till then, here are some of my edited favorites. Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think! If your're interested in more about the approach I took you can
start from the beginning here.
