Portmarnock – Richie.ie

July 9, 2011July 12, 2018

Lydia Coleman Beach Shoot

June and July are turning out to be a pretty busy month with shoots. With the few days of fine weather that we get… in between all the rain, its the perfect chance to get out onto the beach and take some shots. Only days after my last shoot with Lydia, we were back at it again, striking while the iron was still hot so to speak. I was also shooting Alyson Boyle at the same time, but I will put her pics into a separate post.

The team was the same as the night shoot. We had Ann-Jean Fitzsimons on make-up and Gill Keogh on Styling.

I like the shot above of Lydia. The make up was kept very minimal and natural to bring out Lydia’s freckles. And yes, both of us were in the water for this shot. I was hand holding the Speedlight and the umbrella in my left hand while trying not to drop the camera from my right hand. A little bit of desaturation in post and that is this image done.

The shot below is another great one of Lydia. I spoke before of her great smile, and here it is.

The shot above is all with natural light and a reflector. Some times natural light is just better, this is one of those cases. The reflector created nice catch lights in her eyes also as bonus.

I will finish up with this image, again showing Lydia’s great smile.

Stay tuned for the shots of Alyson in a few days.

Here are some Behind the Scenes shots of the crew at work 🙂

June 2, 2011July 12, 2018

Rachel Kenny – Beach & Street

Rachel is another one of the many DIT models I have shot. Rachel was involved in the DIT Fashion Show. Rachel is currently signed with Catwalk Models in Galway. Rachel has a really nice look and it was great to shoot with her on two occasions. She has catwalk experience and has done a good few fashion shows. Working with experience models always make things easier when it comes to posing and general atmosphere on set.

The two shoots were a fashion shoot on the streets of Dublin at night and some beach shots. For the Dublin shoots, we were aiming for a dark look. Ann-Marie Carey was on MUA duties with Danilo Tavares was on hair. Both did a fantastic job. I was assisted by Cameron ( Snapt.eu), who was a big help in the location scouting and the lighting on the night of the shoot.

This shoot has its lighting problems in that the areas is lit by ugly, yellow sodium vapour street lights. This alone was not that big a deal from an ambient light point of view. A custom white balance on the Nikon D7000 worked a treat and produced a nice result…. almost cinematic feel, which is what I was hoping for. The problem then came in trying to use fill light. I do not have big reflectors to reflect back enough of the light. My initial reaction was that I wanted to used flash, but with this custom WB setting, normal white light was shifting to dark blue.

I knew that I needed to balance to my flash with the ambient. This is a trial and error process. You basically need a lot of CTO and 1/2 CTO gels with you and keep adding them to your flash until the light from your flash looks good on your subject. I think I ended up with an equivalent 3 1/2 CTO gel, which was made up of 5 or 6 individual gels. The main problem with this is that each gel added decreases the power of the flash…. power that is already scarce due to the distance from light to subject and I was wanting to keep the ISO low on the body to keep noise down. But it all worked out in the end.

The other set of shots are from a beach shoot with Ray Byrne. It was a great day on the beach and we got some great shots. Here are the best ones. I really like the portrait below of Rachel. I like the expression on here face and she has amazing eyes.

I hope to shoot with Rachel again soon over the Summer to get a wider range of shots. If you’re reading this after 2011, then click to see more shots of Rachel and Ray.

June 2, 2011July 21, 2018

Ray Byrne – Street & Beach

Ray Byrne is a new model with Andrea Roche Model Agency. Ray is another one of the many DIT models I have shot since I started out. Ray was involved in the DIT Fashion Show in 2011 on the night he won a contract with AR Agency. Here are a few images from a shoot we had recently to get his book started.

We shot around Dublin City for a while, before heading off to the beach with Rachel Kenny. We got some great shots during the day. Here are the best ones.

The lighting was kept fairly simple for these shots. They were either natural light or there was a single Nikon SB-600 and a shoot through umbrella used. The shot of Rachel and Ray above for example, there was a light used and placed camera left.

May 21, 2011July 12, 2018

Laura Redac on the Beach

Here is Laura Redac. A Romanian born model, living over here in Ireland. Laura is here a few years now with her fiancé and is currently signed with Assets Model Agency in Dublin. She is a tall girl, 5’11” in her feet and has a lovely natural skin colour.

Ann-Marie Carey was the MUA for the day and she done a great job. Styling on the day was done by the lovely Jennie Moore. The style for the day was beach ware, so plenty of bright colours were in use.

It was a good, fun day. The team worked well on the day and we have since shoot again recently. Those pics will be up soon. This is a quick post as I have loads of shots backing up that need to get edited and blogged. I haven’t got much to say except enjoy the pics

July 2, 2010July 14, 2018

Hannah Healy on the Beach

Here are the final images from a shoot with Hannah Healy out at Portmarnock beach recently. Hannah was also in DIT and we meet through the Fashion show. Hannah is a surf chick so it was a great theme for a shoot. She came all the way over from Galway with her board to shoot with me for a few hours.

I was using my Nikon D40 as usual with the 35mm 1.8 AF-S Lens. In front of the lense was a Hoya circular polarizing filter. It’s pretty much my standard setup these days when shooting out doors. Other bits of kit used on the shoot were basic reflectors, gold side used and my trusty strobes. The strobes has 1/2 cto gels on them to balance for ambient light and they were triggered by either the radio trigger or optical slave.

The above two images were from the later end of the shoot. They veered from the surf theme a bit and we tried a bit of a more of a fashion look. We only spent 10-15mins on this look as the light was fading very fast behind her. The lighting set up is fairly basic, just two strobes at either end of her, ask described in the diagram below:
The power of the left one would have been in the 1/2 range. The wide angle adaptor was used, so that and the gel took a bit of light power. The right strobe was any where from 1/2 in the top frame I think and 1/8 in the second. Although the right light in the top frame is a little hot, I kinda like the effect and the resultant lens flare.

I like this shot. I adjusted the various colour channels in light room to get the right black and white conversion. The lighting on this shot is coming from camera right, the sun and camera left, gold reflector. It was just the two of us on the shoot so no assistances to help out. I some how managed to eye up a shot in the camera with the right hand and then lean over and use a small reflector in my left and to put some light on her face, took a few attempts but we got it eventually 🙂

We were playing around with various angles for this one. Hannah moved the board to the middle of her face and it caught my eye, so I thought there was a shot in it. The sun is coming in from the rear left, so the face is underexposed. I set up the flash just behind my left shoulder on a stand to provide some fill on her face. You can make it out in the catch light on her eye on the bigger version.

I like the shot above, the light turned out great. Just one strobe camera left and the sunlight camera / rear left. This shot is very neat straight out of camera. Could nearly be confused with something from a magazine 🙂