Portraits of Julia

Portraits Part III...Julia. You may recognize her from one of the Toast Martinborough pics, or not, I almost didn't recognize her with her hair down when we met up to take these pictures :P

So we met up at Herd Street Brasserie, a newer restaurant/cafe right on the harbourfront. A pretty nice place to hang out when the weather is good as it's right on the boardwalk, you could throw something into the water from the patio, it's that close. It's on the ground floor of a new condo unit in the harbour, and Waitangi Park is on the opposite side of the building. In one direction is the boardwalk that takes you towards the city and Frank Kitts Park, and in the other direction is where the Oriental Parade boardwalk starts.

As you can see by the pics, the weather this weekend was awesome. Sunny and low 20s. We met up at 4pm for some of that good afternoon light. I wanted to experiment with some strobist stuff as well, balancing the sun rim light with strobes...unfortunately all these pics are natural light. I had taken a few from this location with a flash setup and I THOUGHT they looked good on the back of the camera, but when I saw them on my computer I wasn't so thrilled. Note to self, next time make sure to use the histogram to check exposure.

Trying to see an LCD display in bright sunlight isn't the easiest thing to do, and I mistakenly didn't have my histogram displaying on reviews. I had checked it manually a few times, but when things got going I neglected to check it...just one more lesson learned. The shots that I THOUGHT were well exposed were in fact a little too dark. I think it might also have been me fooling around with negative EV to get the extra zing from the strobe against the darker background. At one point I was using an ND filter as well, and I think that really threw off my exposures...and no, I didn't compensate properly, hence the underexposed images. Other note to self...next time work out my exposure settings manually, set it and forget it, and do it all before you start posing and shooting.

Luckily some of the natural light shots above came out fairly decent, mostly due to the direction of the sun and the fact that the condo's colour is an off white, making for a good bounce light source for where these pics were taken.

The rest of these were taken at Frank Kitts Park. After busting out the umbrella and trying to be discreet in our section of the boardwalk, foot traffic started picking up. Most people passed by with an intrigued look or an inquisitive comment, but I always feel a bit goofy setting up gear in busy places...and I have my back to them, the model is the one who can see all the people checking us out :)

So these are all just natural light as well. The goodness of 'the magic hour'...every photographer's favourite early morning or late afternoon sunlight...not necessarily JUST an hour, it basically refers to the times of day when the sun is lower in the sky and also has a nice warmer tone. And if you're wondering where the deep blue sky background is coming from, I was using a polarized filter.

This pic may be one of my more favoured looks, processing wise. The blue was a bit too intense, bordering on looking too fake, so I tried pulling out a little of the saturation. It kind of gives the (sun)light a bit of a flash/strobe feel.

Sigh...evidence that there are some real creepy losers out there. Someone on my flickr account posted a comment on the above picture. I'm not sure if he was for real, but he thought she was attractive and left his email address for her (on MY page??) and asked her to contact him to 'be friends'. I clicked on his link to see who he was...he only had one picture in his account and it was of some middle aged dude in Thailand. I'm not sure if that was him or a picture of someone he had taken. Either way, I deleted his comment and blocked him from leaving any more comments...what an ass.