Priscilla .:. Portraits (Part 1)

Recently I spent some time visiting family on the East Coast.  On my last day of the trip I met up with Neil van Niekerk from Planet Neil fame for a fun photo shoot. Neil was nice enough to coordinate the location and the model so that I could just show up and play with fancy camera toys. Neil has no shortage of them!  These first two shots were taken with the Nikon 200mm f2.  It’s a crazy big 7 pound lens that is totally impractical, but it has the ability to completely blur out your background into creamy goodness.

Originally we had hoped to do a shoot in Manhattan, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate. Luckily Neil had an inside line on an indoor venue. Neil knows Joseph Costa, who is the curator at the Paterson Historical Museum. Joe is also a photographer (La Moda Studio)! Sweet!

So we showed up at the venue with a van full of lighting gear.  Once inside we found fluorescent lighting and were immediately afraid that the light was going to be terrible. Imagine our surprise when we realized that the light was actually pretty good!  The hypothesis is that the museum has some high quality fluorescent bulbs that out-perform your average office space type of lights.  We didn’t experience any white balance shifts, which can sometimes completely ruin your images.  I took some photos yesterday under different fluorescent lights at a church waiting room, and the photos were completely unusable.  Anyway, we really lucked out, and were able to shoot available light thanks to the high-ISO capabilities of our cameras.  The above shot and the two below were taken using ISO 6400 so that I could shoot at f5.6 and perform some extreme tilting with the Nikon 45mm PC-E Tilt Shift Lens.

OK, I know that this next shot is completely ridiculous.  Haha, filler up Priscilla!

I shot this next shot through some sort of historical artifact.  The interesting part is that you can see what shot Neil was getting at this time HERE.