deLaDominique's photostream  

I feel like out here every day is an exhibition

than usual

Photography by: Kimberly Lawrence
Clothes: Kai-K Boutique
Make-up by: Alyssa Brumant
Model: Saryta Akpa

Last week ago I did my first formal shoot, for the Kai-K boutique in Roseau. It was a daytime shoot with three models. The 365, MMP company recently offered me a small appointment as photographer and I couldn’t refuse. It was definitely an opportunity to not only gain more experience but to also challenge myself. It was an amazing experience and I learned quite a bit in just one day.

The location was already familiar to me, but it being mainly an outdoor shoot posed a few challenges. As it was incredibly windy my friend had to focus on not only holding the reflector at the right angles, but not letting it fly away! The tree branches overhead swayed haphazardly with every gust of wind, making the lighting a little more unpredictable. Those problems were remedied a bit by moving the models slightly, away from the shade of certain trees. Additionally, when we arrived that morning the sky was overcast and throughout the shoot the sun only occasionally showed itself. As someone who likes shooting with natural light this was a bit bothersome, but I used my external flash to compensate. Towards the end of the shoot it started raining, prompting us to shoot some indoor photos also. The last significant issue was with my memory cards. I severely underestimated how many shot I would take and only brought two SD cards. Before the last 100 shots I had to repeatedly copy the pictures to my Mac, slowing down the flow of the shoot.

The shot above isn't one of the final shots, and is a good example of some of the minor issues I encountered. We had trouble concealing the tags on this particular piece. Additionally in this particular shot the reflector can be seen in the lower right corner. These two issues were quickly fixed though!

Despite the challenges the shoot was great. The makeup artist, Alyssa Brumant, was impressive. She is self-taught, and explained a bit of what she was doing as she went along. The models were also amazing and great to work with. I’ve never shot for advertising before, and though I did look up many advertisements I’m definitely not very experienced. The models were great in that respect and I learned quite a bit firsthand from their poses. The selection of clothes were good and the models did a fine job with them. There are a lot of things that I’ll definitely take from this experience, including the need to always carry more than enough memory cards, and how to position models for advertising.

You can check out some of the pictures here.

strobist info: 430ex ii bounced off reflector (both camera right), sync cable
I'm completely new at using off-camera flash so bear with me!

Simple things like this make me happy

A quick shot!