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charlie_merrifi
29th of March 2009 (Sun), 19:19
I have a couple of first time portrait shoots coming up and was wondering how you set up for the shoot. Do you take test shots before hand and get your settings adjusted. And if so how. Do you practice with just the background and adjust your settings off that or with a practice model?. Thanks in advanced for the help.
PhantomII
29th of March 2009 (Sun), 20:58
I usually draft one of my cats as a practice model.
They're pretty cooperative about it.
http://fotogeezer.com/gallery2/d/119-2/img_0007.jpg
:lol:
breathless
29th of March 2009 (Sun), 21:05
I have a couple of first time portrait shoots coming up and was wondering how you set up for the shoot. Do you take test shots before hand and get your settings adjusted. And if so how. Do you practice with just the background and adjust your settings off that or with a practice model?. Thanks in advanced for the help.
Can you be more specific? Do you mean in the studio? Are you asking about lighting or camera settings?
rsagusti
29th of March 2009 (Sun), 21:09
Depends who your taking pictures of, adults / kids, where you'll be, are you using natural light only?? flash? studio lights? Are you going outside, or inside studio set up?
timbop
30th of March 2009 (Mon), 17:15
If at all possible, yes you should try to get your exposure settings right ahead of time. Subjects tend to get annoyed if you keep fooling around with settings while they sit there. Chuck gardner has a great suggestion of shooting a white towel and looking at the histogram to get your exposures correct. Basically you adjust your exposure until the spike hits the right edge of the histogram, and yet you can still see the detail of the towels fibers when zooming in:
http://super.nova.org/DPR/
charlie_merrifi
1st of April 2009 (Wed), 00:31
going to be indoors using constant light (non natural) and no flash.
egordon99
1st of April 2009 (Wed), 08:14
Do you mean just the normal lights in the room? Ouch! I wouldn't do that with my fast primes, yet alone f/5.6 lenses.

Best you can hope for is some nice window light coming in to help you out.

Good luck!

going to be indoors using constant light (non natural) and no flash.
charlie_merrifi
1st of April 2009 (Wed), 14:14
I have two flourescent shop lights i use that work pretty well untill i can afford the real deal.