Luiza in London
A Spring Morning in London
On a cool, windy March morning, I had the pleasure of photographing Luiza. Since she was relatively new to modeling, so we spent some time chatting before we started. I find these informal conversations essential, being photographed by a stranger can be daunting, and if a model isn't relaxed, it shows in the final images. Taking a moment to put us both at ease makes all the difference
The Gear: Keeping it Simple
For this shoot, I decided to travel light, bringing only the Nikon 135mm f/1.8 "Plena" and leaving the speedlights and modifiers behind. Navigating London’s public transport with too much gear is a hassle, as is the constant effort of setting up and watching over equipment in a busy city. Stripping back to a single lens allowed me to stay mobile and focused
Camera Settings
I love shooting wide open to capture those gorgeous, soft backgrounds, so I set my aperture to f/1.8 and didn’t touch it for the next two hours! To compensate for the light and movement, I kept my shutter speed between 1/500 and 1/250, depending on whether Luiza was posing or in motion.
Iso was set to Auto with a maximum of Iso 5000, but hopefully we wouldnt go there
First Location
We began the shoot at the entrace to the grafitti tunnel
I love shooting here. The tunnel creates a dark and colourful background while the natural light on Luiza looks soft and even
2nd Location
Moving into the grafitti tunnel, we found a set of stairs on the left where natural light flooded into the tunnel
This was another great spot for getting some soft light on Luiza while keeping the background dark
Here I could shoot from a slightly elevated postition on the stairs. We captured a lot of realy nice images at this spot
3rd Location
On our way towards the river Thames we found a large alley
We shot some full body images with Luiza sitting on my coat
I was quite pleased with the results but limiting my Iso to 5000 was resulting in some underexposed images which I had to correct in the edit
It was time to move to an area with more light …
4th Location
Our final spot was just outside the National Theatre by the Thames
The cloud cover provded great light and there was no need for any light modifiers
The strong wind dictated that Luiza had to face away from the river, otherwise, (as we discovered), her hair completely covered her face!
Raising the shutter speed to 1/500 allowed me to freeze the motion of her hair and resulted in some of my favourite images of a very enjoyable the two hour shoot
