Maymont Waterfall Portrait
Now that my clients have received their book and images, I can finally show off some of the images I shot during two portrait sessions and a wedding late last year!
I call the one above my “Adam and Eve Portrait”. I mean really, all we needed was for them to be naked with an apple near by, don’t you think? Meet Brian and Kelli.
This is my favorite nature portrait to date. The location was the waterfall at the Japanese Gardens in Maymont Park in Richmond, VA. We were extremely lucky with this scene as Maymont can turn this waterfall on or off and this was the first day in quite a few months that it had been on while I was there. I can’t quite figure out their schedule or if there is rhyme or reason to when they have it running or not. But on this day, luck was on our side.
The sun was setting, if not already set, by the time we arrived at this location. I’m lighting the couple (and what a great couple they are too!) with a single Canon 580 exII flash on a light stand just out of the frame to the right. I’m several dozen feet away, shooting with a Canon 50mm f/1.2 lens on a Canon 5D Mark II camera with an exposure of 1/30th sec. @ f/5. The ISO was 400 and the flash was fired using a Pocket Wizard remote. The flash was gelled with a 1/2 CTO and the camera’s white balance was set to 5700 K.
I use a Sekonic I-358 Light meter to determine the baseline exposure for the flash in situations like this, then use the image review on the camera, with the histogram displayed, to work out the proper exposure for the ambient light. In this situation, I wanted the couple to stand out a bit from the background, so the ultimate exposure was one that underexposed the ambient light by about one stop, but kept the “proper” flash exposure. The trick is to do this fast enough that you don’t send your subjects into a coma from boredom. I think I got this in two shots. We were at this specific spot less than 2 minutes before moving on. I knew I had the shot; no need to linger!
We shot at several locations this day, in and around Maymont, but this one is my favorite.
The next blog update will be a shot of this couple we did at the James River.