James River Portrait
This is Brian and Kelli again, shot a few months prior to my last post, the Adam and Eve Portrait.
This couple booked me in the late spring/early summer for their wedding which wasn’t going to be until November. I suggested that we had the time to shoot a number of different locations for their engagement portraits, shooting some in the summer with the nice weather and another set in the fall after the leaves turned. The previous Maymont image was the autumn shoot, this one was one in the summer, as if you couldn’t tell.
Both Brian and Kelli love their dogs. They have three of them and all three were with us this day. They didn’t trust the other two to sit still enough for this portrait, though, so only this little guy got to join in the fun for this shot.
The lighting here is pretty simple: I’m using the sun, of course, as the key light with fill being provided by a Canon 580 exII in a small softbox held by a friend of the couple. The flash was fired remotely using a couple of pocketwizard remotes. The camera was a Canon 5D Mark II, the lens was a Canon 85 f/1.2L and the exposure was 1/200th of a second at f/16 (ISO 400).
It was incredibly hot that day. I think the temperature topped out a little over 100 degrees that afternoon. Fortunately, we started this shoot in the morning, moving all around Belle Island, and were having a nice lunch at O’Toole’s before it got too hot. In all, a terrific way to spend part of a day.