This weekend was amazing. I got to do some really cool photo sessions with three young women in their prom dresses. So, the next three posts are going to be built around that. This will be three different ways to do cool things with a prom outfit photo session. For the first one, I kept it close to home by doing it in my home studio.
For the studio session, I wanted to make use of color, because prom is about bright colorful outfits, especially for the girls. So, I matched a gel to each dress and used it as a backlight for that subject. Then I used a strobe equipped with an octagon softbox for a key light. For the group shots I threw in an additional light on the side as a fill light. Truth be told, I can’t recall if it was a long box or another octagon softbox, but I know it had a grid on it.
Not everything went perfectly, the red light wasn’t spaced far enough away from the other two in the group shots and basically just disappeared, but we rolled with it. The main point was to get some colors out there and that happened. When something doesn’t work during a session you have to ask yourself two questions really fast: how long will this take to fix and is it needed? In this case I decided it’d take too long, and it wasn’t needed. After that, you just move on.
In this case, it really helps that I had awesome subjects supported by their awesome moms on set. It kept things fun and fun makes for great photos. But the fun didn’t end at the studio. When we got done, we packed up and moved on to our next location. More on that in my next post.