Shooting portraits again, after a year!
Man, was I rusty!
Last weekend marked the return of the Viewfinderz photographer/model meetup group after a year's hiatus. Its sister meetup group, StreetMeet, has also been absent, meaning that I've been on my own to hook up with models for portrait sessions. And, well, it's not really my scene and I don't do it. I have done it, once or twice, but most of the photos you see on the Portrait page of this website came courtesy of the two meetup groups. So it was wonderful to have one back.
To explain the groups (again), they're organized over Instagram in flash-mob style: the organizers send out a date and time and a location, usually a week or so in advance, and anyone and everyone is welcome to attend, aspiring models and portrait photographers or those who just fancy giving it a whirl. The atmosphere is friendly, welcoming, accepting of everyone, laid back and unstressed; once gathered people naturally split up into groups, usually three or four photographers to a model (yes, male models come too), find a likely nook in the locale and start posing and shooting.
The locale this time was Fort Casey on Whidbey Island, a spread of green meadows and old abandoned coastal batteries on a cloudless July evening, limpid and lingering. It's about an hour and half outside Seattle (or in my case two and a half hours as I missed my ferry and had to wait on line for the next one), and somehow I managed to find the klatch of amateur shutterbugs in the vast multilevel warren of tunnels, stairs, arches, watchtowers, catwalks, and old white stone walls with grass on top.
It was, in other words, a fantastic location to shoot in, and that was part of the problem. My great weakness as a portrait photographer is not knowing how to pose a model, and I let the environment do it for me, directing the poor girls in and out of stairs or walls or doorways, with the result that I got a lot of awkward poses and uncomfortable expressions. I had better luck with closeups...
Rusty indeed! Fortunately the girls were brave and willing and wonderful to work with. I shot mostly with a tall, statuesque black-haired beauty named Gloria (@gloria_moye); my little grouplet of about four photographers wandered with her all over the state park trying different ideas, including a long trek out to the lighthouse; the grounds were so large that it was hard to encounter any other grouplets.
At the end of the evening, though, a miraculous gravitation brought us all together up at the top of the fort, where tall grass covers the cliff overlooking Puget Sound (I snuck some telephoto shots of huge cruise ships inbound to the harbor). A cute, plucky girl named Lauren (@laurenantonla_) with jet-black hair, who insisted she was there as a photographer, was hurled into modeling by popular acclaim; she took up her station in the tall windblown grass in the evening light, and after shrieking and giggling at all the lenses pointed at her immediately sobered and knocked the ball out of the park with her magnificent poses. Later in the parkinglot she fed us M&M chocolate chip cookies her mom had sent.
Gearwise I shot with my little Pen Ten (the Olympus E-PL10), and almost the whole event with the 45 f1.8 lens. It's funny; I bought my E-M1 II, a far more expensive and sophisticated camera, partly to impress models should I ever turn to professional portrait gigs -- but I find I prefer shooting with the Pen! The E-M1 II demands to be held to the eye and shot through the EVF, which I find nails all my compositions to eye level, while the handheld little Pen can be waved all around, up and down; this comes in handy as I'm often taller than the models and trying to shoot at or under their eye level.
As for a one-lens show, summer is my nemesis as I usually keep my other lenses in my jacket pockets. In the summer switching lenses involves taking off my pack and rooting around; not worth it. But the 45 f1.8 rules.
