Flower Picking with Princess Skye

Posted by sab | Filed under Photography, Themed, Writeup

Skye and I ventured out to a flower field to take some photographs in one of her beautiful vintage dresses. I was really stuck on what to write about this photoshoot, you can read more eloquent musings about the shoot over at Skye’s Blog :) And now, back to the photographs:

Edit: Some of these images look artifacty, will be re-uploading them in higher JPG quality later.

And now for something a little different…

Behind the Scenes

Skye made a wreath of flowers using some wire:

I plaited her hair into french braids, this was especially fun as it reminded me of my childhood. I have not plaited hair since I was a kid, braiding dolls’ hair and friends’ hair at girly sleepovers.

Flowers, reaching towards the light:

We brought a blanket for Skye to sit on. I was lying on my reflector for the shots where both Skye and I were lying on the ground. There was mass carnage of squashed flowers!

Photographer’s comments

No flash was used because I wanted to use only a reflector for fill. I started out using the white side, but found that the gold side gave a really nice warm tone, and stuck with that for the majority of the shoot.

The post processing brightened everything up and punch up the greens and pinks in the image, keeping it fairly natural-looking. This is a fairly big departure from what I usually do.

It was fun to try something different and great to get outdoors and shoot something on location! Shooting outside brings up a host of issues revolving around the presence of the sun. I would have loved to use a wider aperture for more background blur on these shots, so the houses in the background would be less distracting. I plan to buy neutral density filters so that I can use a wider aperture and get the same amount of light coming in.

I regret not taking Skye up on the offer of waking her roommate to come along and hold the reflector for me, the reflector was acting as a straight fill in these shots and might have looked better from an angle. In some cases, I could not even hold the reflector in a suitable position to generate fill. At least Mirai got to snooze in longer!

In the last shot, Skye has the characteristic raccoon eyes from the sun that every beginner photographer is advised to avoid. For this reason I discarded the photo but Skye liked this shot, so I kept it in the set. What do you think?

Hope you enjoyed the set!

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    Permalink | October 9th, 2008

    8 Responses to “Flower Picking with Princess Skye”

    1. Cherany Says:
      October 10th, 2008 at 3:18 am

      Pretty! Some of these are really great, and you did a fantastic job editing. :)

    2. Chisa Says:
      October 10th, 2008 at 9:28 am

      I love the natural, light feel of these shots, it is quite different from your studio work and came out really well. They have a nice warm, nostalgic feel :) And Skye’s dress is really beautiful.

    3. .the princess portal. » Blog Archive » A Field of Paper Flowers Says:
      October 10th, 2008 at 10:06 am

      [...] consequently honked when they missed the lights. You can read more about the photoshoot over at Sab’s blog. I had a lot of fun doing this shoot, having my hair french braided and making a flower wreath. [...]

    4. sab Says:
      October 10th, 2008 at 10:32 am

      Cherany: Thankyou, I’m really happy how they turned out :)

      Chisa: It was refreshing to try something different, I’m glad the feeling I wanted to put into it translated across the screen to you :)

    5. Sora Says:
      October 10th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

      I had to congrat you for the amazing work you did!! Btw, would you please tell me how did you do the editing? I want to make my photographs look much better and your editing is the effect I ma searchign for :3

    6. Scheharazade Says:
      October 11th, 2008 at 12:52 am

      Bonsoir^-^

      I love her pretty dress !

      Nice pictures.

      Bisous

    7. sab Says:
      October 14th, 2008 at 12:34 am

      Thanks Scheharazade, Skye’s dresses are amazing, she has exquisite taste!

      Sora - I will make a separate post, a tutorial showing the techniques I used. Stay tuned! :)

    8. Sabatomic » Blog Archive » Escape to her Garden Sanctuary - Part I Says:
      October 15th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

      [...] was fun to experiment. At first, I wanted to use only natural light and a reflector as I have in the past, but at the last minute decided to use strobes & umbrellas. This is the difference that a flash [...]

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