Staci Studio Session | Kansas City Fashion Photographer

July 30, 2013

Photography is the art, science, and practice of creating durable images by recording light. I have always been a natural light photographer because I think it’s the most beautiful light. I have a natural light studio in my basement. It has two big bay windows, which creates soft natural light in my studio. This is where all my babies, toddlers, and small kids come for studio portraits. I use reflectors a lot in my studio sessions.

Last weekend, I had an opportunity to learn studio lighting in a photographer’s grungy studio in Kansas City downtown. It is my first time experiencing studio lighting. With my mentor Jim’s guidance of setting up studio lights, I got lots of great shots of my model friend Staci. Staci and I talked before the studio model session to brainstorm on the looks we wanted for this session. Since this would be in a studio with solid color backdrops, I designed 3 simple looks for her. The first one would be a white shirt full body shot look. The second outfit I suggested is a high fashion cocktail dress. The last one is a strapless top for over the shoulder head shot. It turned out that Jim has exactly the same setup I had in mind for these 3 looks, but I didn’t have the perfect lens for shooting full body model shots. Jim is so nice to lend me his 85mm f1.2 lens for the full body shots. Thank you!

With studio lighting, I have full control of almost all the settings on my camera. We used light meter to test out the settings to enter to our cameras before start shooting each setup/look. I have never had a session like this one. It was so hard to decide which pictures to keep and which ones to throw away. Almost all of them are good! My favorite ones are the head shots. The setup is just perfect. The lighting is so beautiful, especially the hair light that make Staci’s hair glow.

Staci has lots of experience in modeling, which helps me a lot on my first model session. She can make 30 different consecutive poses within 30 seconds! From her past photo session experience, she also showed me a trick she learned from another photographer. We shot one unplanned scene in front of a bathroom window. Staci suggested to hold a white paper board to reflect the light behind her while she’s standing in front of the window. The window light behind her creates a foggy hazy effect on the portrait. This is my second favorite from the session.

I learned so much from this session, including light metering, shooting in Manual mode and RAW, and studio lighting setup. Thanks so much to Jim for guiding me through the entire session and Staci for being my gorgeous model! I can’t do this without you guys!

Studio photography here I come! Although I will still shoot using natural light, I will also use off-camera flash in the future. Looks like I will need to invest some gears next…

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