blondes

The beautiful Drake girls were lucky enough recently to score a raffled prize of a photo session with us, and WE were lucky enough to have their name drawn! It was also a good chance to show off what we excel at: natural photos of beautiful people in locations that are special to them. When the weather is nice, we like to work outdoors (though we have a reputation for enjoying torturing models in the most uncomfortable types of weather) so we happily headed out to the Drake farm to shoot in trees, fields, on rock piles, etc.There is not one of these girls that isn't stunning, their mother included... We did some grouped shots and then used each scene for some portraits. While each set of shots have about the same level of final exposure, they've got remarkably different settings. The trees were thick and green in the woods which made a dark canopy, and the fields had full sun. It's a misconception that photogs like bright sunlight actually... Sun = shadows = tricky... So the shots in the woods were at about 1/60th of a second at a moderate ISO (1600) while the field shots were stopped down a bit to f/4 (yes, we consider this 'very' stopped down for our preferences) and at 1/1000 and a lower ISO. Shots were batch-processed for color and exported.We've been gritting our teeth as we look at heavily Photoshopped images lately. We're not purists (we're shooting digital afterall!) but we take a very hands-off approach to processed images. This is fodder for a longer post, and a topic in our classes (one is coming up in Dec) but we kinda pride ourselves on shooting the final shot when we hit the shutter release. Are you paying us to shoot or are you paying us to edit!? The Drake girls are no exception. Beauty needs no manipulation.