Cloudy Days In Claremont
I’ve seen way too many YouTube videos of photo shoots. I probably watch 1-5 a day. I’m constantly amazed by the great results these photographers get every time they go out and shoot with natural light.
One constant I see throughout these videos is that they seem to always shoot in cloudy days. That makes a lot of sense for the style that they go for. Most are somewhat desaturated but yet bright photos. The diffused light from the clouds makes for really flattering lighting.
With cloudy skies predicted for the whole day, I grabbed my models and we headed to this beautiful area with lots of beautiful little places to shoot.
I wanted to shoot with some vintage lenses just to make things a little more interesting for me. Thankfully my models have the patience and with it being a beautiful chill day, it was just nice being outside.
After the first initial photos, I realized that it was very easy to make people look a bit odd from the distortion these older lenses create. Some poses were pretty bad and made both of my models look pretty weird. Distortion is really bad at some apertures for some reason.
Karina is extremely photogenic so when I was getting fringing and blurt around her face, I thought my lens was broken.
She tried different poses too and I eventually figured out that I couldn’t shoot at f1.4. The images just came out really aweful.
I took photos up until my memory card filled up. Testing as many poses as I could and failing at most. I really need to practice posing with different focal lengths. I can see it’s one of my weak points right now.
Editing was another issue. I wanted to edit in the style that I see on these YouTube videos, but because of the contrast I was getting from the lenses, the colors would pop so easily with a few edits so I really struggled between both styles of editing. In the end, I made a mess of things and worked with both styles. Something I really want to start trying to avoid in future shoots.
Over all, I really loved being out in the California clouds, specially in a beautiful area like this one.
