Riley

When someone has beautiful eyes, the first thing I always think of is where am I going to put the flash so I can make sure that their eyes pop out no matter what goes on in the photo.

Riley has some of the brightest eyes I have probably ever photographed. I knew that my flash was going to always be directly on her so I could get that pop in her eyes and make them stand out even more than they already do. I also knew that I wanted to put her around a wall so we could fill in shadows and have some really vibrant images.

The first shots were just a warm up. She sat down and I put greenery as the background. These came out ok, but they weren’t really going with the style I was trying to achieve. I tried a few different poses but I couldn’t get it right.

Then we went to a nearby building and she stood by a big wall. Blinding her with sun on one side and the reflection on the other side, we got some really bright images. We were slowly getting to the colors and style that I had in mind.

We proceeded to go into the shade and this is where the images came out looking great. With the flash filling the shadows, her skin tone was saturated with color and still her eyes came out even more colorful and bright.

We mixed poses often and still got amazing light no matter where we moved to. As long as that big wall was bouncing sunlight into us, the images had a uniform look to them.

After a while we shot some black and white that she specifically wanted. This was a lot of fun too. I tried to play with the shadows hitting the wall, but even they were still bright.

The sun began to set and we had exhausted our time so it was time to call it a day. We got so many great photos and because of the lighting, there was going to be very little editing done. And even less color correcting since the lighting was simply perfect.