Photosession with Agnieszka

For this session I had a pleasure to work with Agnieszka Tokarz. She is a great model and just looks great on photos. Definitelly it was not the last time I worked with her. For this session we decided to have four different clothes setup, and later on choose the best one. In the end I realised that all of them were great, so the results were much better than I even expected. I also decide to start shooting around 1hour before golden hour. This way I get some time to warm up and some time to shoot best colors during the day.

During the session I was heavily using reflector on a stand to light up models face and when the light conditions started to getting worse I also add external flash triggered remotely to be bounced from reflector. It's my first approach to bounce light that way instead to directly flash on model and effects were much better that I expect. For a big reflector (2mx1m) this kind of light diffusion adds lot of soft light that I usually need more that hard light.

During the session I also had some time to try abit with a Canon 100mm 2.8. Results were as good (or even better) as I expected from this lens for a portrait photography, and I'm currently collecting money to buy one to my own collection.

I get back with more than 200 photos and started with very difficult and long way of selecting best candidates to work with. This is the most tedious part as you need usually few passes trough to select roughly 30-50 good candidates so it means more than 400 photos being watched carefully for: a) composition, b) distractions, c) sharpness.

Postprocess starts to kinda work better and better for me with every session. I start to have my own workflow that produces results I'm satisied with, without spending 8h on every photo. Currently I do love adding some light accent to a subject using curves with radial layer attached to it. Additionally I do alot of partial color correction on models body as colors does not go so good naturally out of the camera. I also super-satified of a DxO processing engine and I'm currently using it as a main tool to render RAWs to work with them in Photoshop.

Still alot to learn, but with every session I feel a good progress is being done. Feel free to ask for anything in comments. (click on photo for large version).