Two shoot day

Since I’m an amateur, I usually only do at most one shoot a day, but today I ended up being double booked with one shoot in the home studio and the other on location.  I don’t have a dedicated space for my home studio, so I have to put it up and take it down whenever I do a shoot.   It ends up being quite a bit of work, but it does produce reasonable results.  Location shoots are fun, though they present their own challenges getting enough shots.

I did a headshot shoot in the home studio for some twins.  They’re young professionals and needed some professional shots for their school and and internships.   I set up a four light shoot with a simple white backdrop with a soft box key light, a shoot-through umbrella as a fill and a pair of strip boxes shooting down as hair lights.  we knocked out a couple outfit changes for each and a couple of candid photos of them as a pair.    I used a 135mm f/1.8 and a 85mm f/1.4.  Both work great for studio work.  Today I had the 135 on the APS-C sensor bringing the range to an effective 202.5mm, which is great for portraits.  I had the 85 on the full-frame.

In the afternoon, I went over with my husband to an eating contest.  It was held outdoors with beautiful Bay Area weather.  We set up a two-light photobooth to take photos of the victors and then had another camera doing candids.  For the photobooth, we used an APS-C camera with a 16-50mm f/2.8 lens.  For the candids we used a 24-70mm f/2.8, 16mm f/2.8, 85mm f/1.4 and 135mm f/1.8.  The 135mm f/1.8 is a relatively new lens for us, but it is has quickly become one of our favorites.  It’s a Zeiss Sonnar lens design and produces crisp images with beautiful colors.  It’s amazing when we switch over the 24-70 to the 135, the change in image quality is stunning.  If it wasn’t for the lack of range, I might stick with it for entire candid shoots.

The eating contest produced a lot of great shots and had a lot of scenes.  The best scenes were the pie eating contest, the Odwalla drinking contest and the hot wing eating contest.  We got to meet some great people, I also got to meet some of my husband’s acquaintances.