Picking up from yesterday's “Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them”, the rambling story of a photo shoot of first-time model Yuko by clueless photographers (Paul Barr and me), yesterday ended with Yuko sitting in the shade in front of a lake on the grounds of the dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto...

When it was my turn, I shot a few different looks before I realized that I wasn't really getting any of the background...

The shallow depth of field, which I normally like a lot, made the background completely irrelevant, losing out on the pretty shrine building and the lake that would have added to the shot. Perhaps my squished nose was cutting off oxygen to the brain...

I tried stopping down the aperture considerably to bring in more of the background, but it was just too bright, so my whole approach was wrong....

I had better luck when Paul shot her again, and I ignored the background...

Then it was off to continue exploring the expansive shrine grounds, and more fun and games...

At one point I found a place that I could get to a high vantage above Yuko, so tried some very feminine poses that might take advantage of the situation...

The two photos above being a case in point, it never ceases to amaze me how two photos can be both “almost identical” and “utterly different” at the same time, when the slight difference is in facial expression or other “body language” element that humans are inherently attuned to.

Once she got comfortable, it was hard to go wrong with Yuko. “Look this way”, “Play with your hair”, “Think of you future husband”, “Think of a cute puppy”, etc. (To be clear, instructions like these don't usually result directly in the look you're after, but they lead to more back-and-forth banter and the associated roller-coaster of fleeting facial expressions, which you then pluck into immortality in 1/_500^th of a second increments.)

This is where this post's lead photo (“Girl Next Door”) came in.

The whole while I'm taking these shots, my camera “owns” Yuko's attention, but Paul is making his own photos to great success. At the same time as my “Girl Next Door” shot, Paul got this one:

Paul and I then switched places...

Paul didn't stand up completely straight, and so ended up being too close to Yuko, resulting in a perspective that's generally not quite so appealing for portraiture...

We interrupted our shoot to give our attention to another young, highly-photogenic model...

Yuko tried in roughly the same spot, but the lighting was a bit top heavy...

I had her try spinning her head so that her hair would fly like in a shampoo commercial, but that wasn't working either...

But she was always photogenic while ignoring the camera and just chatting with Paul...

I wanted to explore the feminine from-above close-up again when the opportunity presented itself...

Paul's shot of the same moment was better:

I got her to relax her gaze, which also relaxed her hand into something more natural, so this got another step closer to what I was going for...

... and then brought her attention to the camera and immediately snapped the shot:

I used this photo at the top of part one of this series. I really like it.

Paul and I again switched places. I'll end this part of the series with two photos taken at about the same time. I love both, but Paul's is better...

Continued here...