Archive for the 'Portraiture Practice' Category

My practice with portraiture, both in front of and behind the camera.

Photoshoot with Yuko at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, Part 3

Continuing the long story started in "Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them" and continued in part two, this is the third of what looks to be a four-part series about a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did with a mutual friend, Yuko, at the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto.

It was a first in many respects for all of us. We had a fun time.

All those photos and all that silliness makes one thirsty, so we stopped at a cafe for coffee. (There are numerous private houses on the shrine grounds that [...]


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Photoshoot with Yuko at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, Part 2

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 [...]


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Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them: Yuko at the Fushimi Inari Shrine

The quick portrait of Zak Braverman I did the other day reminded me that I hadn't written yet about a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did in April, of a mutual friend, Yuko.

I've been trying to get better with portraiture for about a year, but my limited experience so far has been mostly with guys. Last April I did do a photoshoot with a photogenic married couple, including some nice shots of the wife; with that under my belt, a few days later Paul and I met Yuko at the dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine in eastern Kyoto.

Yuko has [...]


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Quick Portrait: Zak Braverman in a Coffee Shop

Zak needed a headshot for some kind of online profile related to his shakuhachi-flute playing, so I met up with him for five minutes yesterday morning at a coffee shop for a quick shoot.

The lighting was horrible -- mixed fluorescent, LED, incandescent, and daylight -- so we should have moved elsewhere, but time was short so we went with it. (I lost quite a bit of time on the way because I found someone's wallet in the middle of the street, and it took a while to find a police box that was manned, and then there's paperwork involved [...]


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Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Haradanien Garden: John and Ai

I recently met Paul Barr and a pair of married friends of his for lunch, and we ended up taking the opportunity to visit the Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-west Kyoto for a quick couple photoshoot.

It's still on my list to do a proper blog post about the place (update: it's here), from my visit last week from which so far I've posted only one wigglegram, but it's a daunting prospect because the site is incomparably wonderful. Anyway, you'll see a bit of the site in these pictures today.

It was John and Ai's first visit, so initially we [...]


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