This post finally winds up the story started in “Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them” and then continued in parts two and three, of 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.

Winding our day down, we came across a sleepy cat happy to sit with a stone fox (Inari shrines are known for their foxes).

The cat was not in the mood to pose, or even open its eyes (though it was clearly awake)...

The cat would have none of it. The best I got was this:

Anyway, back to the task at hand, photographing Yuko...

You can tell this one is a bit forced. We were getting tired and running out of ideas, but it had been a wonderful experience.

We came upon an interesting bit of architecture that I felt really held potential...

As much potential as it had, we weren't tapping it, so made a note to come back another day.

We exited the shrine grounds at a side gate, and on the way back to the main entrance through the adjacent residential area, we came upon a big sign in the street. I asked Paul and Yuko to pose:

I'm sad to think what must have prompted the need for such a sign, but since it was there, we had fun with it. After informing Paul of its meaning, he posed for one more...

Back near the entrance to the shrine, I noticed a lady sitting alone in the middle of a colorful scene...

And Paul and Yuko chatting with their own nice backdrop...

At the very end I tried to pose both Yuko and Paul in a group shot...

Paul couldn't get the “mirrored pose” concept, and apparently I couldn't describe it well enough. We were pathetic:

But it was a fund end to a fun day. Hope to do it again some time.

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 open their first floor as a cafe.)

The big window next to Yuko made for gorgeous light, but the cafe also had random incandescent and fluorescent lights, killing an easy white-balance solution, so rather than have half her face tinged in green, I went with a B&W treatment, but I'm not sure it's really working...

It was easier to work with the light when she turned away from the window to talk to Paul; though the light was not as directional, the result is better...

Paul and I had ice coffee, which at many places come pre-packaged in cartons like milk, but here they actually fresh-brewed special ice-coffee beans, and brought it to you piping hot to pour over ice...

Refreshed, we went back out to continue up the mountain and to try more (of the same poses we've already seen in the first two posts)...

It wasn't crowded, so with patience and luck we could get long shots of the path all to ourselves.

Despite the use of the ColorChecker in this area, I couldn't come up with a realistic color for the shots here, so I have the next one in B&W, and the lead photo of this post in mostly-desaturated pastel.

There was a large expanse of the mountain left to explore, but we were running out of time, so we decided to save the rest for another day. On the way back we ran into this nice family, I think from New Zealand.

And one of them kindly snapped a shot for us:

At some point Yuko paused in the shade of a building to put on some lip balm, which the camera could not let pass...

A stone fence overlooking a slope of the mountain provided what I thought would be a nice place for a portrait, so I posed Yuko, who apparently felt it was silly...

But I had the last laugh, 'cause I got pretty much the shot I had envisioned:

Paul also tried at the same location...

Paul's shot has more distortion than I care for, and I'd think it's because he's too close at 70mm, but this next shot by me at 85mm is actually probably from a closer location (because Yuko fills the frame more than 70mm→85mm seems to explain), yet it's not afflicted by the distortion I see above. I don't think it's either lens (both are pro-level lenses), so I'm not sure how to explain it. It's probably her leaning-back pose.

We were almost back to the parking lot, but there's one more post worth of photos I want to share.

Continued here...

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...

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 a natural and infectious smile, but had no experience in front of the camera — only slightly less than Paul and I behind it — so things started off as one might expect: stiff as a board.

I knew I had to give her time to get used to us and our lenses pointed at her, so the location was great for letting us explore as a group, to alternate between being silly and trying real portraiture. I have no clue what I'm doing with portraiture except to try to get the subject to forget, even if for a fleeting moment, about the camera. In that short instant, perhaps the real person is exposed, and therein lies the shot. Or so I imagine.

With that in mind, I don't expect much at the beginning... we'll try poses and such, but we're still warming up to each other, so I expect nothing to come of them but a step toward something better later in the session.

Part of my trying to make her at ease in front of the camera is to be silly myself in front of the camera, so at one point I demonstrated (in front of the passing crowds) the kind of pose I was looking for.

Of course I felt supremely silly, but it's only fair, since I'm asking her to pose the same way. (Though to be fair to me, a beautiful woman posing as a beautiful woman is not as silly as a geeky man posing as a beautiful woman.)

To help demonstrate how fun and easy this all was, when I saw a couple (mid-60s?) in the crowd watching us with big smiles, I turned to them and said “now your turn!”, and posed them as a couple in the same way I had posed Yuko, and photographed them with their camera. Everyone had fun, and perhaps they got a nice shot out of it. And Yuko became more comfortable both with me and as a model, I hope.

Another technique I thought might help her feel at ease in front of the camera was to have her take my camera for some shots.

With that silliness out of the way, I went the opposite direction to “pensive”, perhaps about a far-away love...

And then we move on.

This particular section of path was not photogenic, but I paused here for more shots because it kept the flow going. The goal was not “good results”, but another step on the way to having her feel comfortable in front of the camera.

Yuko was finally starting to get comfortable, and so were we, so the photos steadily improved.

Continued here...

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 in turning it in, and such.)

Anyway, I like the B&W treatment above, but here's the uncropped color version...

Zak himself prefers this next shot instead. The difference in mouth and eyes from above is quite subtle, but the result is vastly different, I think.

Zak likes this one, but I think it's relatively flat. The eyes are essentially unchanged from before, yet somehow this one seems to lack the twinkle and life of the first. At least, that's my view.

Zak's view is probably just him trying to project his cynical side, but I've known him long enough to know what's really behind that façade, well revealed in the following shot:

This was the first “formal” (so to speak) portrait I've done of Zak, but I've snapped plenty of shots of him while sitting across the table from him at a coffee shop, such as this one from January, or this one from five years ago.