I actually did this assignment TWICE -- and it required quite a good chunk of my (AND my husband's!) weekend time. First I worried about having
no model except my faithful hubby... but then it turned out that I would have models for TWO sittings, which I scheduled for Saturday night and Sunday morning.
It all started on Friday night when Irv and I went to Walmart to buy shop lights. On Saturday morning, I bought a tripod. Preparations followed on Saturday afternoon when we set up the FIRST studio, which was in the living room (lamps moved from family room to living room, sheet ironed and hung over curtain rod at window, couch and tables pushed towards dining room, and etc.). After we'd returned from church and had dinner, our neighbors Dave and Laurie came over to model for me. I served wine with cheese and crackers first, to loosen them (and myself!) up a little bit.
It was a really fun time, and Dave and Laurie were
such good sports, going along with and even furthering my suggestions for poses. I used all manual settings on my camera, though, and was less than satisfied with the quality of my pictures even as I was taking them. They were terribly grainy at the suggested 1600 ISO, even while using the tripod, and though this improved some at 800, it was still not quite right. I kept flipping between the various exposure compensation positions and kept the white balance on tungsten (I didn't think to try the auto white balance setting until after the fact).
On Sunday morning, my husband had to relocate the studio to the basement. This was necessary since the class had been instructed to "start [the set-up of lights] in a
dark room" -- and since my first studio had been set up in front of the living room window! Again too late, I wished that I would have thought about this on Saturday afternoon so as to save Irv all of his extra effort... but it never occurred to me then that the living room studio would not work for a morning/almost noon sitting on Sunday. Live and Learn!
Before my friend Evgenia arrived for my second portrait sitting, I took the time to review the on-line materials about three point lighting. As a result of that review, I made several revisions to the second studio. Specifically, I reduced the wattage of the bulbs in the fill and the back lights. On Saturday, I'd had 150 watts in the main light, 150 watts in the back light, and 100 watts in the fill light. On Sunday, the main light was 150 watts, the fill light was 60 watts, and the back light was 60 watts. This time, I used automatic settings for the white balance, ISO, and exposure compensation and disabled the flash function. Each time I turned the camera off to stage the next series of photos, however, the auto flash was re-enabled when I turned the camera back on... and sometimes I did not remember to take care of this until AFTER I'd taken a picture or two... (SIGH!)
My results during the second portrait sitting on Sunday were, on the whole, much better than those from Saturday night. I regret that Dave and Laurie's shots didn't turn out better because I'd really wanted to give them an 8x10" print to frame. I spent quite a lot of time editing their pictures and organizing them to contribute to an entertaining format, though, and I'm hoping that the photos will look okay as 4x6" prints. I plan to make a small photo album to give to them as a gift, instead.
You can view my pictures of Dave and Laurie
here.The pictures of Evgenia are
here.
This week's assignment was to use some of our color shots to experiment with modifications using black and white -- and even to play God by allowing shots of color to show up in and accentuate select aspects of otherwise black and white photographs. 
