New Portrait Shoot and More Editing Advice

All right, here's some new portrait work, I know I'm on a roll! This work features the wonderful Jill Green back for her second shoot with me. Jill's a great subject once she gets into the groove, but that also means I have to shoot a lot of images to capture those awesome images. I'm not complaining, it's time well spent in the studio. This time though I may have shoot too much cause I ended up with a huge file full of favourites, 27 to be exact. My editing process goes as such, group the photos together by type, like full body, mid-shots and close up for example. Then I proceed to find the similar images in those groupings, the best poses stay, the others go into a "No" folder, there not bad, so I'm not just going to delete them. In fact I don't delete anything, my raw images get backed-up and stored on an external hard drive, this way I'll always have them just in case. You might not want to use an image for your website, but the person might really want that picture, take this one for example:

I'm not going to use it on my site, but it feature's Jill's new tattoo, so I know she'll most likely want at least this digital copy, so I put it here in my blog for her. Sometimes I'll see an image that's awesome, I love it, but it doesn't fit with the thematic flow on my site, or represent the person in the image very much at all. I still want to keep it and have a good print version saved on my computer and backed up in the external hard drive and eventually a disc. This image here makes her look really depressed, I cropped with a lot of negative space so she looked very lonely. 

It's a very compelling image on it's own, but doesn't represent her personality, which is what my portrait work is about. This I probably wouldn't even post on here normally, but rather keep it in case an idea for a series came into my mind at a later date and time. The next step is boiling down to no more then 10 solid images for the blog and then a top 3 for my website, that's the guideline I'm going by now. It forces you to really think and pick the most compelling work in your mind. Every photographer I know of does this process, some more then others, but it should become second nature after a while. Anyway, here are the top picks for the blog, the first 3 are the website pics, and thanks again Jill.

P.S.  - Rain really sucks sometimes 

-Larry M. Holder

Preview Image From The Steampunk Project

Ok, now the update on my art project. So once again the model featured is Kayleigh Smith, thank you Kayleigh. This image is not the one I'm using for the final piece but rather out of the 100 shots that we did, I felt this one stood on it's own as a interesting portrait. It will also give you an idea of what the images will look like, at least the photographic portion. Enjoy!

Hope this sparks some interest, keep in mind this is all done in camera, no fancy editing going on here.

-Larry M. Holder 

Natural Beauty In Your Back Yard

Ok so I have one more update before the new art images go up. I just wanted to show a couple of images I took in a local park here in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Most people think there's not much here to look at or really see as far as nature goes, but if you look close enough, you can find small wonders right in your backyard.

-Larry M. Holder

More Portrait Work

Holy Updates! Back with more portrait work, once again featuring the wonderfully talented Kayleigh Smith. One interesting thing to mention about the colour in this shoot, the background actually had a red and green light on it, I guess colour light theory isn't theory all the time. The green almost cancelled out all the red light leaving only a hint of yellowish orange, pretty cool effect though!

This was done at the same time as my first in my steampunk series, so guess what the next update is!

-Larry M. Holder

Huge Pottery Shoot

This is work for a huge pottery shoot I did last week. Featured is the work of Valerie Jean. I was able to use my new 60mm Macro lens on this job and was very happy I could do incredible detail shots, which is exactly what she was after. There's a tonne of photos that aren't going on the website due to space, but I would like to share most of the entire collection on here, as not only is it awesome work, I don't believe there anything I wouldn't want people to see from this shoot.

-Larry M. Holder