John Kung

This is part of a series of photos I’m shooting for a personal project called “My Favourite Place”. The premise is pretty simple, I want to shoot people in their favourite place, somewhere they have some connection to, and to show them interacting with the environment. It isn’t meant to be a landscape, these are portraits, and as such I want to put the emphasis squarely on the subject in the place.

This is Elle, and her favourite place is Tench Reserve on the banks of the Nepean River in Penrith, west of Sydney. This was one of two set ups that we did that day, the other being on the banks of the river itself. We found this great spot in amongst a clump of trees that was covered with fallen pine needles, and I asked her to sit and do whatever it was that she would normally do when she was here by herself. I was looking for a slightly ‘unreal’ look, as if I had taken just this spot and moved it into the studio, so I under-exposed the frame by 1 or 2 stops (I don’t quite remember!) and set a bare flash from camera left to light the subject. If you look at the far left of the frame you can see a tree that’s quite brightly lit; the flash was just next to that tree. I love the look of a bare strobe for full body portraits, but it was partly due to necessity — I tried to shoot with a shoot-through umbrella and even at 1/1 power it didn’t give me enough light.

I had never been to Tench Reserve before the shoot (not a risk I would take with a paying client! But I like the spontaneity of not having a fully formed plan and working on the spot) so while I had an idea of what kind of shot I was looking for (something amongst the trees, something by the river etc) I didn’t have a specific shot in mind. I did, however, cheat a little by checking the place out using Google Maps, so I wasn’t completely blind.

There wasn’t much post-production done, just mucked about with the saturation and white balance and contrast to get to the palette I wanted for the shot. This was done through Adobe Lightroom, didn’t use Photoshop at all. I find Lightroom to be mostly adequate for editing work, I try not to use Photoshop too much because I find that introduces an extra magnitude of complexity that I find distracting.

That’s pretty much it for this shot, very simple setup. Next time I’ll write about the other shot we did that day.