When It's Not My Turn

When I attend my Ottawa Photography Model Meetup Group events, I'm never alone. There are usually at least three other photographers, plus the event organizer and the model.

We're pretty organized and our leader, Mike, keeps us on track over the two or three hours that we have.

When we sign up for an event, we know what the theme is and the model or models that we'll be working with. Leading up to the event, we usually come up with some ideas that we can present to the model and the group, and everyone is usually accommodating. If there's something that the model is not comfortable doing, they will speak up and that's the end of the conversation.

Respect wins out over everything else.

The photographers take turns shooting the model. During that time, the model focuses on that photographer and only that photographer, and the photographer generally has two or three minutes to capture their shots.

If we're shooting in a studio, we all have triggers for the flashes mounted to our cameras, but those who are waiting their turn have either their camera or the trigger turned off. Only the photographer who has that time is allowed to trigger the flashes.

But while we wait for our turn, we are allowed to continue to snap photos if it's all right with the model. We need to stay out of the main photographer's way and, as I said, our flash triggers must be turned off.

Many of the other photographers reset their cameras so that they can continue to shoot. Lately, though, I have chosen a different route.

I use my smartphone.

True, in low light I can rarely get a shot nearly as good as I can with my D-SLR, but I tend to get even more creative with my phone. Not artistically creative—after all, the photographer in control directs the model—but creative with my exposures and how I process the image afterward.

Take a shoot that I attended during the summer, with New Zealand model, Lucy. We were in a photo studio that used to be a squash court, and there were four photographers, plus our organizer, Mike. Lucy was posing in high and low key lighting, moving with various fabrics.

When it wasn't my turn to shoot, I put my Nikon D750 down and reached into my back pocket to retrieve my Samsung Galaxy S24. Because we were working in low light, my camera wanted to use the night mode to enhance the exposure.

But night mode requires that you and your subject stay still for a couple of seconds while it collects the data from the sensor and exposes evenly for the environment. While it's pretty good at remaining stable for whoever is holding the camera, there's nothing it can do to compensate for a moving subject.

So, I have to disable the night mode and switch to Pro mode, where I can control the ISO, shutter speed, and white balance (I let the phone determine the best aperture). Even then, I rarely get super-sharp images, but my smartphone does a pretty decent job.

Earlier this week, I was clearing photos off my phone and storing them in a database on an external drive. When I came to photos of Lucy, I realized there were a lot of photos that I hadn't touched from that shoot—most of which had been captured with my phone.

I guess that I should say, at this point, that this post may not be suitable for viewing at work. While there is no nudity, there is a bare back and butt cleavage.

Here is the unedited photo, captured with my Galaxy S24:

It's not bad but of course, the main photographer is in the frame, there's some blue tape on the floor, and the scene needs some love. I haven't edited the photo prior to writing this post, and I worked on it as I wrote.

The first thing to do was to import the image into my editing software and cut the photographer out of the frame. I also used the blemish tool to remove the tape that was on the floor.

Next, I used a vignette around Lucy to darken areas that I wanted excluded from the overall image and to give more focus to Lucy.

I could still see harsh, circles from when I used a black paint brush to remove the photographer, so I needed to increase the contrast of the overall image. At the same time, I used the Smart Photo Fix tool to modify saturation, white balance, and other features. Usually, I'd turn this kind of photo into a black-and-white image but this time, I decided to keep the colour.

As with other photos that I've captured in a studio, I've wanted to add more space around Lucy, so I increased the canvas size. I didn't think much about the dimensions of the canvas, only that I wanted Lucy to appear in the centre of it, so when I used the previous settings, I got more space around her than I needed.

No worries. Nothing a little crop couldn't fix.

Maybe a little tighter.

Much better. We're almost there but I'd like to add a bit of a glow to Lucy, so I added the Glamour filter.

I like it but it's missing something. Let's try a bit of fill flash (since I didn't use one when I captured this snapshot).

That's it. What do you think?

Though my smartphone doesn't yet match the capabilities of capturing a photo with as good a quality as my Nikon D750, it comes pretty darned close. Lucy isn't crisp in this photo but after I've done some editing and added a soft glow from a filter, this photo passes as a good final image.

After all, when I shared some of my photos from that shoot, some of those images were captured with my smartphone. Can you tell which ones were?

Happy Friday!