Earlier in the summer I posted about my bare-bones ghetto beauty shoot with Amy that turned out spectacularly well given the circumstances. The shots of Erika above were done in much the same vein, but only because I didn’t know any better at the time.

These shots are from nearly five years ago, when I was armed with only a lowly Nikon D70 and a 24-85mm lens — not exactly high end gear by any stretch of the imagination. The shoot took place in my living room, where I set up a four-foot wide roll of white seamless paper. Four-foot seamless is barely wide enough to shoot a single person so every single photo had to be cropped and/or erased to eliminate the bookshelves that were creeping in from each side. Also, seamless paper + carpet = bad combination. Definitely need a hard surface to put that stuff on. You can imagine the damage that Erika’s heels did to the paper.

Lighting was simple (non-TTL) hot-shoe flash units in umbrellas. Most of the magic here comes via the post-processing, where I erased the bookshelves, made the background whiter, shifted the images to high key, and glued two together on one canvas.

It won’t exactly get published in the pages of W or anything, but it’s just another example of how good results can be achieved with sub-par circumstances.

This is the fantastic mess of images as they looked when they were straight out of the camera:

Brutal. I’m so glad I mostly know what I’m doing now, compared to then. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I wish I could have another shot at shooting Erika. Alas, she moved back to her native Bermuda a while ago, so I’ll have to make a trip down there if I want to make it happen.