Randall is seen here posing in the freight elevator at Heather Windsor’s studio in Bowmanville, Ontario. This is pretty much the hottest photo I’ve ever taken of Randall; she amazes me every time we shoot by constantly stepping it up. During our shoot, she acknowledged studying the contact sheets from our previous shoots to learn her best angles and poses. This is why she can look six feet tall in this photo despite being nowhere near that. Is she ready for the Victoria’s Secret catalogue? I think so.

In summary, Randall is the awesomeness and I love her. Can’t wait ’til we shoot again.

Wardrobe: H&M lingerie that I got on sale ($7 for the bra, $5 for the thong).

Lighting: Profoto Pro Ring 2 and daylight.

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Here’s me and Randall in the studio on Saturday. Keep checking back for the results of this shoot!

Music by Goldfrapp and Richard X.

Ryan (me, front) + Randall (hotness, back) = RSQUARED.

Video still from today’s shoot. Stay tuned for the results.

The studio is in Bowmanville, which is a long trek for me, but totally worth it. A couple weeks ago, I shot a familiar face for those of you who follow the blog — Samantha. I’ve only processed one shot from the shoot so far:

The pose and outfit was Sam’s idea. I lit her with an Alien Bees 1600 strobe in a Photoflex softbox, up high to camera right. The background is dark grey seamless paper, lit with a Nikon SB-800 on a tripod. The SB-800′s zoom head was set to about 135mm, for a narrow beam of light across the background, just enough to give Sam some separation.

But I also did another fun time-lapse video:

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The video is composed of 2,290 separate pictures, glued together using QuickTime Pro (version 7, as they’ve stripped this functionality out of the newer versions). I was using my ancient Nikon D70S tethered to a MacBook Pro running Sofortbild. Because the D70S doesn’t have an intervalometer built in, the Sofortbild software is necessary to accomplish pictures at set intervals. Despite setting the intervals to one second, I ended up with photos that were five seconds apart. I suspect this is due to the D70S’s slow buffering, processing, and/or transfer speeds, but I don’t know for sure as I have no real way to test it.

Music: Anger (Rare Force 2 Meg Mix) by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

It took about 30 shots to get this one. Self portraits are something I’ve never been good at, nor even interested in. However, after shooting a model today in the studio, the light streaming in from the windows was too good to pass up.

The biggest challenge was getting myself in focus, since I can’t see myself through the viewfinder. I put a Nikon D700 on a tripod with an 85mm f/1.4 lens. After a few attempts at guessing the focus and failing, I eventually removed the camera from the tripod and brought it with me to where I would stand for the portrait. I then pointed the camera at the tripod and focused on it, to simulate the distance. Initially I was trying shots at f/2.8 because I wanted to make sure the depth of field was shallow enough to throw the background out of focus. This left very little leeway for any mistakes in my distance from the camera, as even an inch or two closer or further away could render myself blurry. I eventually bumped up the aperture to f/4 which gave me a bit more room to play with, without impacting the background too much.

The light was very, very warm as the sun was setting, but I cooled it down and desaturated it using Adobe Lightroom.

I’ve posted photos from this shoot before, but now you can glimpse behind the scenes to see how it was done in this time lapse video.

Model: Randall Sutton. Music: “Lovely Allen” by Holy Fuck.

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Heather is a friend of mine who takes pictures and today she opened her brand new studio space in Bowmanville, Ontario.

But before we talk about that, you need to know more about her!

Heather friended me on Facebook about a year ago, after realizing that we had each shot two of the same models. We hit it off right away, sharing our best photographic stories and insights. With Heather based a fair distance away from me in Oshawa, our first real-life meeting didn’t happen til many months later… at Hooters. Yes, Hooters. We had fried pickles and they were delicious. Hush.

She doesn’t like talking about herself on her website, but she’s a bit more chatty on her blog. And if you like what you see there, join the Facebook fan page.

Heather is a hardworking mom and fabulous photographer, so when she asked me to drive the 70km or so to Bowmanville and photograph her grand opening, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

There were tasty treats from Custom Cakeworks:

Check out this crazy nice wallpaper:

The size of these windows makes me very excited:

Mayor of the Municipality of Clarington, Jim Abernethy, even came out for the ribbon cutting:

I’ve been bugging Heather a lot about when I can start using the space to shoot in, and I’m glad the answer is… now! I hope to get in there before the end of February and have a whole bunch of brand new content for everyone to see.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Here’s a simple headshot we did with ghetto clamshell lighting:

Hasselblad H3D, ISO 100, f/11

Check out more clamshell lighting examples at Lighting Essentials.

I shoot almost everything with just one light. Whether that light is sunlight, a window, a bounced hotshoe flash, or a studio strobe with an umbrella or a softbox… it’s almost always just one.

It’s not that I can’t or won’t shoot with more lights, but as I’ve described here before, I keep things as simple as possible when I shoot. I’d rather spend time interacting with the subject than spend gluttonous amounts of time setting up half a dozen lights, only to use them for five minutes worth of shooting. Some might say that means I care stunningly little about the process and just want the quickest means to the end. But for the type of photos I do, it simply wouldn’t benefit the final product.

Randall, above, was lit with one Alien Bees strobe in a Photoflex softbox. In fact, most of everything on the blog so far has been lit with a single source. It wraps her face nicely and there’s just enough light to highlight the exposed eye, which I love.

Christine, below, has called me out on her blog. We’re gonna have a bit of a blogging war it seems. Stay tuned…