Several weeks ago we held a stock photography shoot on Long Island, with the intention of amassing images for both commercial sale and purposed as a portfolio muster. We were all set to go in regards to hosting with catering, shuttles to and from the train station (many of our participants were coming in from Manhattan), and one of the finest makeup artists I have the pleasure of knowing. What we didn't count on was 14 hours straight of rain to force us entirely indoors! We practically needed an ark to get from one end of the property to the other, but we found that a large wedding/catering tent we had set up as a contingency did the trick just fine.

The shoot started off with portraits and headshots, lit both with studio lights as well as with natural light. The subject of this blog entry will be just the natural light images.

With the constant rain, we had precisely what we needed for soft, even lighting - the clouds were very accommodating in that regard! That left us with the need to simply control that top-down light a little bit, making sure the ladies looked their best.

The great thing about natural light is that you can reflect it, block it, and sculpt it to your needs. To start, we sat them near the edge of the rain cover, so that some light came down at an angle that offered highlights in their hair. This essentially serves as light number one. The ambient light was fine for light number two, creating near-shadowless illumination on their faces. But to make the light completely shadowless, we filled in by using white reflectors below them, just out of frame. In addition to lifting shadows on their features, this also lit up their eyes quite a bit.

Lastly, we were sure to be careful choosing backgrounds for the images. Two of these shots offers a gold reflector, the other an empty garage. But keeping the composition and focus limited to their faces, these backgrounds stay smooth, and thanks to the wonders of Nikon lenses almost creamy in nature. The backgrounds are completely non-distracting from our subjects, which is just the way we like them!

Special thanks to Brianne, Tory, and Gabrielle for being such pleasures to work with, and a tip of the hat to Simon, Terry, Lisa and gang for being the best support crew we could ask for.

Also, we were thrilled to see more of our pet photography on the cover of July's Bird Talk magazine, as well as on many of the pages within. We have hosted several pet stock photography shoots in New York as well as on Long Island, and it is always great when we see the editors at the magazines are using the photos. Special congrats to Linda and Bob on seeing their macaws in print!