A little while ago I posted about doing a location scout on Christchurch’s Port Hills for an upcoming portrait session. The client needed a promo shot for her business website – a consultancy that assists people in applying to immigrate to New Zealand – and she wanted to have some interesting local New Zealand scenery as a background in her profile picture.
I scouted out a location near Sign of the Bellbird that would give us a few options for nice harbour and hills background scenery, whilst also placing the sun behind the subject for the morning shoot. (Squinting ferociously in a profile picture = not a good look).
My partner-in-crime Brence Coghill came along and we fiddled around with some bare off-camera flash to get a working setup.
Here’s what the final test shots looked like. Pretty spiffy all round, even though it was a little cloudy.
So… fast forward a week or so to the day of the shoot and – phooey balooey – it’s quite overcast. The ambient light is, as they say in New Zealand, “flat as”. It was the only day and time we had to do the shoot and, as it wasn’t actually raining or wet, we went ahead anyway.
Turns out the shots I got weren’t toooo far off the first batch of test shots. I did end up doing some tweaking in post (mainly just ‘warming up’ the colour of the background hills to sunny-ify them). I think that, given the uncooperative weather conditions, the final shots came out pretty well. More importantly, the client is really pleased with the results.
Here’s the final pictures:
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