Catherine Quigley

Model: Nina Luca

Photo of Caroline Doyle. Longford Rose 2016

Harsh Kunari

A Studio Portrait Session with Aoife Holland McGeough.

This was one of the first portfolio building sessions I have organised in the early days of learning photography. I have managed to get in touch with Aoife through a friend at a hiking club, she did ballet dancing and was interested in getting some shots for her portfolio.

We set a theme in mind of what we wanted to achieve and set off, our lighting setup was fairly basic, 2 lights on the model from either side and 2 lights on the background.

There was still a lot of experimentation going around at that point, while I do love the shadow on the face, it was not intentional, it was actually a bad positioning of lights that casted the shadow, but we both liked it and decided to stick to it.

I do firmly believe that in order for a picture to be exciting in anyway you have to have fairly hard contrast that highlight and hide the pieces of your picture that might be otherwise boring or not interesting.

So much of photography is trial and error, we’re always pushed to think before we do anything, but I do believe as you get more chained by the rules of photography, we loose some of that spontaneous combustion that happens when you experiment and make mistakes.

Ofcourse experimenting works great if you’re not bound by time and money. When paying clients come in through the door, the timer is ticking, your client time is precious and so is the photographers time, so experimenting is not always an option, and doing some experimentation might not always deliver the results the customer expercts.