Mumtaz what’s the other model that had come to the portrait workshop held earlier in the year. At the end of that session, I had arranged for her to come to the studio. We could shoot under more controlled lighting.

She brought along a number of outfits. The shoot nearly lasted two hours that I will cover in this and the next three post. I have split the session into multiple posts because there were a number of lighting changes. I want to show the effect of these changes rather than confuse them in a long single post. 

We started with a single light in a 7 inch gridded reflector positioned to camera left and at a 90° angle to Mumtaz. The grid was to control the amount of spill from the light onto the backdrop. This created a very dramatic light with strong contrast and dark shadows.

The disadvantage of such a small light source is that it is very difficult to get light in the models eyes unless they are looking directly towards it.

I shot all of the images in this post with my Lumix G9. The settings were 1/200s f8 ISO 200 with focal lengths at 24mm. The setting ensured that I had full control of the light while also giving me a good depth of field.  

The focal length enabled me to shoot full body in my relatively small studio. The camera was tethered to the computer meaning that I could see them much larger than on the back of the camera. The computer also enabled my subject to see the images and make adjustments on the fly.

I used software developed by Panasonic for the tether. In addition to the memory card in the camera, the photos were transferred to the computer as they were taken. They were stored in a specific folder that I had said up Adobe Lightroom to monitor. As each image came in then appeared in Lightroom.

Lightroom does have a tethering function but at the time it was not available for my camera. I have also found it was not all that stable at the time I was shooting.