Once we had finished the studio shoot we headed out to the pool.  

We scheduled the shoot for much later in the day. I knew this timing would give us much more control on the light. The pool was positioned north south. By 5 o’clock, it was in the shade of a line of trees on our boundary. This meant that I did not have to deal with the direct overhead light. 

The light levels were lower than I preferred. I needed to set ISO800 to maintain reasonable levels when shooting at f7.1. The camera was set in aperture priority mode with the overhead shots taken at 1/100s. The ones lower down were taken as 1/50s. This speed is quite slow for a portrait. However, the Lumix G9 has brilliant stabilisation built-in. I can handhold to almost the second.

Unlike the previous weekend the weather was warm and the pool had a chance to warm up. This meant that we had the time to set up the camera overhead and control it via the Ipad. Even so the total shoot lasted only six minutes.

The flowers were fabric which meant that they behaved completely different to actual flowers. Real flowers float whereas the fabric only stayed on the surface for a short period of time before sinking.

The boom arm and camera did appear as a reflection in the image. Knowing that this would happen I was careful where it was positioned. Then it was I knew that I would have to fix this in post. This was achieved mainly using content aware fill. In the lightest version of Photoshop, I would use the Remove tool. It does a much better job of removing such distractions.

This was a great shoot and again I learnt important things to build into the next one. The most obvious was that I needed to work out the background in someway. I had been removing elements in Photoshop but I figured it would be easier to do it in-camera. 

The final shoot in the series booked for the following weekend so I did not have much time to wait.