Autumn Portraits with Sonia
Hey there, yet again it’s been quite a while since I last posted anything here! I’ve been in the process of moving the site to another host and it’s lead to a bit of quiet time. As part of the migration I’ve updated the sites design, upgrading to a graph paper press premium theme which just rocks!
So anyway, a couple of weeks back Sonia and I travelled up into the Blue Mountains to see what we could capture of the last of the Autumn colours as Sydney descends swiftly into the depths of winter. Mount Wilson was our destination as some of the nicer autumny photo’s we’ve seen were from that area. The air was refreshingly crisp up in the mountains and we had a lovely day driving around, stopping off to shoot a few frames every now and then.
I had a flash unit with me so couldn’t resist the temptation to try some backlit portraits with the sun in the frame, trying to capture that classic warm hazy effect.
The photo’s I’m posting here were made on a quiet little road, somewhere up in the mountains. Only one car passed us in the 20 minutes or so that we were hanging around so we felt quite comfortable setting up the light stand and shooting away!
The lighting setup was pretty simple… I just backlit Sonia with the sun and filled in with a bare flash on low power from my left side. I was able to get a nice wide aperture because it was late afternoon by this point and the light was getting pretty low. I was shooting at around f4 to f5.6, with a shutter speed of around 1/100sec and I had ISO at 800.
This last image was taken a little while later than the first ones. I was languishing behind Sonia as we were heading down to a viewpoint to watch the sun setting from and the scene opened up in front of me. I manually focused the shot to only a few meters in front of myself to create the bokeh in the trees above Sonia and used a small aperture to get the starburst effect on the sun. Another nice effect that I’ve seen in plenty of photos around the internet but it was nice to get a chance to try it myself!
