An afternoon with my mom.

I've never had a photo shoot with my mom before. She offered to be my model for today, so we went downtown and scoped out some locations. I guess it was a good day for firsts, because I've never walked around with my gear and a model while scouting out locations. Go me!

My mom is a lovely and beautiful woman and most of the photos I have of her are candids... and they're not very good, hehe. I have a difficult time getting a photo that will truly capture her beauty, and when I do it's fantastic.

She was an extremely obliging model. The sun was in her eyes, the wind was whipping her hair around and she was freezing. My mom is a squinter. I can't believe how many photos I captured of her today where her eyes were open and visible! She was trying really hard for me.

I'm really comfortable with my equipment now and I was able to get the flash to fire pretty much how I wanted it to and to achieve the feel I was going for. The sun was setting camera left and the flash was firing camera right. I believe it was pretty close to her face at this point with the dome diffuser on. This is the first chance I've had to experiment with my camera in FP mode so I could use high shutter speeds with my speedlight. It's so exciting when things go according to plan!

This photo was taken on the boardwalk downtown Poulsbo. It's a nice stroll from the waterfront to a small park in a wooded area and it's a great view of the sound.

There's a great building downtown Poulsbo and I knew I wanted it to be in the background somewhere. The best place I could find was on a small street behind the main drag of Front Street. I don't know what the deal is with that pointy turret, but it sure is fun. Unfortunately the best view was also flanked by a chainlink fence and a dumpster.

This could have been ideal, but my mom wasn't dressed like a woman that would be slinking around a dumpster, so I did my best to cut that out. None of them really turned out to my liking, but this one is alright.

In this last photo here the flash didn't go off. My speedlight didn't "see" the pre-flash on my camera, so the lighting on her face isn't very dynamic. We were in complete shade at this point, the sun had gone below the buildings on the other side of the street behind me. The speedlight was pointed at her to camera left, but I guess I wasn't angled quite right.

I chose this, even though the flash didn't go off, because it was the best and most natural photo of the ones I took of her in this doorframe.

To get her face to pop I upped the exposure, brightness and levels in post. This resulted in some quality loss because I had to bump everything up quite a bit. I'm bummed about that, but this is a good picture of her and I want it shown, perfect or not.

Let's hear it for successful days!

-MJ