Wow, what an amazing week — the studio I’ve been going to had a steampunk-themed model shoot!

I wasn’t sure how I’d find anything more fun to photograph this year than last week’s cosplay, but this week absolutely delivered.

As always in these posts, I try to highlight one thing that went well and one thing to improve next time. Last week, I wanted to focus more on composing in-camera — and I think I made decent progress on that front this time around.

The studio had a four-light setup available for the shoot, but knowing my fondness to over complicate things, I decided to simplify and just use two: a key light and a fill light, and I just left the backlighting turned off. That let me focus on composition instead of constantly fiddling with lighting settings, and I’m really glad I made that call.

Usually, I walk away from studio night with 5–6 shots I really like out of 40–50 (about a 10% keeper rate). This time, I had a hard time cutting any. I ended up keeping 29 out of 120 — nearly a 25% keeper rate. Some of that is probably because I think steampunk is really freaking cool, and some credit definitely goes to our model, Minerva, who brought three different outfits. But I also noticed that I just enjoyed the shoot more when I stopped screwing with the lighting settings and focused on composition.

So, what is the thing I need to improve on for next week? Well, I really need to pull the light meter out of my bag and start using it to work on dialing in lighting ratios.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pics and here’s a link to the amazing model’s instagram page! (I would link mine as well, but I have to assume if you have made it this far then you are already following me, and if not shame on you!!!)