Melissa

On Friday I went to the store with goals of buying three things. Some gels for my speedlites, a peanut slave for my Nikon SB-24 and a beauty dish. The gels ended up being a great purchase (over 200 swatches, size perfect for speedlights at $5) , the peanut slave ended up not working with my flash, and the beauty dish was too expensive. I ended up renting it for the weekend instead of buying it since I've never even used one before so why drop the cash so soon?

Right after the visit to the store I met up with my friend Melissa. I went to the same highschool as Melissa but we didn't start hanging out until I was out of highschool. She's a great friend and I went through many different stages with her. We even traveled to Japan in November of 2009!

Bill at Commercial Framing let me use his space again (!) and I put that beauty dish to work.

Coming out of two semesters of photo school, I always feel that I need to set the white balance to as true to life as possible and set my shadow and highlights for detail when I used to LOVE tweaking colour before. It's strange to feel wrong (and to feel like I will suffer consequences) to produce anything where the colour balance and skin-tone is not true to life and then I see something like Madonna's ad campaign for LV. I have to keep telling myself that it's okay to experiment and it's okay to shift colours.

Click on the picture to view the rest of the photos.

 

This day also marked the first time I've ever dropped my camera. More like throwing it two meters with a one meter drop on concrete floors. Thank goodness both the camera and the lens are okay.