photo | Mizomi Photography

Christine is an up-and-coming young actress I met through ModelMayhem. We did a short photo session this past Sunday to help her add some new shots to her portfolio. I also got to experiment with my Lastolite Trigrip reflectors.

This was one of the first shots we did at her hotel. It was early morning, with the sun just coming up over the West Maui mountains. I noticed the sunlight glinting off the palm trees lining the driveway and thought it might look cool as a background. I positioned Christine about 10 feet in front of the trees, with her back to the sun to highlight her hair. I then used a Lastolite Trigrip silver reflector to bounce some light into her eyes. I shot it with a Canon 1D MkII and a 70-200 lens to throw the trees out of focus.

Christine’s mom drove us down to DT Flemings beach for our next location. For this shot, I had her mom hold the reflector just out of the edge of the frame to the right, silver side again, to throw some fill light into Christine’s eyes. I switched my lens to a 28-70 and put on a polarizing filter to darken the sky.

As we were wrapping up, Christine came up with this idea. Since the sun was pretty high up and the light was getting a bit harsh, I had her mom hold a Lastolite Trigrip 1-stop diffuser just above her head to soften the light for this final portrait.

We had to keep the shoot pretty short, as Christine had another session planned with another photographer for that afternoon, but we got some pretty good images out of the shoot.

Yesterday’s photoshoot was with Dominika, an actress/writer from L.A. who has been in many TV shows and films, including the forthcoming “The Vanquisher”.

We first started out on a beach in Paia, where I got to experiment with my RadioPoppers for the first time since I received them. In the past I had been having hit or miss problems with Canon’s infrared wireless flash system especially in outdoor settings. With the Radio Poppers installed on my ST-E2 transmitter and 580ex flash, I could just concentrate on photographing Dominika.

We next went to Ding Kings – one of the most amazing locations I have seen on Maui. It is a surfboard repair shop housed in an old warehouse in Kahului. Check out this blog for a tour of the place.

They were gracious enough to allow us to shoot at this location and we were able to get some really great shots. It was such an interesting place to shoot. Everytime we turned around, we found another cool thing to shoot.

This was one of the most interesting things to shoot there. The people at Ding Kings built this set of chairs and table that is HUGE. Really neat stuff to shoot!

At this location I chose to use 2 lights. The main was an Alien Bees AB800 with a beauty dish triggered with a Pocket Wizard. To give Dominika some light to pop her out of the background, I used a Nikon SB26 on a lightstand behind her. I also occasionally used a silver Lastolite Trigrip reflector to add a touch of fill.