Elston Photography Blog: Cora Skinner

It has been a while since my last photo shoot post! (Well, I'm a photographer not a writer, haha!) There's nothing like an absolutely fantastic photo shoot to get you back in the mood to share more details with the world!

Nice day for a rooftop pool shoot, don't you think?

This weekend I did I shoot with Cora Skinner of Next Model Management. It is awesome as when your client basically says "go for it!" and lets you do what you want. "Soft sexy flirty" was all of the direction I got for the starting point for the shoot and we jumped off from there! I feel I have really been hitting my stride with my outdoor / location shoots using studio strobes, and it has been a while since I have shot swim, and I felt my portfolio could use a little update there.

Cora also brought some casual clothes for a few commercial / catalog looks before we dove in (no pun intended, I realized that was there on my final proof reading... oh dear...). I only had planned for three looks, so adding four right off the top threw me off for a second, but we were able to get a lot of great shots rather quickly.

We went through 4 looks in the time we had set aside for 1.5 so we kept powering through. The second half was the planed swim part of the shoot.

While we were in the middle of our last look, we heard a massive explosion and then a smoke cloud rose out of the building next to us! An airplane flew over (pictured), then a police helicopter came and went, and there didn’t seem to be anything else going on, so we keep going. Still a little unnerving but Cora was unfazed and ready to keep shooting!

At 6:44pm there was a massive explosion then smoke rose out of this building!

Tech Stuff
Keeping it simple in this smaller (and wet!) space, I went with a Profoto D1 on a beauty dish on a battery pack. Later we found there was an outlet behind a six foot wall, and I plugged in instead. The ambient and the flash lights were pretty closely matched, and only varied but about 2/3 of a stop at most at any particular time during the day. If you're wondering about the rad shallow depth of field in broad daylight, I was using a minus six stop ND filter! Shooting with on has all its own difficulties tied in with it, makes the exposure settings that much more tricky in your head and it's hard to see out of that thing and still focus! For the evening shoot, it was very much a "salt to taste" strobe to ambient ratio. And it was nice to take the ND filter off and see out of my lens properly for a change!

(Feel free to comment below with any tech questions you might have!)

And here are a few of the final swim shots!

Again, a wonderful shoot, instantly one of my all time favorites and about to be the front of my swim portfolio! I felt blessed to work with such a capable and easy-going model as Cora; she totally nailed the entire shoot. Be sure to check out and fan her facebook page!