This image is the result of an experiment that I think worked quite well.

For months I've been promising / threatening Joyce that I'd do a 'proper' portrait of her, but circumstances have conspired against us. Today I only had my 1Ds and a single flash with me, a terrible combination for doing a portrait, but I decided to give it a go and see what I could produce. Always up for a challenge!

We did some shots using dramatic lighting with lots of shadows, not at all flattering, especially for a woman, so I decided to try a variant of beauty lighting. When I say "variant" I mean that I made it up on the spot and it isn't traditional beauty lighting in any sense of the word, but it worked so I'll call it whatever I want! :-)

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We did the shot in the café at the village hall where Joyce works. The background is the blackboard that they write the day's specials on. The single flash was positioned behind Joyce and it served two purposes: To light up the back of her hair and hands, and to bounce some light back onto the blackboard.
The main light was just ambient, which meant I had to use ISO 400 (not desirable on a 1Ds due to shadow noise) and a stupidly low 1/13s shutter speed. (Normally for a quick location shot like this I'd be working with two flashes and a 1D at 1/500s.) Out of 37 photos there were maybe half a dozen that weren't ruined by motion blur, but they were still quite blurry. By pure fluke, this was the best frame and it was the sharpest of the lot.

The 'pose' with the glasses was just an idea to solve a problem: Joyce loves to pose and she's good at it, but she always puts her head down which exaggerates her nose. When I told her not to pose she looked uncomfortable. So I gave her something to do with her glasses and the result looks fairly natural.

This is how the shot was set-up. Click to see it with notes:

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