DC Girls Photoshoot

Some of my friends are living in Washington DC this summer for internships and asked me to take some photos of them before their internships were over. I went down Saturday with Ian, who came to assist me.

We met the girls at the National Mall and started at the Washington Monument. To reduce the amount of equipment, I took my camera bag with only the essentials (couple of lenses, roll of tape, some gels and some extras). Instead of a few lights and stands, I decided to have Ian handhold a single light and umbrella. I choose an umbrella instead of a softbox because it folds up much more easily, should we need to go low profile. I set up a 580 EXII on a short pole with a pocketwizard and 43″ shoot through umbrella for him to hold. I assumed we’d run into issues with authorities, so I tried to keep it as minimal as possible. He just followed me around and pointed the light where I asked him to.

It was going to rain so the clouds looked dramatic.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/250, f/6.3, ISO 100)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/50, f/3.2, ISO 100)

After we took a bunch of different angles from that side of the mall, we made our way down to the Lincoln Memorial. I took a whole series of shots at slow shutter speeds to blur the backgrounds but I still had Ian there with the light to freeze the girls. I bet it was quite a sight watching me walk backwards with Ian to my side firing a flash into a big umbrella all the way to the memorial.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/15, f/4, ISO 200)

It started pouring so we took shelter under a small building until it died down and we braved the rain. This was after we emerged and it was still drizziling a bit.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/50, f/4, ISO 100)

Inside the memorial, I noticed that Lincoln was lit much more brightly than the rest of the room, so I underexposed the ambient a few stops to clean up the shot. I also got down low to remove all the random people. After a few shots, a security guard/policewoman approached me. She wanted to know if we were doing a commercial shoot because we needed a permit. I had to convince her that despite our appearance, we were just college kids.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/30, f/4, ISO 400)

It started getting darker, so I dropped the shutter speed a bit and shot this with a longer lens to create a halo around their heads.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 135mm, 1/30, f/3.2, ISO 400)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/25, f/4, ISO 500)

A few more miscellaneous shots from the rest of the weekend past the break.

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/1000, f/4, ISO 100)

(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 300mm, 1/80, f/6.3, ISO 200)

This is the apartment complex they are living in for the summer. Extremely nice!
(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 1/1000, f/4, ISO 200)

Ian and I visited our friend Bill who also lives in DC. Ian went for a dip in the pool on top of his building.
(Canon EOS 5D Mark II, 17mm, 0.01, f/4, ISO 200)