Dry Lake Outing

i shamelessly stole this one from Connor lol






Lovely day!
Connor stopped by my place on Thursday and we sat there watching a friend watching cartoons and... decided that it was about damn time to get out to Victorville dry lakes.

I have always wanted to go there but since it is far I really didn't want to have to drive by myself and some hot model. Pretty understandable, right? :) So on Saturday we met our models (lovely Brunette and Blonde (Monica and Lyz) from Model Mayhem and went there. Lyz couldn't really shoot that day so we had her working with us for about 40 minutes. Not much but she was so amazing that I am having some hard time choosing the pics. Anyway... it was windy and so freakin' dry that I think i drank like half a gallon of water in an hour...

If you ever go there with lights also bring lots of sand bags. Shit will fly over since it is VERY windy. Also think about having to go to the bathroom in a place where it is absolutely NOWHERE to hide... I mean one can be seen popping a squat (learned that expression from the models!) a mile away! lol
good times!!

About the pics... Since I had no idea what clothes models will bring, i just kinda went with what they had and with Lyz we had something sci-fi inspired. "Lyz, think about landing onto Mars" one could hear me telling her lol Why do people think that I am a nerd? bitchez... :) Monica , on the other hand looked very sports illustrated and we got to work with her for some good 4 hours. Tons of great photos and they will be updated as I process them.

Lighting wise it was easy. One or two strobes, and that's about it... Really the location is just so awesome that natural light will work just fine. Hard natural light that is. There's virtually no golden hour. It's like a golden minute. Dry air doesn't give this amazing light that everyone likes, plus there was no clouds that would reflect and diffuse the harshness of the sun.

Hard light is a great tool when you are comfortable with it. Just avoid distracting shadows. It means that your model will be facing the sun a lot. Have her close her eyes and on count "3" ask her to open them. This is a little anti squinting trick that everyone knows in SoCal.

wow it s 3:17AM - gotta go to bed. Whole day of retouching tomorrow. yay...