Niall Whelan Photography

I had the pleasure of hosting and shooting with Christelle last week.  Christelle is from Quebec and was starting her month long Euro tour in Ireland last week.

I had no real ideas about the shoot, but it wasn’t long before Christelle was making suggestions about outdoor locations and capturing some of the Irish landscape.  So I was happy to mix it up and try some studio/shed and location shots depending on the conditions.  We met on Tuesday before she was due to spend 3 days in Cork, which meant we could share ideas before our shoot the following Saturday in Dublin.

Scouting locations on Tuesday led to the above shot and some attempts at slow motion (4 sec.) seascape/nude shots with sunset, but I failed to capture the conditions in time.

I’ve used my shed-studio twice already this year, but it was a lot warmer on each of those occasions.  We spent a couple of hours there in the morning, but I think it was nearly warmer outside.  Insulation is definitely on the to-do list.

It was only after setting up the first natural light shot [left] that I realised I had made an error on my last shoot with Fredau, leaving the florescent light on mixed with daylight:-(  Not a problem now I know I was post processing with wrong WB settings…

Every shoot is a learning curve!

I also wanted to try a B&W art-nude lighting setup, which I think worked quite well.

After a few more setups we ventured out to the beach, hoping to find low tide reflections in the wet sand as we had seen on the previous Tuesday.

Unfortunately, even though we got the tide right, the wind had picked up in the morning and the receding tide was replaced by dry sand.  So instead we headed for the dunes to see what other opportunities there were.

There was no shortage of wind so a shot with flowing material was definitely a possibility, if Christelle could survive the cold and keep her footing long enough while I sheltered out of the wind behind the dunes:-)

I think I used all my gear this shoot.  This shot has 2 ND soft grads plus an SB800 adding some fill light.  I had to be careful not to introduce flare from the flash on the filters.  This was also shot with my 16-35mm wide angle lens.  In hindsight I should have used my zoom to avoid distortion.  Not usually a problem for landscape, but not very flattering for a model if she’s positioned away from the centre of the frame.  I’d been admiring the work of Leszek Paradowski and thought many of his images in the landscape were made with wide angle lenses.  Another lesson learned!