Shooting with a model around the city

It's a weird form of street shooting to bring a model in somewhat unusual (and skimpy) clothing around the alleys of Pioneer Square and Georgetown, but if you survive the results are pretty rewarding!  These were taken with an assistant aiming a handheld off-camera strobe (SB-600 with a Stofen diffuser head), triggered by the pop-up flash on my SLR which was set to -2 stops.  This is one of the rare times I actually used the Nikon CLR flash control system (I usually just shoot with a manual flash).

One Studio, One Model, Two Hours, Many Looks...

This set of images, shot at one two hour studio session, is the result of careful planning and efficient execution.  Typically a set of models are run through a single setup.  This is the opposite.  South Puget Sound Photo Studio has three sets side by side.  I arranged the backgrounds I wanted - brick, muslin, and black seamless.  Then we moved from set to set, taking the lighting with us.  Working with a model with whom I've worked a few times before was a big plus.  Also while we had time for some costume changes we had to pretty much stick to a single hair/makeup choice.  Overall this was a heck of a lot of fun to shoot, and the variety in the results seems much bigger than the amount of time it actually took to shoot them!

Checkerboards

I feel like I'm in an old laundry commercial - How do I get the blacks "black" and the whites "white", all while preserving decent skintones in the middle?  These were shot at South Sound Photo Studio, where I had access to all sorts of lighting equipment.  I set up two strobes to blast the background, but it was really tricky to avoid too many reflections off the Home Depot linoleum being used as the seamless backdrop.  Messing with curves in photoshop was necessary to get things as distinct as possible (mainly dragging the top right point further to the left along the top of the box).  I'm pretty happy with the results, but still feel I have some learning to do in this area.