Day 85

85/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

This is my friend Amanda. 

We've been friends since 7th grade if memory serves. When we met, we were both in that awkward early-teenager phase and managed to stay friends since then. She's a dreamer and has a huge heart, and those are the kind of people I like to keep around. I've been wanting to do some more portrait-style stuff, and I knew I was coming home for a few days, so Amanda was one of the people who got a call. 

She was stoked to do it, so we started to throw around ideas. The cool part about this shoot was that it was more of a collaboration than me coming in and executing an idea. We came up with this sort of lazy morning idea and we went from there. Her house is cool and has some interesting furniture, so we decided I'd just come over in the morning and go from there. 


When I got there, we caught up (I haven't seen her in months), and then we started looking at places. I liked her kitchen table with the cabinet and the kind of adobe colored wall, and I really liked the white wall with the mirror in the background. It was getting some yellow color bounced onto it from the other room which I dug. I started breaking out the flashes and going to town, but my lighting was ugly. Like, REALLY ugly. I turned everything off and just looked at the scene, and the natural lighting was much prettier, so I tried that. It was a tad darker than I would have liked, Amanda was kind of sinking into the background. To fix it, I brought out a SB-24 and shot it through an umbrella, mimicking what the natural light was doing, just punching it up a bit. 


Once I had the light dialed, and we figured out what Amanda was actually doing, we started shooting. I shot about 35 pictures in the time it took her to smoke a cigarette and we were done. The whole thing probably took 20 minutes, with most of that going to my first botched lighting job and figuring out the pose. Quick and easy, and I'm happy with how it turned out. The ONLY thing I would change if I had to go back and do it again is the tone of this picture. It's pretty moody, which I like,  but Amanda has a great smile.