Having fun taking portraits on a rainy day

It was a couple of weeks ago, on a Friday evening, when Maddie (a family friend) joined my son and I on a photo journey. Maddie is such a beautiful girl and I asked her if we could shoot some portrait shots of her around our town. She readily agreed, so off we went to find some cool locations. Before we took off from the house, we grabbed a couple of umbrellas. We did this for two reasons. First, the clouds were rolling in and it looked like rain was only minutes away, and secondly I thought that it would make for a cool prop.

We started out at the train tracks. If you have been reading the blog for the last couple of months, you know that I have shot here a couple of times in the last 3 months. Maddie had seen the other portraits that we took here and she really liked this locale. The rain had not started yet, but I liked the umbrella in the shot.

Upon returning to my home studio, and editing the images, we wondered if the red umbrella clashed with her purple shirt. So, using the "replace color" command in Photoshop CS5, I changed the color of the umbrella and also removed the text.

After shooting the images above, I asked Maddie to take a walk along the tracks and photographed her walking in both directions. I really like this shot, because unlike so many of the other shots, she is looking away from the camera. (Photographer's note: This image is made stronger by the fact that she is in perfect position on the train tracks - not too close and not too far - and right in mid stride.  The fact that she is not looking directly at the camera, gives the impression that we caught her in the middle of a walk, and not part of a photo shoot. On this shot, instead of changing the color of the umbrella, I changed the color of her sweater to a deep shade of blue.)
 

And then the rain really did start coming down. If you look closely at this image (you can click on it to see it a bit larger), you can see the rain drops in the background.

To avoid the rain, we hopped into the car and decided to drive into new areas of Saratoga to see if we could find any new areas to shoot portraits. We came across this tiny little park, and since the rain had stopped, we hopped out to try some shots on a small bridge.

For this image, I edited the RAW file and then used NIK Color Efex Pro 3.0 to add a "glamour glow" to the final piece.

As I was shooting these images of Maddie on the bridge, my son walked along the nearby dry creek bed and found some cool mossy trees. After grabbing numerous shots on the bridge, we followed him to check it out. I came across this one area where the tree trunks came together and I asked Maddie to go behind the tree and rest on the mossy trunk.  There was perfect light coming from behind Maddie, lighting her hair, and I added a hint of light from my flash.

As a gift to her, I made a 13"x19" print of this image on my new Epson R2000 printer. I printed this on Epson's Velvet Fine Art paper and it looked awesome. She now has this hanging in her room. (Photographer's note: Shooting images like this is a win/win for you and the "model". She gets some nice images for her Facebook page, her parents get some nice shots to print and use at home, and you get the satisfaction of capturing photos for friends. Oh, and we had a fun time during the process!)