Andrea, a col­league of mine from work, needed some pho­tos for her vita. Since I just got my brand new Elin­chrom D-​Lite 2 To Go kit, this was a great oppor­tun­ity to give “stu­dio pho­to­graphy” a shot.

The D-​Lite kit is a set of stu­dio flashes with some use­ful accessor­ies aimed at ama­teurs that would like to get their feet wet in the world of stu­dio pho­to­graphy. Well, I’m not going to start a photo stu­dio, but I always wanted to try out that “whole dif­fer­ent world”. More on that at some later point.

The actual photo shoot was done at work in the even­ing, after the place settled down a bit. For the first set of shots I had Andrea “pose” in front of a white board. I wanted to get a shal­low depth of field as not to get too many dis­tract­ing details in the shot. As — con­trary to pop­u­lar belief — the prob­lem with stu­dio flashes is that they are rather too power­ful than too weak, I couldn’t use dir­ectly, even dialed down to the low­est set­ting. Instead, I just stuck with their mod­el­ling lights.

The second series of pho­tos then was taken in front of a white wall, to get a more neut­ral, clean passport-​photo type of shot to put on the applic­a­tion let­ter. The look I tried to cre­ate here was to show self-​assurance, con­fid­ence and pre­pared­ness, but still with a friendly, human touch ;-)

On a tech­nical side, one thing that com­pletely blew me away (apart from the nat­ural col­ours pro­duced by the stu­dio flashes) was how amaz­ing 25 Mega­pixels can look. Check out the 100% view!