My sister-in-law’s daughter Clarissa celebrated her First Holy Communion recently and I had the pleasure of shooting at the reception party. They also wanted a studio type full length portrait of Clarissa to use in the background at the party.

Not always easy finding models when I have the time to practice in my tiny home studio. After a lot of coaxing and nudging I sometimes manage to persuade my beautiful wife into throwing some poses together while I bore her with flashes of light and funny direction.

Here are a couple of shots I liked out of the bunch we did before heading out for a valentines day dinner.

Playing around with a couple of perfume bottles working on product photography. Both setups are very simple and easily achieved with limited equipment.

In both shots I’ve used a wooden cutting board that was lying around. For this first shot, the CK Free bottle is placed on the cutting board and flash is at about 1/32nd power into 60cm softbox placed directly behind the bottle. The white blown out background you see is the face of the softbox. For a simple product shot like this with barely any opacity there was no need to fill light.