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It’s a snowy Saturday morning here in Utah and my 9:00 am photo shoot just got postponed, so I thought I would spend a few minutes and break down a wintery image for today’s post.

One thing that I have been working on improving in my photography is my use of color themes within a photo. When capturing this image (from a recent wintertime stock series), I concentrated on keeping the color tone similar in each element of the shot. With Michelle’s strikingly dark eyes (yeah, I’m a bit biased) and wanting to create a warm result to go with the hot cup of chocolate, working with brown tones was a natural choice.

My first thought when putting together the composition was to use a dark brown cup for the cocoa. After a bit of thought I opted for white to have the cup provide a subtle similarity to the brown/white of her eyes. Secondly, Michelle’s jacket was too dark in the original, so I had her wrap in a tan fleece that I happened to have in studio to give separation between her hair and jacket on the left.

One improvement that I wish I would have done is to move the cup a short distance to the right. I find the clipping of the cup’s handle on the left a bit disconcerting.

As you can tell by the large catchlights in the eyes, the lighting setup was very simple. I used a 24×36″ softbox positioned vertically to the left of camera. I purposely wanted to create the dark shadow area on the right, so the light was placed at a fairly sharp angle with no fill (light or reflector) on the opposite side. The 600ws light was turned to a minimum power setting to allow me to shoot at f/5 creating a narrow depth of field. To further narrow the depth of field, I shot with the lens at its most telephoto setting of 105mm (I stood on a stepladder to get enough distance).

Well, that’s enough rambling for today. I’m now off to brave the Greatest Snow on Earth.

Canon 5D, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/125 second, f/5, ISO 100

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