This story started when I showed my earlier slide shows to a colleague of mine. When he mentioned my photography enthusiasm to his wife, Annamari, who is happen to be a hobbyist belly dancer, she turned out to be interested in making a few pictures of herself and her instructor, Judit. The deal was this: I can practice portrait photography on them and they might have a few good photographs of themselves for promotional purposes. Anita, my make up expert , was luckily available for the occasion too. With her the deal is that she is working on extending her portfolio.
So we started to organize the shooting. Judit found a nice place in the fancy old Buda Castle area (Budapest, Hungary). I purchased a brolly and a tripod for the flash and did my part of planning too: I checked pictures of belly dancers on the Web for ideas and inspiration, read an article on posing, thought a lot about lighting options, spent some time on finding free belly dance music for my future slide show.

Still not being a professional photographer I have the courage to share my mistakes and learnings of a shooting session not destroying my reputation at all .

The gear

My camera is a Nikon D80 and used the big boy 70-200 lens for this occasion. My lighting gear was two SB-800 speedlights, with the new reflecting brolly and two tripods.
My 70-200 F2.8 VR is a great piece of glass. It is great for portraiture for instance but one needs to know how it behaves in different circumstances to be able to leverage all of it.
Learning #1
This is something that I was good at actually: I knew that this lens is prone to flare when hit by direct light. I used the lens hood to control this behaviour and also tried to use a DIY snoot (made of black card board) attached to the hair lighting flash. This latter thing was not useful at all, but e.g. placing that flash at a height of around two and half meters (hand held by Anita’s boy friend ) did not create any flare on the pictures.
Learning #2
One of the major strengths of this lens is that it is fix 2.8 throughout its full range of focal length. When making close-ups and head only portraiture an aperture setting of 2.8 can give great bokeh (smooth background) and some haziness even of the face in front of and behind the sharp focus area (which is suggested to be your model’s closer eye.) However when shooting a standing figure an aperture setting of 2.8 might not be the best. As I experienced this time for such purpose an aperture of 4-5 would be better or even 8-9 if you have enough light available.
Learning #3
Auto-focus is a great thing especially if you, just like me, do not trust your own eyes and would like to avoid focus manually. However in poorly lit environments when photographing a homogeneous surface auto-focus might simply not work. This has happened to me when wanted to make a close-up picture of one the models’ belly. The camera just could not find anything to focus on the plain skin. My solution was focusing on rather the edge of the body then to the middle then using focus lock.
Learning #4
This shooting session was the first time I used my brand new tripod for the flash, tripod head and reflecting brolly. I had not even tested them before. OK, at home I stood up the tripod and assembled the pieces together and put the flash on it as well, but did not take a single picture with using them. Testing your new gear on real assignment gives you just too much excitement and uncertainty.

The light

One of the SB-800s served as my main light in - shame on me - TTL mode remotely controlled from the camera utilising Nikon’s wireless infrared technology marketed as Creative Lighting System. The flashlight was on a tripod and fired into a reflecting brolly. I intended to use the other flash as a hair light or back light to separate my models from the background with a nicely lit edge on the side of their body or hair.
Learning #5
Yes, the fill light was actually missing. I might need a third flash or forget the fancy hair light for a second and concentrate on the fill light instead.
Learning #6
When processing the photos in Lightroom I noticed that most the pictures are underexposed and had to adjust the exposure from +0.33 to +0.99. Since this functionality cannot be used extensively without compromising quality it should have been noticed and corrected by me during shooting. To notice the glitch I should have checked the histogram on the camera right after taking a few test shots. To compensate, I think, I could have had two options: compensate the flash power to overexpose a bit or to use the spot metering on the camera instead of the matrix metering. I am open to further suggestions here.
Learning #7
Also noticed only during processing that the skin tone of my models was somewhat unnatural. The pain here is that I had planned to use a warming color filter on at least the main light flash, but simply forgot about it.

The models

My models arrived to the place a bit earlier than me. By the time I got there they already had some ideas on which parts of the building could have been used as a background for the pictures and what dress would look good in front of them. We had a look around the scene and I asked them about what the wanted to see on the pictures.
Learning #8
In commercial photography you are not shooting l’art pour l’art, you are doing that to satisfy your client. OK, it was not that kind of commercial photography, but my models were a kind of client to me. So it was important to listen to what they want to achieve. In this case it was interesting that while I was planning to take pictures of belly dancers their intention was to show the architectural richness of the building as well. Strange to me, important to them.
Learning #9
After they changed their clothes and I set up my lighting gear the make up specialist arrived. I started to make some test shots with one of the models withouth make-up while the other was “under preparation”. It took almost an hour after our arrival to start real shooting. This time seems to be unavoidable and is to be planned and expected.
Learning #10
I made the pictures with the intention of possibly selling some of them on microstock sites. However I mentioned this only to my colleague and not to the models before the shooting. I told them about the model release form that I wanted to have them sign only after the session when everyone was in hurry and quite understandably they were not eager to sign it. First, they said, they want to see the pictures. The rights of the pictures and the necessary model release form is to be discussed before the session.

And finally have a look at the best shots clicking on the picture:

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