“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” – Alice Walker (The Color Purple)

Making it downtown was an experience.  It was a bleak day, drizzling slightly and there were threats of rain.  Despite all that I packed my camera, a couple lenses and headed out.

As an aside – I shot with my 24-70 and Nikon 70-200 2.8 lenses.  This is unusual for me because I shoot mainly with prime and only reluctantly pull out the zooms.  However, I carried these because I was not sure about the area and how much space I would have to zoom with my feet.  I was also concerned that I might need a lot of flexibility if it was a faced paced shoot.  Lastly if the weather was bad I didn’t want to be changing lenses on a windy rainy day.

I got to the location on time (which was one hour before everyone else) and walked around a bit and waited for the rest of the team to show up.  Despite the shaky start to the day it was well worth the wait.  Almost immediately I got a great vibe from the crew.  This was a really energetic and dynamic group of young entrepreneurs being braver than I ever was at that age.  The models, photographers, business owners had an easy charisma that just makes for a fun shoot.

I’d been shooting mainly in studio and was  not sure about handling the ever changing and unpredictable natural light settings.  But I kept a couple key ideas in mind.

1. Watch for the light carefully and look at the shadows.
2. Pick backgrounds that don’t distract from the subject.
3. Try to pay attention to the rules of composition with foreground middle-ground and background.

We were politely reminded that a permit was required for the fist location so we moved to another location.  However we got a couple good shots done before we left.

Would have stayed longer, but had to get back home.  Look forward to the next one.