I took a break from the insane day job and home remodeling to do a weekend photo workshop with Scott Church. He’s brilliant at photographing people, does everything from babies and kids to birthdays to weddings and traditional glamor/pinup. A friend of mine from design school agreed to go along as my model/collaborator and we made some art that we’re both quite proud of. She brought a lot of costumes, I brought a lot of props, and while everyone else was shooting naked/pinup/whatever we were shooting comic book panels. The full set is here.

This was two light sources — the sun and a fill flash, no Photoshop involved — Scott explained how to set this up in about an hour of live demonstration. (And yes, that really is a Gerber Mark II. :-):

Natural light from one window and not much else. And no, it’s not real. It’s a $10 prop from eBay with an edge duller than most butter knives:

One thing I really enjoyed about working with Scott is that he made us take lots of test photos, some of them came out as good as the “real” photos. Here’s one where I was trying to balance natural light from outside with light from a lamp: