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Sian Holmes

In my eternal boredom I found a Facebook group for photographer, models and hair and make up artists, which is how I came to get in touch with the ever so photogenic Sian.

Sian was looking to get some pictures together for her portfolio and is also fairly new to modelling, or so she claims, she seemed to know what she was doing with her poses.

Towards the end of the shoot I had some problems with my speed light, not ideal but because of this problem we had to resort to available light, we found a good area with amazing soft light coming in, so disaster averted, it also made me think of more creative ways to shoot SIan.

Head Shots With Alex Cherman

Hey everyone Marcelo Silva here and I just wanted to share my thoughts on the art of the head shot.

I shot with a young talented Australian actor Alex Cherman. Alex has done some modelling before so working with him was a delight because of how professional he was. 

One of the things that I need from my models when doing a head shot is that the tip of their eye lids need to be touching the tip of their irises (this is a softer version of the squint).

One of the other things you need to do when taking head shots is that you want to be shooting at their eye level.

In head shots the most vital thing for casting agents look for is the eyes of the actor (the eyes are the window to the soul). It is vial that the photographer not only nails focus on the eyes but the photographer also needs to go into Lightroom or Photoshop to really make the eyes pop.

I had a lot of fun shooting with Alex check out his Instagram here and his IMDB.

 

Students of Swinburne

One day in class I was showing I was showing my friend Nadir some of my pictures from my flickr account and he liked my pictures from my 100 strangers project and he as a less experienced photographer expressed an interest in improving his own photography. One day we spoke about doing a Humans of New York styled page for our University to teach him more about how to use his camera, how to compose portraits and how to approach people.

Not long after we created the page and went for a walk about campus to find people to shoot. To be honest I wasn't prepared happened later that night (but more on that later). We found several willing participants to photograph and  the project was on it's way to be a success. Nadir was learning too, he even wound up getting a pictures that I was jealous of.

I was expecting that only our friends would have liked the page and that we'd have about 20 likes all up but on the first night we got over a hundred and by the end of the week it was over a thousand. It was quite amazing and we where receiving amazing feedback and when we where shooting on campus people where recognising the fact that we where the Students of Swinburne photographers it was an amazing time for the two of us to be on campus at the time. 

I think this page was the reason this page was so successful is because of the community of students felt like they where a part of something special. There's an online community of Swinburne students call Swinburne Stalker Space and an active member of the group wound up posting about our page and that's when it took off.

Unfortunately the stories coming from Australian uni students weren't as deep as some of the stories from the Humans of New york page but the stories we where getting but that's what made our project unique there was some humour involved.

I graduated shorty after and Nadir kept on shooting to keep the page alive and I'd drop by to join if I when I could but then the time came for him to graduate and then came along a young lady by the name of Lois messaged the page to express he interest of joining and now she runs the page.

Check out the page and give it a like just click here.