Rocks, flesh, dry land and light: portraits of Holly

Steven Perdikis

Where I live, in Australia, it gets very, stupidly dry in the summer time. So what better time to go off and take photos? Well… especially if you want to get sun burnt.

I’ve known Holly now for over five years, since the first time we met in a graveyard to take some photographs and commence the tradition of making her look like a demon, half way through a blink, in almost every subsequent photo-shoot.

We’ve also become good friends, and I even photographed her Dad’s wedding to her step mother. We’ve done a lot of work together, and regular readers of this rambling will recognise her face.

These images were captured in January this year; and were mostly photographed in full sunlight.

Did I make my job easier by stepping down the aperture or using a scrim to soften the light?

No, I worked with what I had, and we got these images out pretty quickly – most of them were in a dry creek bed, surrounded by rocky formations.

There were a few trees which offered a little bid of shade, and an opportunity to use flash, then we decided to use the actual rock walls around the creek bed to go for something a little bit cooler (and the fact that the sun was on the other side of the rock wall).

That made it possible to use flash, which I love to do outdoors.

At some point during this shoot, my flash fell down due to a gust of wind, but I managed, like some sort of photographic ninja, to catch it centimetres from the ground. It’s a crazy life when you’re trying to protect your gear.

I really like the ones against the rock wall – they were easy to capture, and we were not working with any dynamic poses, so it was easy to focus right on in on the eyes, as you should do in photographic portraiture.

We shot a few other outfits that day in other locations, but they’ll have to come another day, as I fear I may have rambled far too much in this post.

This particular shoot wasn’t really planned out to “go to x, and do y”, we just drove around for a bit until we found a place that we liked.

Blog Archive