Teenagers and hoodies - not always a bad combination!

Sometimes a simple item of colourful clothing can really make a photograph.

Erin, who often models for me, was wearing a 'hooded sweatshirt' here and I liked the way it brought out the green in her eyes. The hood also acted as a strong frame for her face. I'm always inspired to photograph a good subject, beautiful light and wonderful colours.



The model was placed near to a window and I got between her and that available light source. The window was north-facing which always works best for soft light and illuminates the skin wonderfully plus you don't have the problems of harsh sunlight interference.
In Winter the light is not as strong so you have the option of using a tripod, using a higher ISO setting or a faster lens. I like the freedom of being hand-held so I boosted the ISO to 1600 (be careful of the noise in the shadows when doing this). The lens used here was 50mm with a aperture setting of f2. This allowed me to shoot at a fast shutter speed of 0.005 sec (1/200) to eliminate the problem of camera-shake.
The focus is on the nearest eye here and I wanted to get really good sharpness on that and let the rest fall into softness which is also a good reason to use a wide aperture setting.

Sometimes I'll use my light meter to find the right exposure and at other times the in-camera spot metering does a good enough job of it. I mostly shoot in AV and manual modes.
In photoshop I decided to crop to a square format on this and just boost the image a little using saturation and curves layers. Not too much tweaking needed really. I try to get it right in-camera when possible as it means less work sitting in front of the computer!

Hope this basic information has helped some of you who are just starting out.
Please feel free to comment if this has been useful to you.