It’s never a good thing when you drive a bit over an hour to take some portraits and it ends up raining.  Thankfully, the big tree which we were shooting under provided enough cover to get a string of shots off and prevent the gear from getting totally saturated. I even got a thumbs up from a very tough critic.

I concluded the senior portrait shoot over the weekend at Laurel Hill State Park by the lake.  It was a bit later in the evening than I was hoping for, but the light held out and I was happy with what turned out.  This time I had a brand new Fujinon XF 55-200mm telephoto lens to use.  The package arrived right before the shoot and I opened the shipping box, pulled out the black Fujinon lens box, grabbed the lens and went.  Thankfully it worked very well and so far I love the images it produces.  Using this lens versus the 18-55mm zoom gave me a better working distance and let me blow the background out quite easily.

Earlier today my sister in law and I took a walk around town with the goal of getting some senior portraits done.  This was the first time I was using the new Fuji X-E1 for portrait work and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Needless to say, it worked very well.  I set my ISO to Auto 400, clicked the shutter speed dial to 1/125 and let the aperture float to where it was needed.  The lighting conditions made it stick right around it’s maximum of f/4, so that was perfect.  On most of the shots, I used a speedlight with a small softbox attached and triggered by a pair of generic radio triggers.  The power was set low so that it gave the image just a slight bump in light.  Everything came together beautifully.  Here are just a few from the walk.