I came across Arya Kern when browsing for models on Facebook. She had asked if anyone was available for a last minute shoot. Although I was initially hesitant, I sought to it. Boy was I glad I did! She was excellent and needed ZERO guidance…

She came up with the idea to shoot at UW which was an excellent choice as this place is beautiful and massive with so many different places and styles to shoot…

Here’s how the events unfolded and what it took to get some really beautiful shots, with the MacDaddy Sigma 50 of course…


I was on my way to the location with too much time to burn so I swung by Glazer’s in downtown Seattle. I walked in that sucker like a wild gunslinger demanding where I could find the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM lens. I had my eye on this gem for months and needed it in order to take care of business! So I impulsed and bought it on the spot. One of the best impulses of my life…

When I arrived on location, I found Arya sitting there on the bench. When I greeted her she immediately popped up and was ready for business; she was obviously experienced.

We walked around and I scanned every nook and cranny for a spot. The sun was so bright that a lot of the area we were in was simply unusable. We came across some cool pillars at the top of a small staircase and decided to try it out the lighting anyways. The results were okay but probably only because of the 1-1.5 stops of vignetting with this lens. Usually this is frowned upon but it worked in our case:

Although the spot was really awesome, the lighting caused big shadows and blown highlights. I needed something better! After all, I just dropped loads of money on a new lens :p

We walked into some shade a few hundred feet away and tried a few more shots. The backdrop wasn’t the most pleasing and people managed to find their way into my view totally disrupting the shots but WOW was the bokeh amazing with this lens. I exploded with excitement on the inside but kept a calm demeanor and appearance. This lens is absolutely fantastic. Sharp as a tack even opened all the way up and extremely little barrel distortion:

About 20 minutes in, Arya decided to change into a new outfit. At the same time, I got my softbox ready for some serious shooting. I could tell she was a dancer and held her poses really well. It was time to find something worthwhile…

We scouted around for some brick walls to shoot at but the good ones seemed to be occupied by people standing around. (What they were doing against a random brick wall beats the hell out of me!)

Then out of nowhere this beautiful scene popped into view. I think we struck gold! The lighting, the outfit, the ambiance, it was surely going to yield good results…

Before I knew it, she was sitting up on the wall. I had her move a couple times to setup the right compositions but other than those few adjustments, she was doing it all on her own. A natural of some sort…

With the sun leaking through the trees, we got a lot of cool lighting effects. Coupled with the deep green and red orange of the brick, the scene popped nicely. The colors were really making a statement here!

I placed the 43″ softbox mostly to camera left as to light up her face, otherwise it wasn’t really needed. For those shots where she was facing the sun, I threw the whole tripod in the ivy and had it facing her way…

I enjoyed this location so much that we spent the majority of our time here. Not only did we enjoy what was displaying on the camera, so did one other bystander who insisted he get a photo with Arya:

I couldn’t get over how beautiful the results were turning out with this lens as well as the lighting and the model. After firing a couple hundred shots here, I asked if we could move to another area. This time, placing Arya smack dab in the middle of the street…

A few people stopped and watched as we took some more photos with yet again a bystander displaying interest in the model. This time we played with his head a bit by hinting we were known pro’s and asked if he wanted to be famous :p Of course, “Watts” was completely down to get his photo taken with a legit model:

The overall performance of the lens was fantastic and the model was great to shoot with. This shoot was yet another success! And you never know, maybe Watts really will be famous some day…

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