Portrait Photography | Photoshoot with Emilie

Emilie and I have been wanting to do a photo shoot for a while, but our schedules seem to have a way of deviously scheming behind our backs and making it nearly impossible to find a time to get together.  So, throwing our hands up in the air, we reserved the the first Saturday that we both had free; it was over a month away.

We decided to make a party out of it and invited our Austin portrait photographer friends Ming Gong and Raychel Deppe.  The plan was to head out to McKinney Falls State Park right out side Austin and to get take photos of Emilie using the waterfalls, trees, rocks and good ole fashioned nature as a backdrop.

Of course, good ole fashioned nature decided to play us a mean card: rain.  If memory serves correctly, it rained for two days prior to the scheduled shoot and there was a 60% chance (read: 100% chance) of rain  on the day of the shoot.  

Not wanting to have a soaked and muddy model, let alone soaked and muddy photographers with soaked and malfunctioning cameras, we took evasive action and found a location that could shelter us from both rain and mud.

Enter the parking garage!

Parking garages are great.  If it is raining, they keep the rain off your head and the mud off your feet.  If the sun is harsh and contrasty
(and hot), you can stay on the lower levels where the light is softer and you can find great light directionality from the windows all around
you.   There are repeating patterns in both light and structure, angled and parallel lines.

It also helps if the parking garage is relatively empty.  Cars tend to clutter up the place.

If you are in the market for a nice parking garage as a shooting space, try to find one that backs up to a park or greenbelt.  As parking
garages are naturally rather open spaces (no real outer walls) it is much nicer to have a blurry green foresty background than to have a nice
blurry McDonalds sign mucking up the frame.  If you are a portrait photographer or people photographer in general, keep a mental list of garages in your neighborhood.

Even though our initial plan was ruined by past, present and future rain, it turns out the rain was a blessing in disguise.  The skies were
overcast all morning long, providing nice even soft illumination everywhere.  It was dreamy… and it kept the temperature cool.

We started shooting on the roof and headed to lower levels when the rain came splashing down.  We quickly realized that the wet concrete offered an opportunity to work with reflections. Rain, my friends, is a boon.

After a lot of photographs and a lot of laughing, we broke camp to head out to Trudy’s, one of Austin’s great Mexican restaurants that serves up a mean Mexican Martini.   It was a good day and one soon to be repeated.