My niece is a beatiful young woman, and people often ask her if she does modeling. After several years of hearing that, she decided to give it a try. First thing she needed was some shots for the application, so she called me.

When shooting portraits, there are two things I'm most concerned with: the background and the light. There's not a lot I can do about the subject, but I do have control over what background I use and the light, so that's what I focus on (so to speak).

Being November in Kansas City, we're in the tail end of fall colors. Since it's not very cold out yet (days in the 50s and 60s), I wanted to work outside to take advantage of that color. And if I have a say about the time of day - and I did this time - I'm going to schedule for late afternoon to get that low-angle warm, end of day light.

There's a park near their home, so I drove there beforehand and scouted some good spots. Good planning always makes a shoot easier for me. I looked for areas where the background would either be clean or add color to the shot. As for light, the day was forecast to be sunny, so I wanted to use the sun as a sidelight and backlight. That also meant that with the sun, I could use a reflector to add light to her face. And I knew that her mom would be happy to hold the reflector for me.

All that was left was shooting the pictures. I met them at the park, and we worked through the various locations I'd already picked out. I kept the lens at a wide f/stop (f/2.8 to 4) to minimize depth of field, and had her bring a couple of tops and shoes she could easily change, so there would be variety in her outfits. The whole thing took about 45-minutes.

That evening I downloaded everything. Photo Mechanic's my main workflow tool, handling that job along with renaming, captioning and backup, and then helping narrow the selection to about a dozen photos. Then it was a simple matter of having Photo Mechanic build a web gallery, posting it and letting them choose the photos they wanted.

Once I had their selections, it was time to print. For fifteen years I've used Photoshop, but lately I'm doing more single-image editing with Nikon's Capture NX. I like its U-Point technology, and now that Nik Filters can be run on RAW files inside Capture, it's even better. There's also a new Picture Control utility, part of Capture and the new Nikon cameras. Turning that "On" at its default settings brought out her skin tones and added a bit of "punch" to the scene. I added the "Dynamic Skin Softener" filter from Nik to finish them and the images were ready to print. Off they went to my Epson R2400.

So my part's done, now it's up to the agency. And if she needs more shots, I'll be happy to do them.