Last Day in Hoboken — Starky Photography

This is a serious throwback to a shoot I did last Halloween! It was my very last shoot at my old studio in Hoboken, and I wanted to make it count. Kelsey and Charissa came in for this one, and, since they’re friends, we decided to do a mix of photos separately and together. The main goal here was to capture strong images for our portfolios while at the same time using as many of the features of the studio as we could.

We started on the rooftop, which had always been my favorite part of the studio. It wasn’t on the mood board, actually, but being the last day, I figured we should try something up there before we got to the bulk of our mood board. We used to climb up a ladder to get to the highest level (!) until I realized there was a staircase that led right up...I thank all of you who climbed the ladder with me!

It felt great up there, but it was extra windy, so we started with these photos of Kelsey in the entryway of the staircase, effectively blocking most of the wind. And it worked! I think these were actually my favorite shots of the whole day, which is surprising: usually I end up liking my last shots the most. There’s always a sense of urgency at the end of a shoot and everyone’s synced up by then, too, but I’m glad we got these when we did.

We wanted some energy and fun from their photos together, but you can’t help just looking cool on a rooftop, so we did a bit of both. It was actually getting cloudy, too, which affected the lighting a bit, so I had to get creative about where to place them. I opted to have them with their backs to the sun, hoping to get some kind of light on their hair and shoulder and add some dimension to the photos, even though there was less light on their faces. But I was shooting on an 85mm, 1.4 lens, so I was able to open up the aperture enough to get enough light into the images and you can hardly tell. It was the wind that made us call it quits on the rooftop, though: it picked up and it was almost impossible to get a nice shot without hair in their faces

Indoors, we got to the second part of the mood board, which was to use the industrial vibes of the space. We did some closeup, upbeat shots, for which the white walls were perfect, and then went for some contrast with Kelsey wearing an all-white outfit against the industrial space. The studio was a room at the corner of the building, so it had massive windows on both corner walls, which, despite it being cloudy outside, made for some great natural light indoors.

We left the portraits with a black backdrop for last, as that could be a look that I could recreate just about anywhere and wanted to make sure to use the space to its fullest. The challenge here was that we were running out of light by this point. I often angled my shots with a black backdrop so that the model had one window to her right, and then the other window behind the backdrop. In this way, we could often get a nice hair light from the window. But, since the sun was only visible from one window now, close to sunset, I thought at the last minute to set up a strobe and shoot it through the back of the black, cloth backdrop. It wasn’t necessary for Kelsey because with her being blond, she would still pop from the backdrop (although it did add an interesting kind of ambient light on the backdrop), but it was essential for Charissa, whose black hair would’ve totally gotten lost in the photo. You can see a test shot of Kelsey below of how I tried to originally have the light hitting her directly, but I didn’t have the time to properly diffuse it, so I stuck it behind the backdrop.

We started with Kelsey, and by the time we got to Charissa, we had almost no light. My Canon 5D IV camera came to the rescue here with its amazing low-light capabilities, and so we got some great shots of Charissa as well. Fortunately, they were intended to be in black and white, which made it much easier to edit, too. You can see in the comparison shot below that there was almost no light, but the actual main light on her was coming from the flood lights on the football field right next to the studio. It was something, but it also had an ugly color to it, so black-and-white fixed all that.

It was an ambitious shoot which got hectic but it really brought out everyone’s best. If we were all less seasoned, it might’ve been a debacle, but we crammed as much as we could before they had to leave and before I had to pack up everything and move out before the studio lease was up at the end of the day. I’m so thankful that we were able to make it happen at this pace, and am thankful for having taken the risk on that studio that year, and I’m holding out that we’ll be able to do many more shoots soon. I hope this insight was helpful to you guys! Finally, a big shout out to Alexa Rae Johnson who was on deck as makeup artist!