INTRODUCTION:
Rosita contacted me late last year to do a few photos of her and her family to decorate their newly renovated kitchen with. At our meeting together she let me know that she was especially drawn to my photography as it seemed to really capture people’s personalities and emotions! For the kitchen they decided on a several large B&W canvases of their individual headshots of family members. Although they’re just headshots I really wanted to inject some more personality into the photos by having everyone bring a prop that meant something special to them for their photos. The props ranged from family cat, Russian hats, golf clubs, and hobbyists air rifles and each showed a little something about each family member. From the love of traveling to a favourite sport or past time. We definitely tried a lot of fun silly things to make everyone loose and have fun in their photos and I am sure it shows in the final product!

PHOTOS:

Introduction:
Ashley and I met late last year and it has taken almost four long months for our schedules to allow us to photograph together. Ashley is a recent graduate looking to possibly pursue a career in the dramatic arts. She contacted me to shoot a couple recent headshots of her before heading back home to Toronto.

Technique:
For this headshot session I had the wonderful assistance of Chi, a fellow photographer and friend. This allowed me to use a reflector to direct some light on Ashley without having to resort to using off camera flash. This was important as you aren’t limited to the flash sync speed of your camera (in my case 1/250th of a second), and I am able to use fast shutter speeds of over 1/1000th of a second. Why would I want to do this you might be asking? The answer is you want to be able to use a larger aperture (F2.8 in this case) to give you less depth of field and more background blur and bokeh to your images. With flash photography you’re fastest shutter speed is your flash sync and most of the time during bright sunny days this lets in too much light at F2.8 even at your lowest ISO settings. Usually this means having to stop down your aperture to something like F11 which usually means everything will be sharp and focused.

In photos #1 and #2 Ashley is sitting on the steps of a building. She is sitting in the shade created by the building while Chi is excellently holding the white reflector in front and to the side of Ashley’s face. Chi is close enough that even in the shade, the reflected light is enough just to add a bit of brightness to her face and you can even notice a bonus catchlight in her eyes! Below is a diagram of the setup we used for photos #1 and #2 compliments of a new Wacom tablet I bought.

Photos:

Lighting Diagram

Introduction:
Erica is a sweet young girl who is interested in starting a career in commercial modeling or acting. We had 30 minutes free in our schedules the other day and decided to do a brief photo session that she would be able to use in her portfolio. The weather that day was really cloudy and dreary but Erica’s big bright smile brought warmth to these images and help show her wonderful personality! Here are a couple that I liked. We did another photo session earlier that showed off more of Erica’s modeling abilities that I have yet to fully edit but keep an eye out for those soon!

Technique:
Because of time constraints I didn’t get to use any off camera lighting. All the light was from the cloudy day. Just position your model in an area where pleasing light hits their face. I used spot metering and metered for her skin tones and just kept shooting concentrating on her posing and expressions rather than worrying about lighting. Looking back I wished I had used some sort of fill flash to create a magical sparkle in her eyes or a reflector to fill in some dark areas around her eyes. Fortunately Photoshop comes to the rescue and I was able to add some magic in post processing. It’s definitely not the same though.

Photos:

Introduction:

Tom is an aspiring actor/model who recently approached me to do some professional quality headshots. I don’t normally do headshots but I thought I would help him out and have a go. Because Tom is new and had never done any headshots before I directed him to a useful website that gives models/actors tips on how to approach heahshot photography:

http://www.headshots101.com/

This website details what an model/actor should expect, what type of wardrobe to bring, and how to chooes the right photographer. It’s a pretty detailed website but it doesn’t really help photographers. In order to prepare for the shoot myself I just looked at inspirational headshots from other photographers. The more expensive the photographer the better his images.

Shoot Details:

Because it is the middle of winter up here in Kingston Ontario, Canada we decided to keep most of the photography indoors. Also because Tom is a little camera shy we also tried to stay away from heavily populated areas of campus. I guess it’s hard to be yourself when people are staring at you because you’re getting your photo taken right? For the first shot we went with a simple Strobist setup with a warmed (1/2 CTO gelled) hotshoe flash shooting through an umbrella camera right. I adjusted the angle of the flash/umbrella until both his eyes were reasonably lit. The worst is when you have only half a face lit when using an umbrella! The background was lit by another bare speedlight firing across the wall from camera right. Care was taken to have the Tom far enough away from the wall to not have the spill light from the umbrella affecting the exposure of the wall!

All the other images where done using natural light as we walked along campus. The second location was in a stairwell fire escape that had very interesting lines plus one small window that we used as a pseudo softbox. The third location was infront of a large window that we were able to overexpose to create a nice white background. Key light was hard to control and is actually a little flat as it just comes from sunlight that was bounced in from the hallways.

Things I Learned:

• Wardrobe is VERY important. Models please bring various DIFFERENT articles of clothing to be best prepared
• Expressions and conveying an open and friendly attitude is important. Models should practice in front of a mirror.
• Make Up Artists (MUA) will save you hours in post production. If only I knew some good ones in Kingston.
• Zoolander shirts are cool.

Photos:

Sometimes you get too hung up on on type of photography you forget to try new things or things you have done before in the past. I know after reading Strobist for so long I have tried to use off-camera flash for everything. But last weekend upon arriving at a dance studio to shoot headshots for a local student-run dance company (EXPOSED Dance Initiative) I say this giant well lit window that I thought would be perfect to use as a nice soft light source.

I completely forgot to take photos of the set/location but here is a group photo that was NOT taken with just window light, but the window light was used to wrap around the group of dancers (but this is for another post). It does show a little bit of the dance studio and the large windows which are perfect for our use.

If you’ve been follow David Hobby’s blog Strobist or know a little bit about portrait lighting you should know that it isn’t always about the quantity of light you have but more so about the quality and direction of light.

Well how do we improve the quality of light? Well depending on our application we sometimes want a nice soft light that doesn’t cast distracting and ugly shadows all over a subjects face. In order to do that we need a nice large light source. The larger the light source the softer the light. That’s why photographers use flashes firing into umbrellas. It makes their tiny flash seem bigger as it lightens the entire umbrella. So in these headshots I could have used a flash and umbrella but why waste such a prime location?

So I positioned each dancer close to the window and turned them slightly so that the light from the window would hit them from such an angle that it would create a more dynamic modeling light. The slight shadows on the unlit side of the face help to add depth to each image. Try playing around with the position the light comes from by turning the model and repositioning yourself to see how the light and it’s direction changes the images.

If you wanted to shoot nice portraits by the window I recommend you using a portrait lens (ie. 50mm F1.8, 85mm F1.8, 70-200mm F2.8) and shooting relatively wide open at say F2.8 to blur out the distracting background.

So next time you see a large window, whip out your favourite portrait lens and start taking pictures!