I know that I said that I wasn’t going to do much blogging about the portrait end of my photography since this blog has always been about my landscape and decay photography. I’ve done pretty good with keeping with that promise, but I have to slip one in that covers two of my recent shoots. I won’t make it long because there is no sense in going through every detail of the shoots, but there are some things that I think are worth bringing up if for no other reason than to document my progression as a people photographer. These two shoots have taken place over the last three weeks and have both been here at the studio in Purlear, NC. They could not have been any more different, but in both cases, I got to use off camera flash in an outside setting to work with ambient light to create moods. This is something that I haven’t done much of in the past, so it was nice to stretch my skills in that regard.
The first session was one at the end of September and happened kind of quickly. Toni was talking with a family friend of ours about her stepson wanting to get into modeling. She asked if I would be willing to do a headshot for him so he could have that to give to agencies and potential employers. I was happy to help out but knew that there would be more to it than just a headshot. In my limited experience, I had come across something called a comp card, or composite card. This is essentially a business card for models that has several photos included along with stats and contact information. I didn’t know everything that went into it but knew enough to research it.
While researching this wasn’t going to pose a problem, the timeframe that I had to work with was kind of tight. If memory serves, the family was going to be going out of town for the weekend. I wanted to get them fit in as soon as possible which was on Thursday, just three days from when I agreed to shoot it. During this time, I spent a good amount of time looking up examples of comp cards and what they included. I found that a headshot was a good starting point, but there also needed to be some non-branded lifestyle photos as well as full length and 3/4 length photos. Typically a comp card would include four to six images, so I was aiming for five during the session.
Initially, I read that the images needed to be naturally lit, and I assumed that they meant outside photos with ambient light. That put me in a mindset of doing a location shoot, but there wasn’t going to be time with them not able to get here until after 5:30. There wouldn’t be enough light to do much outside, so I considered bringing them into the studio. The more I researched, the more I realized that studio shoots were fine and having studio lighting was not a problem as long as it wasn’t dramatic lighting. The idea behind the comp cards is to have simple lighting that shows the subject fully. Along that same thought process, these images shouldn’t be retouched and should represent the subject accurately. In other words, this is not the time for the photographer to go all out to make the photo perfect, just keep it simple. I could do that, and it would speed things up in the process.
I had a rough gameplan in place to do the shoot in stages both outside and inside. I knew that I would have enough light to get things done for a quick session outside when they got here so I was ready when they pulled up. We went ahead and got to work straight away. I started off with some basic walking shots going for that full length photo that I needed as well as a bit of lifestyle mixed in. This was mostly to break the ice and to get us used to working with each other. As we both found our grooves, I moved us over to the wall by the driveway for some sitting and leaning options. The sun was getting low at this point, and I was using the garage door to bounce the light back onto my subject’s face. This was where I was really starting to get into the posing aspect of things as I was trying to get him into a pose that looked comfortable but still working compositionally. We had a lot of fun with this one and things were moving along rather quickly which was good since the light was fading fast.
I had planned for that fading light aspect and had already brought out one of the studio strobes for the last shot that I had planned for outside. This was going to be the most difficult for me since I have very little experience with mixing strobes and ambient light as would be needed here. My idea was to give a little pop to my subject with the flash while underexposing the ambient a bit to give it more of that nighttime feeling. With the low light levels, it was going to obviously be flash lit, but I wanted to work with the color balance a bit to make it seem a little more natural. There were also plans of doing this as a black and white shot as well.
Knowing that I was going to be pushed for time, I had already had Toni stand in to get the flash at the right power before they even arrived. This helped me, even if the exposure changed a bit before I was ready to shoot this pose. All I had to do was make some small adjustments and I was ready to get the image. It took just a minute more to get the light positioned just right for his facial structure and we were off. This was a shot that I had planned on using a skateboard for, but that was accidentally left at the house. The thing that sets a professional photographer apart from an amateur is they are just better problem solvers. While the board was not far away, it would have delayed the shoot to where the light would have been gone. There were only a few minutes left to be able to get the shot and that was what I intended on doing. Without the board, I needed something else for the lifestyle type image. Looking around, he had a backpack where he had his change of clothes for the other portions of the shoot. I had him grab that and sling it over his shoulder.
That was the trick to this composition, and everything came together perfectly here. The flash made all the difference in the world, and I was glad that I had already figured that I would need it before getting started. As it turned out, I ended processing this as a color and black and white photo for a bit of variety. My hopes were that I would deliver the five images that he needed for the comp card as well as giving him a decent starter portfolio. By making this one photo into two, I was further along that track and he had choices for what to use.
After only a few minutes with this pose, the light was fading, and it was time to move inside. He needed to get changed for the next look. While he was doing that, I collected my gear and brought it back into the studio where I already had things set up for the originally planned headshot. I knew that we could slow down at this point because I had control over the light now that we were inside. There were several ideas that I had for us to cycle through, and it was only going to take me a minute to get things turned on and ready since there were already two strobes set up and dialed in for what we were doing.
Headshots have become something very familiar to me over the years. I’ve lost count of the headshots that I’ve done, but having done two different company’s employee headshots as well as several individual ones along the way it is safe to say I’ve worked this out to a science now. For this, I went with a very forgiving lighting arrangement where I used clamshell beauty lighting with a beauty dish centered above the camera and a Westcott Eyelighter 3 for fill and catchlights. For a bit of depth, I added a gridded bare bulb strobe behind him for the background light. It was simple and effective and very much like the last largescale headshot session that I had worked on in August.
When we were happy with the headshot, we moved into a more of a product type shot where I used a keyboard on a makeshift desk. The desk was done with a small table that I have in the studio with two pieces of fill wood that came with my desk when it was shipped. That provided just the right environment to tell the story that I was after. Then it became all about getting the pose which was the most important part. This turned out to be my favorite image of the evening I believe, although my subject didn’t share in my excitement. He preferred other photos more than this one, but I digress. I thought that he nailed the look here and the pose was solidly executed. It just works in all the important ways.
From here, we did some other looks, and I changed the background to a brick look that fit kind of the urban vibe we were going for in the latter stages. There were a lot more headshots done for variety, and a few more 3/4 and full length ones as well. The end count for the session was 21 delivered images with only a few of them being done as both color and black and white. These are just a handful from the session to show some examples.
I would like to mention that we finished the shoot around 9 or so that night and I had the finished images delivered to the clients by the end of the day on Friday, not even 24 hours later. I’ve head way too many tales of photographers holding onto the images for weeks or months after a shoot before being ready to deliver anything. I have a hard time doing things like that and will gladly work through an entire day in front of the computer in order to get the photos edited and ready whether it be digital or print. Of course, if I’m outsourcing the print job, I will have to wait for the printer, but I’ll have my part done within 48 hours, and usually within a day. It is just one of those things that helps to set me apart from other photographers and it seems to really shock many of my clients who have their deliverables in hand within that day’s turnaround time.
When I got everything wrapped up from that shoot, it was time to start working on the next one which had been scheduled for a couple of months. This was going to be a Halloween themed shoot on Friday the 13th of all days. It fit the mood to have it on that day but was going to introduce some difficulties in the session because of timing. Friday is, of course, a work day which meant that one of my clients was going to have to get off or work early to make the shoot happen since they were wanting it to be outside. We batted around some different locations that could work, but getting permission was starting to be a problem. I remember asking my client what type of setting they would want, and she responded that they were looking for trails through the woods, or maybe an old barn. I saw an opportunity to make the location really simple at this point and I offered the yard here at the studio. We are fortunate to have trails over several acres which are easily accessible. I sent some video footage of what was there and they found it as acceptable for a location. The only caveat was that they were an hour and two hours away from my studio which would again put a crunch on time since we were needing to do this outside.
With work and travel time, it was decided that 5pm was going to be the time to get started. This would give us just under two hours of light before sunset would happen. More than two hours on a photo shoot becomes tiresome so, that was going to work out fine as long as I could light things appropriately. We started to build a moodboard on Pinterest and I could see a theme developing. The photos that we were all posting seemed to be blue hour, and just generally dark settings. This fits, because you rarely see a horror movie filmed during the daylight hours. I knew that in order to do this, I was going to need to use strobes and keep the ambient light rather dim. This is something that I’ve read a lot about and watched plenty of YouTube videos on the subject, but just haven’t done in actuality. That was a benefit from the last session where I used a strobe with the brick wall pose before coming inside. That at least gave me practical experience doing that type of technique. I was going to lean on that pretty hard for this session.
As we got closer, it was decided that my two subjects would be dressed as witches. While I didn’t really expect anything other than black, this introduced another concern into my thoughts as a photographer. I was going to be keeping things dark and mysterious while my subjects were wearing black. The last thing I wanted was for there to be floating heads in a sea of darkness which meant that I was really going to have to pay attention to the lighting that I was using. I wrestled with this for quite some time and decided that since Toni would be available to help out, I would be able to bring a studio strobe outside. These strobes are battery operated and 500 watt seconds so there would be no worry with overpowering even the mid-day ambient light. They were just heavy and I would need help getting them moved and in position which is where Toni would come in.
There was also some prop shopping that happened before the shoot where I found an old porch light that looked like a lantern. I made a few modifications to it and got it to where I could insert a hotshoe flash inside to fire off during exposures to make it look like the lantern was lit without there being any fire, or anything else that could be risky. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to use this, but I loved the idea when I saw it during one of my YouTube University classes.
As the day of the shoot approached, things changed at Toni’s work and it was looking like she might not be able to be around to help. This put into question my ability to realistically use a heavy studio strobe. There was also the possibility that we were going to see rain, and if nothing else some deep clouds. There was a rain date planned for, but I was hoping not to have to use it since the idea was to do this on Friday the 13th. I just kept an eye on the weather, and tried to work out options that would make working solo easier. I decided that with the possibility of low levels of ambient light thanks to the clouds, I might not have to overpower much, so if I was lucky, I could just use a hotshoe flash with a modifier and stand. This would be much lighter and more resilient in case of a fall than the larger strobes. I just didn’t know how effective they would be in practice until the sun started to go down. To make sure that I had the best possible power out of the small lights, I planned on using a Magnum reflector which will increase the light output by about two stops. This should make my little strobes much more effective. It will be hard light, but I’ve found that this reflector has some of the most beautiful light on the right subjects. It is one of my favorite modifiers for photographing Toni when she lets me.
I had everything figured out and felt confident that I was going to be able to get this done in the time allotted. We had the location secured which was simple for me since I just had to walk out of the front door to be there. I had the lighting figured out, and I knew what look I was going for. I was up to date on the props that were going to be used and the general storyline that we were wanting to go with. It was just a matter of the weather and if Toni would be able to help out.
As it turned out, the rain held off and we actually had sunny skies which caused me more concern than the clouds would have. I now had hotspots along the trails which meant that I was going to have to be selective about which sections we worked in so that I didn’t have sunlight streaming through the trees. I had walked the property the day before and picked out the areas which were most likely going to work, and those were the spots that we concentrated on. Both of the clients arrived by 5 and got dressed while I pulled equipment out into the yard. It was still very much daylight at this point as you can see from the BTS photo that Toni shot while we were working on this one shot. No more than a few minutes were between these two photos, but you can see how dark I was able to make the background through the use of the strobe. This is a very handy technique to have and it is one that I have been wanting to use for a while. The fact that I used it from the first shot through the last was very helpful. There were around 170 frames shot during this session, and pretty much all of them were with flash and ambient light mixed. I say pretty much all, because there was a problem at one point where my two flashes went dead. After all of the batteries were replaced, and I power cycled them again, I was back up and running though. Friday the 13th problems I assume.
Not only did I get to work with the flashes in a way that I had not been able to before, I also introduced myself to a new style of editing for this session. I’ve always been about dark and moody, but this takes it up a notch or more. I’ve never purposely underexposed the background this much on purpose. Then I went in to post and cooled the color temperature down a lot to simulate nighttime conditions. A bit of atmospheric haze was added into the photos to dial back the crispness of the background since dim lighting doesn’t have much detail to it. It took me about 30 minutes to edit the first image while I figured out how best to get it all done. From that point on, I think it was about 15 minutes per photo. There were 40 photos delivered when I was all finished.
Something else that I got to work with on this shoot that was a bit different for me was working with motivated light. Having the setting look like it was in the dark, many of the props that were used had to provide light to make the scene work. Of course, a candle was not going to provide any light on my subject in the grand scheme of things, so that was where the strobes came into play. It was not so simple as to just aim the flash into the scene, I had to make sure that it was a flattering light to my subjects as well as going along with any prop lights such as the candle seen here. I had to keep in mind the direction of the prop light so that the added light to the scene made sense when at all possible. This is easier to do with one person, but there were many times when both of them were in the frame with a motivated light source.
One of the best parts of the evening was when I just told them to have fun with it and to just act the parts. I didn’t spend any time posing them, just put the props in place and let them have at it. They were saying incantations about all kinds of things, and I could tell they were just putting random thoughts together, but it worked out so well. I just worked my way around them and shot photos that I thought captured the right moments. Only occasionally did I have to interject any posing tweaks and that was usually just to make sure that nothing was blocking something important. I was able to use a lot of the vegetation around the area to give it that kind of voyeuristic feel, so the viewer felt like they just stumbled upon this pair in the woods.
The dark outfits started out as something that I worried about because of the floating head concerns. That turned out to not be a problem at all with the way I was lighting the scene. The outfits picked up just enough light to allow me to get plenty of detail into things. Something that Toni and I both agreed on was the red hair which just looked fantastic in every photo. Having the background showing a heavy blue color cast the red just jumped out and looked amazing. I also really found the details in these sleeves to be a lot of fun to work with in post as I brought out the little details. I have a whole new appreciation for dark colored clothing for a night shoot. It is not nearly as difficult as I had once thought it would be.
One of the props that they brought was some sage to light. The idea was to have it smoking and to capture some shots with that. This turned into the hardest part of the session for all of us. For some reason the sage didn’t want to stay lit (Friday the 13th problems), and then I had a hard time getting the light to hit it correctly to really make the smoke show up. Sadly, there were only a couple of frames with the sage, but I managed to get several of the lighting process at least so that we had the concept captured at least. I think that if the sage had stayed lit and we could have gotten them into the right position relative to the flash this would have worked out just fine. I had a second flash set up just for the smoke since it needed a direct source of light from behind to really show up. I kept the key light on their faces as it had been. If you are keeping track, I am now balancing two separate off camera flashes while working with ambient light. This was so above my pay grade just an hour before, but I was making it work just like I knew what I was doing.
Thank you YouTube University!!! I make no bones about it. What I have learned about photography, has been from books, magazines, and now videos. If I can learn it, you can too!
Speaking of my alma mater, you might recall that I sourced an old porch light for a lantern, but we haven’t seen it yet. Well, I had so many other things going on, I almost forgot, but as we were looking for something for them to hold on the trail, that lantern made perfect sense. I put the smaller flash in it and sealed it up. I had already laced the back panel with foil and put three layers of diffusion on the amber colored lenses which I found were necessary to keep the flash from blowing out, even at 1/128 power. It seemed kind of silly holding a porch light, but the first shot I made proved the concept. This thing was a winner and I now have it available for other shoots. It really was a lot like magic the way it only lit up for that fraction of a second while the photos was being shot.
because it was so successful, I kept on using it for most of the rest of the evening until the ambient dropped so low that I had to boost the ISO so high that the lantern just lost all color to it because of the overexposure from the flash inside. It was a lot of fun while it lasted and certainly went a long way towards making the scene look much later than it actually was.
OK, time for a quick light check. It was getting a little too dark in the woods, so it was time to come out on the front yard for some of the other shots that were planned. You can see that the ambient light was still pretty good, but I believe that Toni’s phone did some exposure boosting here since it felt a little darker at this point. I no longer needed the extra punch from the Magnum reflector and figured that I would be better off with a shoot through umbrella which I had brought out with me as well. This would give a broader light source and much softer than the Magnum. I kept the other flash in the lantern which you can see on the ground unlit. Toni did have a great idea to bring out two jars that she had in the kitchen to put some candles in. It had been too bright before for them to work, but the light was getting low enough now that they would show up better. The idea here was the same as before where I was going to keep the light low and soft to give that illusion of night, even though we were still about 45 minutes from sunset.
You be the judge about whether or not the lighting worked out as planned. I think that it worked amazingly well here, and it looks like this might have happened in the middle of the night. Again, only a few minutes from the behind the scenes shot that Toni did and the image shown here. The power of the flash in the lantern was registering on the ground around it to make it eve more believable which I really enjoyed. You can even see the textures in the glass sections which adds another layer of detail to this scene.
One of the final bits of equipment that we had been waiting to use was a fog machine that my clients had brought with them. This is one of those things that I have thought about getting more often than not, but haven’t gone ahead and done it because the juice has a shelf life and I’m not sure how effective it would be in the studio with no ventilation. All that being said, I really liked the effect that it provided to the scene and other than trying to second guess which direction the wind was going to be blowing (we were always wrong), it worked great. Originally, we had been planning for smoke grenades, but they hadn’t come in in time for the shoot. They had the fog machine, and I had enough extension cord length to get it to the edge of the front yard which was where we needed it. Toni helped out here by providing the fog when needed as I got the shots.
By this point, the light was dark enough that the lantern was no longer a viable option as you an tell from the above photo that it was starting to overexpose losing the effect that it needed to have. It was all well and good because Toni had brought out the jars with candles which were now providing enough light to be effective on their own. I was able to repurpose the smaller strobe to the smoke duty as it was set up with a grid to light up the smoke from behind as we did some more photos.
As the light all but left, we decided that we were all done and started to gather up all the equipment. As we were doing this, there was one idea that they reminded me of that I had forgotten all about. I still had the light set up so we tried to make that work, but the light was so dim that I couldn’t get the camera to focus and wasn’t able to get the viewfinder bright enough to manually focus it either. We moved closer to the house where the porch lights would be of assistance in getting the focus. I used the flash to overpower those lights and give me the right lighting on the hands since that was going to be the subject. I managed to get two exposures in focus here and called it a night. It was no pitch black outside and we had to use flashlights to gather up the gear.
As with the previous session that I talked about in this blog, I wanted to get the deliverables back to the clients as soon as possible. I had told them that I would try to have them done by Saturday, but it might be Sunday depending on how long the editing took. I had 170 photos and I suspected that there would be 20 that I would be delivering to them. Well, I started editing first thing on Saturday morning, and had them digitally delivered by 7:30 that evening. Oh, and there were 40 delivered images which were all edited without the use of presets, or anything like that. Each photo got its own edit, and personal style. This is how I like to do business.
If you would like to get signed up for a special photography session, I’m still new enough at this that I am not turning away much except for weddings. I don’t do weddings. Otherwise, I am happy to entertain about anything. I’m getting pretty dialed in with my pricing which is always going to be specific to the job and expectations. If it is something that I can learn from, and model releases are signed, I will offer discounted rates and free digitals. It all depends on what you are needing, and what I will have to do in order to deliver on those needs. The consultations are always free, and I’m happy to see if I’m a good fit for your desired session. Let’s get that conversation started today, and if you are wanting your very own spooky Halloween shoot, there is still time to get it in the books.
