Finally, I want to give you guys a chance to glance behind the scenes of that birthday shoot i did for my brother. My goal was to create rather dramatic shots (as opposed to creating perfectly-smooth lit images), so in most shots I opted for my newly built DIY beauty dish. This decision was rather spontaneous, so I actually ended up building the dish the night before and the paint on it was still wet – literally! Basically, the beauty dish is a big salad bowl (you wouldn’t believe how many stores I had screened to find the right shape!) and a flower pot saucer lined with aluminum foil on the inside acting as a reflector. The light it makes is somewhere in between soft and hard – seemed like a a good match for a “manly” shoot.

As you can see, I used the dish on the shots on the bridge from up high and left. Why the oblique angle, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: a) He’s wearing glasses, so any light source at the standard 45° angle would show up as a reflection on his glasses and b) my goal for this shoot was to try different things and go away from the same old. I thought it looked rather interesting. In fact, it looked a little too interesting (in terms of dramatic), so I decided to fill in some light from below and right with a silver reflector. The reflector is being held by my lovely assistant of the day. This lighting technique is basically what I used on almost all the shots – dish from above, sometimes fill in a little with a reflector. Really easy. And the light was really smooth enough so I didn’t have to touch it up a lot in Photoshop – in fact, I think I never went above 1/4 power which allowed for fast recycle times and still gave me apertures around 4 which was enough (or little enough) depth of field for me. As a matter of fact, being a “strobist” I do take some pride in trying to exposing somewhat correctly – I always try to hit the correct exposure by chimping on the little screen since I don’t want to have to bump up the exposure by 8 stops afterwards in the raw converter.

This shot in the cafe was done in no more than two minutes including set-up. As David Hobby once wrote, pretty soon you get the kinda-scary ability to guesstimate the settings on the camera and the strobe: I ended up at something like f/2.2, iso 400 and a sixtieth of a second. As you might have guessed, little reflector on the side. Oh, and cloudy white balance to warm it up. This is the out of cam exposure (as are all images in this post), so comparing to the processed images below you get the idea what the on-set lighting already gave me without a whole lot of photoshop editing.

In this shot, you can see the spotlight character of the dish and the nice shadow it creates. Without the fill-in reflector it’s definitely a relatively harsh light (since I had to place it at a certain distance to the subject due to the framing), but I like it that way. The exposure on his face is a little too high on the neutral setting, so for the final image (see posts below) I went with two different raw exposures that I merged into one image (which is something that I end up doing quite frequently whenever I want to darken the background).

I hope you enjoyed this short explanation – if you have any questions, shoot me a comment!

There is this saying that somewhat goes like the shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot. In my case, since I fortunately don’t have kids yet, that applies to my family: I never had the time to take nice pictures of them. My brother has been asking me to take some pictures of him for way too long – so for his 28th birthday I finally agreed to take some nice portraits of him.

I will save the techie stuff about these pictures for another post so I can focus on the thought process behind the portraits here – so stay tuned for the next post, tech folks!

I need to elaborate on my brother a bit to give you an idea about the kind of pictures we had in mind. He’s without a doubt the most creative guy I know of – coming up with new ideas is as natural to him as breathing. He’s an entrepreneur – of course. The ideas that rumble through his head are often business related, so he’s constantly starting new businesses. I think, right now he’s working on at least three different startup ideas. On top of that, he’s got a job many people would kill for. Oh, also he’s a great friend and a good listener. Ok now, convey all that in a couple of portraits…

For the first set, I scouted a location that was supposed to reflect the business side. Also, it should be modern, chic and stylish. To be honest, I had never spent as much time on getting a location – including phone calls to the right persons and making friends with the security personal. But I think it was well worth it.

I had written up a small shooting script with the ideas I wanted to realize. So I pretty much knew what I was going to shoot beforehand and I could focus on more important things like my model. We started off with a couple of portraits on a bridge inside an office building. Pictures he could use for his new job (they want pictures of their employees for their magazine) or as editorial material in articles or blogs.

My personal goal for this shooting, however, was not to only do my standard 3/4 headshot routine, but to choose different angles and play around with space, perspective and sight lines. So I got down on the floor (and cleaned up the dirt with my t-shirt) and took some whole-body shots as well. I really loved this bridge and I’m happy with the way he interacts with the location – kind of like: Hey, I’m CEO, but I’m down to earth. Doing business without ties, literally.

After the bridge shots, we went to a small staircase with wonderful glass stairs that were lit up by neon tubes – I’m saving some of those shots (which were among my personal favorites) up so I can illustrate the tech stuff in the next post. The mood in these pictures was the same, some more serious, some friendly shots with a chic background.

More pictures in part 2 of this post.

Finishing up on the office building location I wanted to do some lost-in-space-kind-of pictures. So I had him sit down on the couch with his laptop. The idea here was to show that his professional life pretty much revolves around the web and geek stuff. The bird’s eye view picture we did afterwards was a lot of fun – I kinda had to yell my commands downstairs. My idea for this shot was to show him not as a loner, but as somebody who is unique. I let the floor go dark (happy with the way this came out!) by putting only one light on him (more about this in the following tech post).

On our way back, he surprised me with a great photo idea – surprising not only because the visual concept is really cool, but also because it does require some courage to set up a photo shoot in the middle of the city with a thousand people walking by every minute. I set my camera on an improvised tripod (I normally don’t bring one to my shootings because I prefer the non-static shots) and we let it roll. A couple of pops from a flash during the exposure helped to make him stand out from the moving crowd – no photoshop in here!

Finishing up we had a coffee in a cozy coffee bar. There were candles on the table, a red leather couch and a brick wall – so I went with that mood, lit him with just one light (like in 99% of all cases) and took some pictures while we were enjoying our coffees. A two-minute deal.

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this shooting – and how happy I was when I looked on that small screen on the back of my camera. Sometimes you just know when you have nailed a shot. I’m extremely happy with the pictures and I had a great time processing them (even though it took a couple of weeks).

Word-of-mouth marketing works! This nice guy here is a friend of a friend. He was planning to send out applications starting next week, so he needed a nice portrait – pronto, por favor! He wasn’t too happy with the portrait that a professional photographer had taken of him the day before. Following the advice of that friend he stumbled upon this blog and really liked what I did for those guys. Fortunately, I had all my equipment at the university that day (I’ll tell you why very soon), so we arranged a spontaneous shooting at the nearby university building.

For this shoot, I was going to try different setups. As you know, I like to add a little structure or a pattern to the background to spice things up a little. Yet, due to the comments I received about the last pictures, I decided to do one shot with a more classic background. For that, I had the model stand in front of a plain dark gray wall (actually, a door), aimed one flash on the background to add a little gradient and lit him with my selfmade umbrella softbox from top left and bounced some light back with a reflector from the right. Again, I added a cardboard-gridded flash on camera right, from behind his face to add a little highlight on his jawline. This is the picture that he liked the most and that he will use to send out his applications.

The other shot is more like my “classic” style – a nice pattern of some stairs, softbox top right, reflector from the left. Even if he’s not going to use it, it’s great to have a variety to chose from. And that’s what makes me different to most professional photographers: Even though the whole shoot took about 30 minutes, I had about 90 pictures in the can, meaning that at least a few of them had the right expression – it’s just a matter of statistics.

Last weekend, I shot some business portraits for two really cool guys from my university. I like to do projects like these whenever I find the time, because they are a good practice and they are a lot of fun to do, too. I try to deal with these kinds of assignments in a quite professional way so that I have an incentive to deliver my best. And as I am exploring the intriguing Strobist (see previous post) “techniques” more and more (you can’t really call ‘em techniques, it’s more like an approach to consider lighting in a thoughtful way) of course I use a project like this to try some new lighting setups.

When I saw what I had on the chip, it somewhat made me think back to the very first business portraits that I took using the available light only. This first picture is one example: The available light, enhanced by only a small, foldable reflector, gives a very smooth, even lighting. And thinking “business portrait”, I’d say that’s kind of what you’re looking for. After all, the light in a portrait used to accompany the resum? in a formal job application shouldn’t scream “Hey! Look at me! See how cool I am?”. All it should do is bring out the features of the face in a nice, subtle, flattering way. These are all things available light can do – given the right weather, the right time of day and the right location (or at least the right angle).

If you don’t have all that, available light can be a pain. Take that from someone who actually loves available light. For these two pictures above, I simply selected locations that were in the shade to achieve an even lighting. Still, you’re somehow at the mercy of all the outdoor conditions – you’re not in control. Fortunately, becoming part of the Strobist movement is all about achieving control over your light. And it’s not even expensive. Calling yourself an available light photographer often has to do with being a budget photographer, which you can remain using some cheapo speedlights instead of huge (studio) lighting gear. Addionally, as you can see from my pictures, having a history in on-location shooting with available light stimulated my love for nice background patterns that create an interesting contrast to the ordinary plain-white seamless backgrounds you mostly see on business portraits.

Long story short, here are my new portraits that I shot on location (university buildings used as backdrop) using my recently acquired small lighting gear. As I mentioned above, I tried to keep it subtle, yet add some accentuation to fit their type. The beauty of this shoot was that I was in absolute control over my light. The flashes could have easily overpowered the available light on the shot, but I decided to use it to add some fill. The setup was simple: One shoot-through umbrella on camera right, one snooted light on the background, one cardboard-gridded spot on the cheek from camera left and back to add some interesting contrast.

Are these pictures any better than the available light portraits? I don’t know. Let me know what you think using the comment button! What I did enjoy, however, is the amount of control that I had in the last shoot. As David Hobby wrote, don’t let good light ruin a photo, the most important thing is still the subject – a great smile, the right atmosphere, and so on. Which is why I kept the setup simple so I didn’t need to set things back and forth after I had them in the ballpark within 5 test shots and could instead focus on the subjects.