portrait photography – JWNPhoto.com

Articles Tagged with: portrait photography

Cracking The Shell

Dr. Colleen Boylston’s husband tasked me with the job of creating a portrait of his wife for a new brochure for their medical practice, Sweetgrass Pediatrics. She was not happy about it at all! She’s not the type of person who likes attention (in fact, she’ll hate that I’m including her in this post). She doesn’t like having her picture taken, especially when I set up an on-location studio in one of their offices and all of her peers and employees are peeking in on the shoot. Can you imagine looking like that and not wanting to show it off?

Regardless, this is one of my favorite things about photographing real people. Sometimes it takes time, and it can take a lot of effort on the part of the subject and the photographer alike. When you can finally get them to open up in front of the camera, it’s such a rewarding feeling. I actually shot two little sessions with Dr. Boylston that morning. The first session was OK, but she was really not being herself – she wasn’t comfortable and I knew it. Thanks to one of her employees, Lakeia, who has done modeling before, she was able to get inspired:

I told her she couldn’t let her employees show her up! She was uncomfortable with posing techniques at first because she thought it was going to look too “Glamour Shot-like”. Once she saw Lakeia’s shots she got it! I was able to get her back in front of the camera with a new attitude and we got the shot up top. Now, if only I could have Lakeia hanging around at every photo shoot! Check out the set of photos from that shoot here.

Practice

I ordered a new backdrop last week for an upcoming event and I needed to set it up, iron/steam it, and test it out with my lights. I grabbed my kids as my test subjects and started to fire away. On my camera’s LCD, the shots looked great, but once I imported them to my laptop, I noticed that they were all underexposed. Sounds like a case of check the histogram! Digital cameras make a lot of things easy, but this is an example of the easiness working against you.

As you can see from the shots above, I was able to brighten these photos up in Lightroom. Sure, that’s a solution to a problem, but it’s a bad solution. The shoot I’m doing this for will be of a lot of different subjects in a short period of time. This means I need to get it right the moment I click the shutter. I will not have time to fix these shots, so I need them to be correctly exposed. I moved my lights to fill in more shadows, I added a reflector to the setup as well. I also increased my aperture by 1/3 of a stop to let in more of the flash. Most importantly, I turned on the histogram on my camera’s display so that I knew that the shots weren’t under-exposed. I’m also going to tether my camera to my laptop and not even bother to judge my camera’s screen.

This is the reason I like to test everything out on my own time. Sometimes very basic things will plague you, and I would rather make those mistakes during practice than while real paying customers are in front of me. I should make use of a light meter and test the backdrop and subject to find the right exposure, but I’m not shooting with studio strobes, I’m using speedlights. I am manually setting them even though I could use Nikon’s iTTL system, because I really want to have full control over the exposure. If anyone has a good light meter they want to give me, I’d be glad to make use of it 😉

I think we all have had plenty of occasions where we took a bunch of photos that looked great on the camera’s LCD screen, but once we looked at them on a computer screen the problems became very obvious. What’s your horror story of a blown shot?