Photography & Lighting setups
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I haven’t used the snoot for portraits in a while, and when a publisher in Stockholm asked me to take some portraits of a writer, I thought it could be a good idea to include it. To create something a little different.
Using the snoot all by itself would maybe have been cool, but not that useful. Maybe if she wrote vintage mystery novels. So, I used it together with a much larger light source from the same direction, a 5 foot Profoto softbox Octa. As something between fill and key light.
This is a business portrait from the final session the day I used almost the same lighting setup for three different clients with just the addition of one more light for every new “model”.
It started with the one light setup with a test model (a friend with a skate board), which resulted in these portraits of a Swedish singer.
Later the same day, I shot some business portraits using two lights, and last, the portrait above with a third light used as fill light. Just a little, to make the texture in his face become more visible, and the shadows more open.
This is a portrait style I think works very well for corporate and business portraits of all types. On location or in the studio, with a clean background or with something out of focus.
It works especially well if you need to have a lot of portraits in a layout, for example showing the board of directors or management, as every face has the same type of shadows on one side.
What you need is three lights, a diffusion panel and a camera.
Portrait photography is a good niche to be in as a photographer, I think. But most of the times you only get one shot at getting it right. At least when it comes to business portraits, most companies tend to update their image bank only when they really need to.
One reason might be that most people like to look younger, and an easy way is to use old photos from when they really were younger.
But, this time I was asked by a Swedish publishing house to update their author portraits, and one of the authors I was hired to shoot was a guy named Peter Barlach. A chance to better my last portrait of him taken couple of years back (when I honestly wasn’t that good at this).
Most of my portrait photography features a smiling face, or at least someone working hard not to look too grim and serious. But, sometimes someone comes into my photo studio in Stockholm and does exactly the opposite.
The gentleman in this case works as a business consultant and he is a very nice guy, but he doesn’t smile for the camera. Nope. And I like that, you don’t have to smile. Most lawyers never do that, for example.
The lighting setup in my studio used three Profoto Compacts and I developed all portraits in Lightroom including the black and white conversion. And added some final touches in Photoshop.
This was the short version.
