There is something I like with cinema lighting, or lighting for television, when they tend to have faces painted with just two tones of the same skin colour. This might sound strange when I try to explain it, I blame it on not having English as my first language. What I am trying to say is; I like interesting shadows.
For this portrait, a headshot for an author I did a couple of weeks ago, I tried to balance the key and the fill light so there would be one half of the portrait in a lighter skin tone, and the other in a darker.
[Read the full post here…]
I usually don’t let my light modifiers be a part of my portraits, sometimes I have to clone out the corner of a reflector panel or crop to get rid of a softbox that was placed very close to the model.
For this portrait of a Swedish authour and illustrator, we tried a lot of different angles, the white Profoto Softlight Reflector (a beauty dish) was first just used as hair light, placed very close to the background, out of frame. When I changed my position a bit, it became a part of the portrait.
Moving around in the studio can give new results…
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.
Lighting diagram & behind the scenes here…
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.
Lighting setup diagram and more details here…
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).
Read more about the lighting setup and behind the scenes…
