Getting Kinky in Austin, Texas

There's nothing I like better than an interesting portrait subject and a big, soft light. This was shot for a magazine cover and it's one of the outtake outtakes. That means the magazine assigned me to do a 35mm color image to run on the cover (vertical, saturated, etc.) and when we finished with that we switched cameras and mentalities and started shooting big black and white images that were square and fun. The color outtakes are the first outtakes and the stacks of contact sheets and negatives are the second outtakes.

I've tried portrait shoots a lot of different ways. Many photographers I've worked with or hired (back in my ad agency days) were strong believers in the "big crew". They made each portrait session a big deal. A really big deal. There was always a first and second assistant, a make up person and maybe another person for hair or wardrobe. Everything always seemed tense. Like a preparing for surgery. And sometimes the big crew is client driven. The portrait may be of a CEO or some other "very important" company officer and short timelines may have been set.

There's always a good rationale. And for some people it may be the only way to comfortably work. But I've always been most comfortable hewing to the opposite extreme. If I brought along assistants it was usually because I couldn't carry in all the gear by myself. If I hired a make up person I generally wanted him/her to do the make up and then leave me alone with the sitter.

I think it's hard for a lot of people to have their portrait taken. They have a certain amount of fear that they won't meet expectations or that they won't be able to project what they want people to see. With more and more people on the set it can become harder and harder for inexperienced sitters to relax and get with the program. Even if the inexperienced sitters are world famous business people....

Here's the way I like to do it. I like to spend hours by myself setting up and testing my lighting. Which is kind of silly since I tend to light things the same way most of the time. I guess it's a ritual. Before every major portrait sitting the first thing I do is to clean the studio. Then I start planning the shot. Seems like the biggest thing is getting the background just right. If I can get the background hung and lit just right everything else falls into place. I usually have vision for how I would like the photos to turn out. Sometimes it goes that way and sometimes it doesn't.

I'm always trying to get the most distance between my background and the subject. I like to use long lenses and compress the background as much as possible. f2 on a 4:3 camera, f2.8 on 35mm and f4 or 5.6 on a medium format camera. The last thing that gets set is the main light. Right now I'm setting up for portrait tomorrow at 1 pm. I'm using a Profoto 600 monolight into a five foot octabank and I'm diffusing that thru two layers of diffusion on a six by six foot panel. Maybe a little piece of foamcore to the opposite side for fill.

For this session I'm working solo. Just me and the sitter. We'll talk about what we want to get from the session and then I'll have him sit down and we'll start. The session goes in fits and starts. We might find a subject of mutual interest and chat for several minutes between bursts of frames. ("He burst into Frames!!!")

When we both feel that we've got what we came together for we'll end the session, talk a bit more and go our separate ways. No big drama, no big production.

I'll head out to lunch and then come back and start processing. And we'll do it all over again the next day. And that's the fun stuff.