Portrait Project. Ongoing. My eccentric thought process/workflow.

Lauren.

You are what you practice. I forget from time to time that portraiture is a process and not just the click of a shutter. You really have to decide what you want from a session and then do the practice in order to make it work. Lauren is one of my clients and I asked her to come into the studio to have her portrait made. She was kind enough to agree and we set up a time and date. 

Then I came to grips with the fact that I'd slacked off doing portraits for fun and portraits for my art over the last few years spending much more time either doing straightforward images for clients or writing about various things on the blog. Frankly, I felt out of practice. 

So the first thing I had to do was go through a selection process. I knew I'd be shooting in the studio but I was unclear about what gear to use. Which lights? Continuous light or flash? What kind of modifiers? Multiple smaller lights or fewer, bigger lights? What kind of background? Plain paper? Muslin with color? (And I still need to work on dropping the saturation in the green channel in post...). What camera should I use? And once I'd chosen the camera then what lens to put on it to get the look that I wanted to see?

Then, of course I'd have to think about posing and what kind of crop I'd like on the final image and even what I might talk to Lauren about to put her at ease and get her into the flow of the session. 

Afterwards there's another slew of process driven questions. What Raw processor would I use for the files? How would I manage color? Would this image be a good one to put through DXO Filmpack and use one of their film profiles? Which program would I use to do a nice vignette? (How about Snapseed?).   And finally, how would I share the image with my check writing audience? 

I chose the muslin background because I had done a recent portrait with it and liked the look. It's bright summer here and we were shooting in the middle of the afternoon and I didn't feel like blocking all the windows to cut down on color contamination from daylight when using fluorescents or LEDs so I chose to got with electronic flash. I used the Elinchrom Ranger to give the batteries a work out and because it has nice, 1/10th of a stop control. The Elinchrom flash heads also give off a nice, warm light. There's no UV spike anywhere as there often is with inexpensive battery powered strobes or cheap monolights. Since I had nearly infinite power at my finger tips I used a 72 inch Fotodiox umbrella that's white on the inside and black on the backside. I also covered the business side of it with a white diffusion cloth. With the flash head correctly positioned to really cover all of the inside space it's a wonderful soft but direction light source. 

I placed two 4 foot by 4 foot black panels to the opposite side of Lauren from the main light to keep the spill from bouncing off the studio's white walls and reducing lighting contrast in the image.  A second flash head, at 1/3rd power (compared to the setting for the main light) was used in a small soft box to light the background. Two lights seemed just right for the effect I had in mind. 

From the zany collection of cameras currently in my possession I selected a Nikon D7100 coupled with an interesting 18-140mm zoom lens. I set the camera to 14 bit raw, lossless compression, in manual mode. The ISO was nailed to 100 and the camera was set to 1/125th and f5.6. 

We chatted and took images for about an hour and I ended up with around 250 image files. I put them into Lightroom to do a quick color tweak and convert to gallery sized jpegs. I'll put the ones I like up in a private gallery on Smugmug so Lauren can make her selections. In the meantime I output the first image of the shoot and pulled it into Portrait Professional to soften her skin tone just a bit and do a few little color tweaks. Then I pushed the file into Snapseed to add a nice vignette---darkening the corners. Finally I pulled the file into DXO Filmpack 3 and converted the image into a Fuji Astia film profile.  I uploaded the portrait to this blog as an sRGB files at 2100 pixels on the long side. 

When Lauren makes her selections I'll first open them in DXO and do my raw conversions there. I'll take large 16 bit tiffs and do my retouching in PhotoShop. From there we'll see where the creative, post production process leads. 

We've had enough columns here about tangential subjects that barely graze the photographic arts---I thought I'd pull myself back on course and write about the stuff I really care about.  That's making portraits.

Edit: I never imagined that each site would compress and display images so differently. Go to 500px to see Lauren's image much closer to what I'm seeing on my screen: 

http://500px.com/photo/78991065/lauren-provia-web-res-by-kirk-tuck?from=user_library

p.s. Thanks Robert for making me double check!