Portrait Subject.
Several days ago I wrote a post that showed how I was using LED lights to illuminate portrait subjects at a law firm here in Austin. I wanted to follow up that description of the technical stuff by showing what the final result looks like so you can better understand what I was trying to accomplish at the shoot. The image above may not be the one finally selected by the client for inclusion in their website but it is a good example of what we were going for. No major retouching has been done.
To refresh, the taking camera was a Sony A7R2, using a Rokinon 85mm t1.5 cine lens set at f2.8. My goal in lighting is to first make the subject look great while matching to a consistent look for all the thirty+ images I've made for the same company over the last few months. My lighting goal is to control the color and quality of the light on the subject while effectively blending the existing light from three different, continuous sources (exterior through the windows (blue/cyan), mixed spectrum florescent, and more yellow spectrum from compact fluorescents in ceiling cans). The effectiveness of precisely targeted, custom white balancing can not be underestimated.
That's it.
(Sorry for the delay between the first blog and the example photo. I wanted to receive permission to use my client's portrait before posting it here. Not necessarily required but very appropriate....).
8 comments:
If I were to just look at the portrait, I never would imagine all that you did to achieve a result that looks so easy to do. Just hold up the camera and shoot,right? That's why they pay you the big bucks.
Nicely done! An excellent example of a contemporary professional portrait.
Really good. Good lighting and visually interesting (love the background) without detracting from the subject one bit. Glad you were able to show us one of the finished ones. — John Griffin
Wonderful portrait, including the background. Thank you for showing us how you set this up. But boy howdy, they're making lawyers younger every day (says this old lawyer).
This is an interesting addition to your thoughts on the Hasselblad thingy. Continuous lighting makes the need for flash sync go away, which negates the value of the leaf shutters. If you're right and LED lighting is the future for professionals, that's another nail in the coffin, as it were.
If you have the time, and inclination, head over to Bloomberg news site, and check out the portraits of President Obama that accompany a featured article on the "anti-business President". Maybe it's an aesthetic choice,but I find them ghastly.
Andrew, Flash is so last decade.....
I guess if I had to critique the resulting image, I'd say I don't care for the dark bars growing out of her head in the example photo. I would have placed her more camera left or changed my shooting angle so her head breaks against a cleaner area. This is being hypercritical but the first thing I noticed. I call this 'intersecting lines' and I really try hard to avoid it in capturing images. The rest looks great! Love the 85mm focal length you used at f/2.8! I too have been supplementing my strobe lighting with continuous led lighting and it works really well for certain things and a great tool to have in the studio toolbox!
Post a Comment