Chelsea on 3rd St.
I'm currently making a large library of images that will work as backgrounds. We're photographing 15 individuals next week and we're doing it on a neutral background. Once the keeper portraits are selected I'll be removing people from the backgrounds and dropping them into various cityscape backgrounds.
The reason? Most of the portrait subjects are older, want to be wearing suits and ties, or other business dress, and since it's forecast on the one day when they are all in Austin for a board meeting to be over 100° with a "feels like" temperature of something like 107° the agency and I thought it better to photograph them in the cool comfort of a hotel ballroom and then pick and choose backgrounds in post. Particularly appropriate since they've scheduled a slot for portraits between 1pm and 3pm...
It certainly makes sense to me. Outside is always a crap shoot for more formal portraits. And most people begin to shine or perspire within the first five minutes after they step into the heat bath. Add to that rogue gusts of wind making a mess of careful hair sculptures and the chance that there are no good backgrounds within a few steps of the hotel and you start to wonder why we haven't been piecing together our environmental portraits all along...
I don't really mind the heat but I do like the control of an interior shoot with great lights and catering just a phone call away.
6 comments:
a real film/tv veteran here told us a tale about needing a shot of this exec from a travel agency going down a certain hotel escalator or stairs and them renting this cyclorama at pinewood studios to do it, painted it all chromakey green, apparently matched very well and the guy was concerned he'd never get travel expenses approved again, not sure if it was film or early video, I've been looking at a few vfx books about the lengths they go to to match focal length and camera position to get things to line up perfectly, I think some examples were from wolf of wall street, they did things like film a street scene in london then shoot the actors in the US, quite mundane sort of shots but just reduced the need for travel
Do you shoot potential backgrounds out of focus? Or is the oof effect done in post?
"Do you shoot potential backgrounds out of focus? Or is the oof effect done in post?"
A little of both. I drive to put the focus where I think I might put a subject later but invariably my touch is too light and I go back in post and fine tune the out of focus area. Some depends on how big the final image will be used. If it's big the effect should be less, if it's small the effect needs to be a bit more pronounced so the effect reads as intentional.
Perfect.
Kudos on the crapshoot / crap shoot wordplay
Mark
Thanks Mark. I try!
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