Fun with a 50mm lens. And some lights. And a portrait subject. And time to play around with files. And...

L.

 There's a tech company I really like to work with. They've tried to explain to me exactly what their product does but it's software and my only, and much obsoleted, knowledge about tech is bunched up on the hardware side of the equation. At any rate they came to me a couple of years ago and asked me to do portraits for them. But not conventional portraits. They wanted to photograph their people in the studio or at their location with a background, and then have building and urban landscape photographs dropped in as backgrounds. They weren't (aren't) looking for authenticity or exacting matches, they just want to position their folks in fun backgrounds as a counterpoint to the human element. 

I'm always game for something new so, of course, I signed on. We've done a dozen or so portrait assignments for them and they've all been quite fun. Their taste in photos is different from so many of the art directors who are closer to my age. Stuff doesn't have to be believable as long as it's fun.

I photographed L. on Wednesday, just before lunch.  Afterwards I met my creative director friend and collaborator, Greg, for Mexican cuisine at Las Palomas Restaurant and we talked advertising, marketing, college age parenting and vacations. It was my turn to pick up the tab and any lunch with Greg is worth whatever I pay. He's smart, interesting and well informed about current, national advertising trends. And it's good to play catch up over lunch. That, and a lot of history doing assignment work together.

When I got back to the office I downloaded the 150 different images I'd shot of L. (above, example), did a quick, general enhancement in Lightroom (Classic), exported the files as Jpegs and then uploaded them to Smugmug, sending the link along to my client. I was expecting some delay between "send" and any sort of selection or feedback but two hours later their marketing team had already picked out three images and asked me to composite them with backgrounds in three different ways. All in color. The background in black and white with L. in color, and completely in black and white. I was happy to have a fun project to work on and I have a huge folder of urban backgrounds from all over the place to choose from. The one above is from Austin but my second and third choices used background images taken in Montreal and Paris.

I started out by pulling the three images they chose into PhotoShop. I used the selection tool to select L. from the studio background onto a transparent layer and I used the refine edge tool to make sure his hair looked good. Then I started opening background images and ...  trying the combinations out. For an image like this I end up with a bunch of layers to control effects on the background and the subject separately. I'll use a classic gradient to tone down a background on one side, another layer to control contrast, etc. 

There was a Google logo on one of the buildings in the background and I wanted to remove it even though the buildings would be out of focus. I used a selection tool (lasso) and then content aware in the delete tool to make the logo vanish but to reconstruct the area beneath the logo so it would all match. 

It took most of the next morning to choose and construct all of the combinations. I paid special attention to the foreground and backgrounds of the black and white conversions. I wanted the backgrounds to be lighter and lower contrast than the foreground and I wanted the color backgrounds to have less overall saturation than the foreground person. 

When I make portraits I usually use a longer than normal lens because I like the way an 85-100mm lens draws faces. But on Wednesday I was feeling like I needed a change in perspective. Mentally; not lens perspective... So I pulled out the "lowly" Panasonic 50mm f1.8 lens. A plastic fantastic 50mm that's actually a very, very good lens even if it's priced like a basement bargain. Mostly I wanted to use it not only for the angle of view but also because I wanted to be able to move freely and have the camera focus on the subject's eyes. I was also shooting without using a tripod because I'm trying to break an old habit of having the camera locked down on a tripod for portraits. I wanted to just go handheld instead. 

At f4.0 the lens is wicked sharp. As are most good 50mm lenses I've come across in the last 40 years. L. was a great subject and had no self conscious fear of the camera or of being photographed. He was having fun. I was having fun and that's the way a photo session should go. 

In the past this client has always used the images I've delivered to them in black and white. With that history in mind I shot in raw so it would be easy to go in either direction. I did opt to use the monochrome setting in the camera (and you don't need to shoot raw+jpeg to see a black and white image as you shoot, in current Leica SL cameras) to make sure I was capturing the correct tonalities for black and white. If that was what we ended up with.

When I sent the studio portrait images over I sent one gallery as black and whites and another gallery with the same images in color. No sense making the client try to suss out how a color image will read as a black and white or vice versa.

The session and the post processing was a lot of fun. I got to use a couple of new PhotoShop tools that made working the files a bit easier and better. But the real bonus was getting more comfortable using a wider lens for portraiture. That was a blast. And not using a tripod!

It was the very next day when I headed off to photograph an attorney with no tripod and only two lenses. A 50mm AF lens and a 70mm M series lens. So much more fun when you stop worrying about what might happen and just chill out and shoot.

Who knew shooting portraits with a 50mm lens would turn out to be a thing? Concerned about bokeh? You can always make your own...