Finishing up an assignment that may be my last commercial work of the year. Or the decade. Or...whatever.

Stephanie. Faculty at the Seminary.

I wrote recently about a client I did portraits for on what might have been the hottest day of the Summer. The thermometer hit 105° that afternoon with a heat index of over 110°.  During that hellaciously hot day I did portraits of seventeen people. No one was affected by the heat. No one sweated. No one's checks flushed bright red. And we got the work done with no lasting ill effects for the photographer. 

Here's how I proceeded: Based on outside portrait attempts for the same client in Summers past (beginning of the Fall semester and mostly roasting, we totally changed our approach last year. Instead of scouting multiple locations around the campus and then scheduling people to meet us outside and be photographed in the blistering heat I was able to schedule all seventeen people to come into a cozy and well air conditioned studio located in the campus library building. Coffee available just down the hall...Lunch delivered by the client.

The studio we used is fairly small but big enough in which to shoot portraits. The back wall is a white cyc. There is existing lighting on a set of ceiling grids/rails but I nearly always want to use my own lights. More control. More familiarity. 

I used LED lights from Nanlite. They are the Compac 100 series of light panels which are 16 by 24 inches, have good front diffusion built in, and are fixed to be used in a vertical orientation. I used two of these at the front of the set up and put fabric grids on them to control light spill around the small, white walled space. One fixture was used as a main light from camera left and the other as a fill light from camera right. I added a third fixture with a slightly warmer light setting in the back, as a back light. I usually set backlights to be on the opposite side of my subjects from my main light. Seems to work better that way. 

The final light was a small panel, a LumiPad 25, also from Nanlite, used as a direct light onto the background to keep the illumination level commensurate with the front lighting.

The camera of choice for the portraits was the Leica SL2-S which I like for situations like this where a 47 or 61 megapixel camera file is overkill and the smaller, 24 megapixels of this camera are more than adequate. I chose to use a TTArtisan 75mm f2.0 AF lens (for the L mount) because I didn't want to crop too tightly; I needed "air" around my subjects in order to have flexibility in compositing the portraits with exterior background images. I stayed right around f5.6 and 1/100th of second shutter speed, using ISO as needed. Raw files to start with...

We did the same kind of shooting for last year's images so I already had put together a catalog of pre-un-focused backgrounds from all over the campus. I was thinking about who I would composite into which background as I was photographing the people, trying to predict how each person would fit into a given background. 

Back in the office I took the images selected by the subjects, and approved by the marketing people, and did a bunch of color matching, retouching and all the usual things you might do with a portrait image, in Lightroom. Once I had the images retouched and enhanced the way I liked them I exported them to PhotoShop for a final bit of trickery and then separated each subject from their neutral background and dropped them into appropriate exterior backgrounds from around the school. There is nearly always some fine-tuning to be done. 

I use defringing in the layers menu to get rid of hard edge outlines where the images meet. I try to match color and contrast between subject and background without going overboard, and I try to remind myself that viewers of the website will be able to see many of these images side by side and so I took post production steps to try to homogenous the overall look for the sake of continuity. When I finally flatten the layers before saving I generally add a bit of noise to the overall file because I think it helps harmonize the foreground and background layers together. 

I'm halfway through the composites right now and I'm aiming to finish everything up before the end of the day tomorrow. 

When we wrap up the project I'll bill them for my day of shooting, a set cost for each composite, miscellaneous post production costs and also a usage fee for a five year license to use the images on their website and also for public relations as it relates to the Seminary. 

I just thought you, the reader, needed a change of pace and I wanted to remind long term readers that  the whole reason the blog exists is to explore and share the real world, day-to-day machinations of a professional, freelance photographer. And yes! We still exist in 2025. 

Go Photography!!!