Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Broken Ego headshots (for lack of a better word)

  At a recent band practice. I took a few headshots my fellow members. Ever since I started using the inspirations of guys like Peter Hurley and David Hobby, I started to realize how important the headshot is. Whether you're an insurance agent or an actress, everyone tries to out their best foot forward with their headshot.
  I had this vision in my head of a new band poster featuring (of course) the members and (of course) in black and white, so, I had to choose the light. Hard light: which is where there is a hard line drawn between good exposure and heavy shadow, or soft light: which seems to 'wrap around' the subects head, from bright to faded exposure. I chose hard light. It's easier to achieve and hey, this is rock and roll, anyway.
  Unless you walk around with a freight train headlight on your shoulder, all the time, you must have realized that flash coming from your camera ( near the lens) looks un-natural. So a light source that comes from the side, or front-side should be seeked out. For me, the easiest way to do this is to fire an off-camera flash. Not every camera is capable of this, but, with a little planning, it could work on most.

   If your camera flash is non removable, then the short answer is to get close to a white wall, and bounce the flash off of it.
 You'd have to take a piece of paper, or something, and put it in front of the flash, to 'steer' it toward the white wall.
 
(she is really thrilled to be a part of this experiment)
 This really turns out to be soft light, but, you can see, it no longer looks like an on-camera flash.

                                      My method of choice, is to utilize my cameras hotshoe.
 




 As i said, the flash should not be near the lens, so, quite literally, I remove it from the camera. You can buy a wireless trigger to set it off, but, in these pictures, you could have gotten away with a 3 ft. TTL cable that runs from the camera (right hand) to the flash (left hand). At arms length, it was just enough light to get the effect I was going for. These are lit with very hard light.



   In closing, try a few picture with your flash off the camera.
Also, I want you to know that it is difficult  to try and get the 4 nicest guys in the world to look mean, but, they came through.

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