Monday, January 14, 2013

lighting bob and laura's portrait

 
    Two really good friends of mine got engaged and asked me to shoot the engagement picture. I was honored and I accepted. As I posted earlier, I have a really strong definition of what a portrait is. Being that I want to make a business as a 'mobile portrait' photographer, I saw on my first real assignment that I shouldn't really draw such a hard line on this opinion.
   In my head, I was thinking 3 ft. between me and the subject(s), 2 ft. between the subject(s) and the backdrop, and 1 ft. to play with. All I need is 6 ft. to make a portrait. Well, after seeing what 6 ft. looked like, I would have rather had 10, but, there I was unpacking, knowing full well it would work. The further distance would have blurred the backdrop perfectly, but, we didn't have it. We tried a white backdrop first, but, the couple preferred the black. I was shooting tethered, so, we got to see our results immediately on the laptop.
It's pretty straight forward, really. 2 similar sized umbrellas with equally powered strobes bounced into both. I was running the flashes at about 1/4 and there were triggered wirelessly.
The backdrop was set upon a bench, behind them. I pointed a 3rd, slave flash (that means it's triggered by the 2 other flashes), at the backdrop. We onlty used that for the white backdrop, but, when we switched to black, we didn't use it.

 
I stood between the 2 umbrellas and made sure to focus on the eyes. Also, make sure the heads are equal distance from the lens. Only 1 of them will be in focus if that happens. Sharpness in the eyes is critical for a good portrait. This gets harder to achieve with the more people that are in the shot.





After we shot about 70
 frames, they looked at all of them and decided that there were lots to choose from that would work well. On the laptop, Laura pick out her favorite 10 (any number of picture can be chosen) and I came home to edit them.
Portrait editing will be a post soon.
Please, let me know what you think and thanks.
 
Congratulations, Bob and Laura!!
 

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