KevinMurray

July 2, 2010

Reel World Theory – Studio Portraiture on location

Portraiture in the wild

Often, as a commercial photographer I find myself assigned to photograph people for a variety of editorial and environmental portraits. With our upcoming Portraits on the Square we’ll be shooting social media portraits of as many folks as will fit in our 2-hour session. The “location” is outside, late afternoon through evening on the Downtown Square in Ocala. The end goal for this assignment is to make each portrait as unique to the individual as possible. Should be fun!

Social Media Portraiture

Social Media Portraiture is a fairly recent phenom spawned from the overwhelming popularity of today’s internet driven social media websites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others. Over the last year or so we’ve gotten an increasing number of requests to photograph clients specifically for use on their business websites, personal blogs and for use as their profile/avatar photos on social portals.

Pre-Production

Usually it’s a relatively simple matter of arriving at the location, doing a quick scout, finding a suitably aesthetic background or wall near a power outlet, set up lights, take a couple of controlled test exposures and then wait for my person of interest to arrive, however, In this assignment we’ve neither the luxury of a controlled environment or the ability to power up so, we need to develop a portable lighting strategy that will compensate for the diminishing available light and maintain output capacity over 100 or so portrait sessions.

Testing and Initial comps

We need to know relative ambient light levels to establish a baseline exposure. As we’re going to be shooting outdoors at 100 ISO we take a reflected light reading which indicates a base exposure of 125th of a second at f5.6. As we want to “dial out” or “punk” as much of our existing Sunlight from our exposures we’ll re-calculate our manual exposure settings by adjusting camera shutter speed and lens aperture to under expose available light down to a level that won’t significantly register on our exposures. Lastly, to create a unique background we’ll be shooting wide open for very shallow depth of field say around the f2.8 to f4.5 range.

Summary So far..

Early on at the beginning of this post I mentioned the importance of pre-production, figuring out which elements and variables we’d need to wrestle control of. There were two elements, both variable which we needed to control: 1. Ambient light (or, eventual lack thereof) and 2. Location/Background (visual continuity or, lack thereof). By establishing our exposure baseline -without- the requirement of ambient light and, working through the exploratory process of using lens combination’s with a shallow depth of field we’ve been able to control that which was initially uncontrollable and that takes pressure off the moment, allowing us to concentrate on creating images of interesting people.

related articles: Studio portraiture on location Part II