KevinMurray

April 19, 2010

Assignment – Teen Portrait – MySpace

Shooting Senior Portraits is a lot like Foreign Films, either you get `em or you don’t.
Personally, I love working with Teens creating senior portraits they feel expresses best who they are or, at least, who’d they like to think they are.
Nate’s session proved to be a bit of a challenge as we wanted to put him in his favorite setting, working on his laptop out in the garden, next to his boy cave. Problem was, it was drizzling and, there’d be little chance to get the great late afternoon “God Light” over his left shoulder.
So, we’d have to improvise and create the ephemeral late afternoon lighting artificially and, without being able to plug in to wall power, meant we’d need to go portable…

The Lighting Plot

Baseline settings

Setting up the camera first, I re-metered and set exposure 1-stop under ambient to bring the existing light level into line to where I could rig my lights and still have room to move flash output up or down as needed for effect.

Background Light

The “Sunset” I set high (about 9′) off the ground, 25′ behind where I’d have Nate sit. Looking at initial lighting tests I realized the over the shoulder rim light wasn’t working the way I wanted. The CTO Tungsten gel(s) were contaminating and overwhelming the soft-blue glow from the monitor I wanted to fall on Nate’s face and Tshirt so I dropped the light to just above horizon (about 4.5′) and skimmed the light in through the trees effectively using the leaves as a natural gobo. Much better.

Main Fill and Monitor Glow

With the Main fill I wanted to light broadly (but not so noticeable that you’d recognize as softboxy), more of a subtle wrap to expose a bit of detail and fill in shadows. Using a stripped down Plume Wafer (reflective panels removed), and positioned a couple feet in front and about 10′ to his right we lit Nate nicely, opening up the shadows while not blowing out hi-key details on his Teeshirt. The laptop glow was a series of hit-n-misses using different hand-held flashes laying on his keyboard and bouncing off a reflector card mounted to his monitor. Gelled CTB 1.5 over an older Nikon SB-20 `Tater @ 1/32nd power.

The FinalImage

The cropped vertical photo at the beginning of this post is the one Nate chose to grace his myspace page, personally, I rather like the full-frame above but agree with him that once the image is reduced to social media size (60x60pixels) a lot of the information is lost and the composition becomes kind of muddy.