Monday, October 18, 2010

A Simple Portrait

Being a corporate photographer, portraits of guys in ties are a big part of my business. Being able to pull off a simple portrait in a short amount of time is very important. Executives have only have a short amount of time to give you and the faster you can get their portrait the happier they are.


You can see here my set up. I'm using a 43 inch folding convertible umbrella in the shoot through position. I'm using a single Nikon SB-800 with a Quantum Turbo SC battery. You will notice a second strobe in the background which I ended up turning off. My color balance was set to tungsten and the flash was fitted with a Full cut CTO to balance with that.

When I shoot portraits like this, I like to anchor my subject. What do I mean by anchor, well, most people feel very uncomfortable just standing for a photo. So I have them lean against a wall, place a hand on a chair or simply hold onto a pair of glasses or a pen. Have something to do seems to put them more at ease... or anchored. You can see the wall in the photo above. Wall work particularly well as they can also provide a bit of bounce. DT

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice work David- good portrait

Unknown said...

great portrait David

Mel Haynes, Jr said...

Great post. I always seem to over complicate things that should not be complicated. This is a great example of how things should be done and the advice for anchoring a person is great.

I always love how you walk into any place and are able to create a great background visual. Using gels and depth of field, your photos really are more than just a "headshot", which a lot of beginners could learn from.

It would be interesting to see your thought process on choosing the right location and how the background plays into your final spot.

Thanks for the post,

Mel

http://www.melhaynesphoto.com

rich said...

As always your lighting is awesome!

But what about those flying saucers coming from his head? Isnt this an example of bad composition- like a tree growing out of someones head?

Im a little surprised here.

Mo said...

Very clean shot! Nice

Eric Muetterties said...

I assume that the ambient lighting there is tungsten, since you went with Tungsten WB and gelled with CTO. Or is it that you chose to overpower and have it be on the tungsten side of things?

Eric Muetterties said...

Why did you chose CTO and Tungsten. Was that what the ambient was or was that a choice to overpower with the tungsten flavor of light?

Great post. Gotta love the often shunned umbrella. I love its light.

David Tejada said...

I chose tungsten to allow the daylight in the back window to shift to a cooler tone. It also allowed for the warmer light from the ceiling to not be so warm. DT

dan said...

This is great advice, i shot my cousins senior portraits a few months back and noticed that the few poses in which he was leaning against something seemed much more relaxed than the ones where he just stood there looking uncomfortable.

Thanks for posting this.