hip hop shots

A nineteen year old wants a photo for his album cover. This is no awkward teenager but a professional image maker and for four hours I photograph him.

Like any performer, and like me as a photographer, he needs to warm up - I use the poor light of a rainy day that filters through the open window to give him confidence, educating him, involving him by explaining as I shoot how I am sculpting the light on his face. I want him to understand that any request I make is to enhance his image, not mine.

In his first photos he almost looks like a boxer, silent with a white towel. The natural light is a challenge, it makes me slow down, makes me interact with him. Initially we need to work together but soon he'll gain enough confidence to do his routines without any encouragement.

As I show him the resulting photos he gains confidence and the showman in him begins to come out. I do little to encourage him as I working with the light and he with his image. Sometimes I don't see him as person but as a living reflector and absorber of light. Occasionally I direct him when something he does catches my eye - his hands at one point, another is his ottaman look as he wears his baseball cap sideways.



Once he is self-assured, I move on from natural light to flash - two umbrellas and strobes. Using flash can be tedious since it is such a controlled and predictable light and if I am not careful, I go into autopilot and switch off but because I have set the stage, so to speak, he is by now very engaging from his sheer self-confidence.

In his initial shot you can almost see him psyching himself up before he goes onto the stage, a white backdrop.



Then I steer him a little, suggesting he pose "for the ladies".




I use a 42" covered umbrella very close to him to exaggerate the mirror sheen of his body with a secondary open 32" umbrella acting as fill.

At the end he is tired, reflective, his performance has drawn his energy.

Anatomy of a coffee shoot

Further to my last post, I've had a lot interest in the ultimate shot of George, the coffee roaster. Some skeptics don't believe that it was a quick shot in less than ideal conditions and lots of people want an understanding of the technical issues I had to deal with.

So this post isn't about the psychology of a portrait sitting but more the nuts and bolts of how to shoot an environmental portrait.

To convince you I wasn't in a studio, I've taken the before shoot. For the record, this was taken at 2.26pm or seven minutes before the final shoot.



There's a lot not to like about this image. The uniform lighting doesn't make George the focus of the image. Instead there is a clutter of things that catch the eye - the square control box, the wiring on the back wall, the blue ducting running vertically on the support beam. Even worse, George doesn't look trim though he looks like he is geared up for work since I asked him to wear an open necked shirt and casual jacket. He's not looking at the camera and that was intentional. George is a busy guy and the last thing he wants to do is waste time looking at a camera when the photographer is still planning the shoot.

This image helped me to decide where to place George; either to the left or to the right of the roaster machine. Since the square contol box was distracting I decided that George would stand in front of it so the coffee machine would be to his left.

Next I didn't want to see anything but George and the roaster machine, no cables, no wiring... A 32" flash umbrella was placed about 1 metre to George's right: the flash umbrella was used to turn the small hard light wireless-controlled flash into a large softer light source which would flatter George.

But a small flash doesn't travel very far and didn't illuminate the roaster machine. This meant that I could use another wirelessly controlled flash that aimed a tight light beam (105 mm setting on the flash light) at the roaster machine. An enormous advantage of using two distinct light sources is that the resulting photo will be far more interesting simply because it is not only a portrait but also a study in lighting conditions.

The shoot done, I then reviewed the ensuing fifteen images on my computer and decided that the shot below had potential.



But there were a few problems with it. A horizontal bar below George's coat was distracting because it was a bright regular shape:



It had to go and so did a point source of light, both elimated using the clone and Exposure brush tools in Adobe Lightroom :



Now to George - fortunately he is a good looking bloke so there wasn't too much to do - eliminate a sunspot on his right cheek and freckle on the bridge of his nose and lighten his left side. The sunspot and freckle elimination took 10 seconds using the clone tool in Adobe Lightroom.


The lightening of his face was more complicated because as human beings, we are very diligent when scanning faces and the slightest fudging is apparent. I created a virtual copy of the image within Adobe Lightroom and then used the Adobe Lightroom 'fill light' command to lighten the left side of his face until it looked good (which meant his right hand side was over light.


Then I opened the two images as a two layered document within Adobe Photoshop (one correctly exposed for Gorge' right cheek, the other correctly exposed for George's left cheek). I then masked the lighter image and carefully concealed some of the mask in order to expose the lighter image by using a very low opacity brush.





Finally I had an image I was happy with, or was I?



The Develop Module of Adobe Lightroom is able to process your image in different ways using 'User Presets' so I applied some of them to the image hoping that one or more of them might guide me in enhancing the portrait.





Neither of the above two interpretations, 'Antique Lighting' and Faded Elegance', helped me but the next one, 'Direct Positive' did.



I loved how punchy the image became and the background clutter was elimated leaving just George and the roaster machine. But a problem, Geoerge looked about to die from jaundice and the darker side of his face had become almost obscured. I solved the jaundice problem by changing the colour temperature of the image. I lightened George's face using the technique described earlier. Then George's top shirt button was eliminated using the clone technique since it was distracting.

Finally an image I was pleased with. George looks handsome and professional, his creation behind him bathed in a bluish light emphasising his scientific approach to coffee roasting.

Mug shots

George Sabados is the founder of GS Roasting, a wholesale coffee roastery in inner-city Sydney, and to the chagrin of many coffee aficionados, he doesn't retail coffee, though that maybe about to change hence me being commissioned to photograph him for several websites currently under wraps.

George not only roasts coffee, he is a coffee judge of international renown and is an expert in turning around cafes. He is also a great bloke and happiest when not buttoned up in a suit.

So many roles means that one photograph cannot do. George needed three photos, as a good bloke you would want to engage to sort out an underperforming cafe, as a gun coffee roaster and as a coffee consultant.

So how to produce three distinct images in an hour? George's office wasn't glamorous, a computer station, reams of paper, invoices, standard lighting, nothing you would want to see so when I set up the shoot in his office, I avoided the CEO at his desk look (which works if the CEO has a magnificent oak bureau but not if it's an Officeworks $99 special) and went for a very simple shoot - just George and the innocuous venetian blinds behind him.

To warm him up, get him used to the camera, I asked him to wear a casual shirt. Initially he sat at his desk but George is a doer, happiest when he is working. Once standing, the photos started to work but a problem, George was even too casual in the first photo notwithstanding you immediately smile when you look at it. The solution, not a reshoot but a tight crop - thanks to high end full frame DSLR cameras, you can get a fantastic image even if you use 1/5th of the frame.


Then to the suit shot. The whole point of wearing a suit is that it disguises your individuality - the term "suit" doesn't exactly conjure up a fun guy so as a photographer, there's no point fretting if the image doesn't 'sing' and give you visions of winning the Pulitzer Prize. Maybe if I had spent a day tricking up the lighting, I could have got a memorable result but instead, I got the suit shot.



I then focussed on what I really wanted to photograph - an environmental portrait of George, his environment being a bespoke coffee roaster that has allowed him to produce exalted coffee blends. The circumstances of this part of the shoot weren't ideal - roasting was about to begin in five minutes so the workers were loading beans and preparing boxes and a forklift truck was whizzing around alarmingly close to my gear. Worse still, a machine had just broken giving George and his offsider, Rudy, a major headache. So a quick two light set up, a naked strobe lighting the roaster and a flash umbrella lighting George.

The four faces of Bella

Child portraiture is fraught with difficulty since you are effectively dealing with not just one client but four: the child, the mother, the father and yourself and at some point, you have to decide who will be writing the cheque and focus on meeting that person's expectations. Or do you?


When Bella came to my studio she had clear expectations in mind - just as a hairdresser might be shown Nicole Kidman's latest look in a glossy magazine and told to replicate it, Bella showed me images on the web that she wanted for herself. Once upon a time I could have pretended to comply with her wish and then quietly ignored it but now that every eleven year girl has a digital camera and knows images can be instantly reviewed, I cheerfully complied. Bella's request wasn't ideal, it didn't suit her, but that didn't matter since until she felt I had met her expectations, there was no point worrying about anyone else: you cannot photograph uncooperative subjects and they will be uncooperative if they feel they cannot trust you.


Once Bella's expectations had been met, I wanted a more natural look to please her mum but how to achieve it?I decided to use a studio prop, a burgundy felt hat. Unless the portrait sitter is a raging extravert, they will take time to thaw and shrug off that hounded or coerced look. But you don't have a lot of time in a studio. Somehow, by giving the portrait sitter a studio prop they relax at lot faster. Perhaps this is because they feel they are no longer the subject. Who knows? I don't but the results speak for themselves.


By now the portrait session will be half finished and the subject will be comfortable enough to do away with the prop so it's time to experiment in order to photograph them at their best. Changing backgrounds and alternating between natural light and flash ensures that I as a photographer, am alert to every nuance of the subject's features as the lighting changes.



By the end of the forty minute session, I have satisfied my four clients. Forty minutes might seem short but any longer and the child will get bored.