Part 2: A Day With Gallo Center for the Arts

Last look, we had gone through the process of capturing environmental portraits of the Gallo Center for the Arts team. Today we’ll cover a little bit of the process I used to capture their headshots. When capturing corporate headshots, my goal is to capture a clean consistent look for all individuals of the group. Something that can throw a curve ball for people are individuals with glasses. Certain lighting setups do not lend themselves well when photographing someone with glasses, as the lights will reflect from their lenses. As well, one does not want to have different lighting setups, as that breaks away from the goal of getting consistent looks.

For these headshots I opted for a large umbrella as my main light, positioned camera right and slightly in front of the subjects. Behind camera is a strobe that is bouncing light into a v-flat wall, working as my fill. On camera left is a white v-flat that will bounce light back onto the subject, to lighten up the shadow side of the face some. Lastly right in front of the subject is an additional white foam board to help bounce light under the chin.

Light diagram layout of setup.

The back light would require a little height adjustment for those with glasses in order to not get any reflection bouncing back. That and a little play on head tilt, ensured very little glare on the lenses.

This look steps away from the typical wrapped light look of most headshots and gives a little dimension to the image with the addition of some light shadowing. Which for a theater group, I think works really well. Let me know what you think about the setup or final images in the comments below.

Part 1: A Day With Gallo Center for the Arts

I recently had the chance to work with the team over at Gallo Center for the Arts, which was such an exciting opportunity for me. In collaborating with Doug, who is their Director of Marketing & Public Relations, we came up with the idea to capture some environmental shots of the team as well as the standard headshots. With everything planned, the next step was for me to figure out how to best capture everyone in the Mary Stuart Rogers theater space. I typically work from my studio, where I’ve got things fairly dialed in for my style of shooting, so going on location presents a new set of challenges, though nothing I couldn’t meet head on.

In working to capture an environmental shot that helped to highlight the person and the theater space, the main challenge was, how to light the environment? I wanted to keep the space low lit, to give the feeling like whoever I was photographing was the star of the stage. So the first thing I did was work find a good base layer to serve as my plate shot. You can see in the following images, as I bring in lights to illuminate the subjects and then add additional lights to illuminate the lower section of the seating and finally the plate shot.

With everything dialed in, it was go time! You can see the final results below.

I just love how the environmental shots came out with the interplay of the theater, the canvas to break up the scene a little bit and the subject. What challenges have you faced while out on location? How did you work to get the shot while working in those spaces? Check back in for the second half where we go over the more formal headshots.