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.

Headshot Marathon!

September 4th - 7th, I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd annual The Portrait Masters conference in Phoenix Arizona. The conference is put on by my mentor Sue Bryce, bringing together photographers from around the world and amazing guest speakers to educate and inspire us all to take our work to greater heights. While I was there to take that all in, I found myself inspired to play and see how many headshots I could capture of those participating in the conference. In total there were 500 attendees, so the grand goal was to try and capture them all within the 3.5 days I was there.

Doing the math I figured spending about a minute with everyone to capture their headshot, which would require that I spend close to 8.5 hours of my time spread across those 3.5 days. With that knowledge I worked to spread my days accordingly so I could still partake in other parts of the conference, which included listening to the guest speakers, visiting the vendor booths and practicing in the shooting bays.

One of the key things in shooting for this personal project was to try and maintain a consistent backdrop. I learned early on that the location that I loved, was a bit out of the way for the attendees, so as in most things in life, I had to compromise in order to get remotely close to 500 photos. Further into the project I realized the math was calculated for optimal conditions, namely that people would be lining out the door to get their headshots with me :). I certainly had to hustle and get photographers, some a little more apprehensive than others, to get in front of the camera. In the end I was able to capture 209 headshots and have to thank my friends Ashley and Cody Lindsey for helping coordinating and assisting in the project, as well the many other photographers that walked in front of the lens and recruited more to spend a minute or so with me. From that I was able to create this fun slideshow. Sit back, enjoy the music and faces from the project and the fun collage at the end!

Music by Gerson Lopez