Portraits

If you haven't been to Strobist yet, you're nuts. Go there every day.

I say this because I use things every day that I learned at that site.

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First Day:

First real portrait for the paper the other day. Real quick. I made it quick. Most photographers don't get much time to take a portrait of people. Lucky for me, the subjects (homecoming court at a high school) were already together and posing for the secretary's at the school, bonus!

I didn't want to take forever since these kids had to be back at class in about 10 minutes. Goodness knows they would hate it if I made them late for class.

I'm pretty fast with my flashes so I let the kids relax while I set up a quick shoot through white umbrella on my left and clamped a hair light flash on the right, kind of behind them.

Do you notice that light coming in on the right side? I do, and I like it. It's better than having all of their faces shaded on one side. It would have looked a lot better if I had made them move forward more and stuck a flash directly behind all of them. That would have made some good rim light.

The reason I used the umbrella for the main light is that it is nice and soft, and soft light is nice to people's faces. If you want to bring the wrinkles out in someone's face, then by all means, use hard light. However, if you're trying to make people look nice and smooth and lovely, softer light.

This is pretty basic for a portrait. One light can be used, but the second really helps. If you're planning on doing more portrait work or maybe moving toward commercial photo instead of journalism, then you might think about getting a second, or third, flash.

It's nothing special, but it's something that will make it and is lit well enough to give some shape to the people. I wish I'd have gotten more daring and found a better background, but I was trying to get it done so they didn't have to sit for so long.

I definitely enjoyed the fact that they were pre-posed for me. I probably would have spent way too long trying to get them to stand correctly.

Next post will be about yet another festival and another soccer game. Be ready for some complaining from me on that one.