An impromptu portrait & teaching session with Nate (gallery)

Nate told me that he was looking to take some new portraits of himself but he felt he’d have trouble taking them on his own since it’s hard to be in front of and behind the camera at the same time. He wanted to reproduce a lighting effect similar to something I have used before myself a number of years ago so it was also a good opportunity for me to teach him some simpler lighting methods and show him my approach to doing this sort of thing.

Instead of using both of his 600Ws Profoto strobes I had us use just one with the reflector dish off to the camera’s left about 75 degrees off the normal. I wanted a fairly hard, directional light to provide the majority of the lighting in the scene. A second Profoto was moved in until it was just a couple feet away from Nate camera right with a softbox mounted and I hung a white bedsheet over it (although I wanted to also try just the bare face of the softbox) to provide a simple reflector and fill in the shadows some.

For a backdrop I hung up my single piece of black velvet and eventually I MacGyver’d a black construction paper baffle to prevent the strobe from directly illuminating the velvet. It wasn’t creating much of a bright spot thanks to the velvet but eliminating that in camera prevents the possibility for needing to edit it out of a number of the photos and it was a 30 second task to stick an unused tall lamp on top of a table and clamp the paper to it. Even though the edit itself would have been quite quick I believe it’s always better to solve problems in camera once than fix them many times in post processing.

The shoot wound up being pretty fun and certainly brought back a lot of what I remembered doing four or five years ago, the last time I shot with studio strobes in this fashion. I think it also finally illustrated to Nate why I was always espousing the virtue of very simple lighting with minimal sources and fewer fancy light modifiers like softboxes and umbrellas.