Headshots are fun.
Two posts in one day? Get used to it over the next few days, I have been pretty behind posting my stuff.
Shoots like this are why I love my job. Beth is a student at Lamont School of Music here in Denver, and she’s quite the oboe player, let me tell you. Anyways, she is going to Milan, Italy over summer for a music program and needed a headshot for their website. Instead of shooting this in the studio, where everything is easy and controlled, and can sometimes get repetitive. We decided to shoot this in the music school, which is a beautiful building with lots of opportunities for interesting backgrounds. I met her in the lobby, and when I saw how busy it was up there, we went downstairs where there wouldn’t be too many people to distract us. Through a cracked door I saw some lockers lined up across the wall, so we ventured in there to get a better look. I visualized the locks out of focus, and thought it would be a good place to get something interesting, so this is where we set up.
The light in there was terrible, but dark, orangey, grossness is the usual for this building. My setup for this shot was a Nikon SB-800 into a small chimera softbox, triggered by Pocket Wizards. I use this for most of my headshots.
To balance out the color of the ambient light, I did the first 6 shots with a full CTO gel on my SB-800, and had my model hold a grey card so I could color balance the pictures in post. After getting a look at the images, I decided to add another CTO so that there would a difference in color temperature between the flash and the ambient of the background. We took another 6 shots and were done in less than 30 minutes.
