Head games

I took headshots for an actress named Jennifer the other day (as mentioned recently), which proved to be a successful second attempt at venturing out and about with a single flash on a light stand. I attempted to have two, but the Nikon wouldn’t behave, due to a shoe issue.

The sunset+single strobe approach worked well with Devon, so we went into the park at around 5:30 p.m. to start to work.

First, we found a nice tree to stand by, and got some technical things worked out here. We had to look out for kids playing disc golf in the background, but were otherwise free of unnatural intrusion in the frames.

Since we were going for headshots and not anything else, I stuck almost exclusively to my 100 mm 2.0 lens. It’s one of my go-to lenses for concerts, and can also be excellent for portraiture. I mostly like it for headshots, and prefer to go to my 50 mm or 24 mm lenses for full-body stuff … but that’s another post.

The lack of distortion helps this lens stand out, so you don’t have to worry about warping people or stretching things. It also makes it super easy to have that really nice, blurry background.

So, shooting with one flash on a stand as fill (usually filling in her face or the dark side of her face that was away from the sun), the sunset to cover all the other light and a goal of only getting headshots, it was pretty easy to get the technical mess out of the way so we could concentrate on the look of the shots themselves.

I found our best stuff used dynamic (as in not plain or standing straight and shooting straightforward) angles and poses. She would face her body one way, and her head toward me, and I would often shoot downward. Of course, we still got some cool “straightforward” shots, too. This one was in front of a pond.

With our technical issues out of the way, we basically shot everything we could think of. Happy, serious, straightforward, at an angle and a little more open ended. This post concentrates mostly on the “serious” shots she needed immediately, but we have more with some levity and cool angles left to work on.  All in all, it turned out great, and she was pleased.

Simplicity and good planning can yield excellent results.

Any questions?

Listening: Good bluegrass stuff