Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Experiment. Don’t go out with preconceptions of what a picture will look like. That will block you from being receptive to something new and exciting.“— Mason Resnick
But that’s not what your subjects want. They want a portrait of themselves or a loved one that looks different from the last portrait you made and maybe even one that captures that subject’s individuality.
The same goes with your lighting. Back in the film days, I helped a friend who was sick and shot a few of his portrait sittings for his clients. The studio’s assistant showed me their lighting system that included strings attached to his Photogenic lights and it had different knots representing subject-to-light distances, which were used to maintain a consistent lighting ratio. All his subjects got the same consistent lighting that made retouching the negatives easier and faster in the production line world of high volume portraiture. But all of the portraits looked the same.
How I made this portrait: For this portrait of the incredible Erin Valakari, the lighting setup consisted of two Paul C Buff DigiBee DB800’s and one Alien Bee B800 light. The main DigiBee DB800 at camera right had a Plume Ltd. Wafer soft box attached. A Alien Bee B800 with an 16 x 30-inch Westcott Apollo Strip soft box was located at camera left. Another DigiBee DB800 with a 48-inch Dynalite Quad Square black/silver umbrella was located at camera left and placed neat the back of my home studio. The background was a hand painted Carbonite muslin from Silverlake Photo. The camera used was a Olympus Pen F with Oly’s 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 II kit lens. Exposure was 1/200 sec at f/11 and ISO 400. The original RAW file was converted to a DNG file using Adobe DNG Converter and that converted the Olympus ORF’s into portable DNG files I could use with my old version of Photoshop. The Glamour Glow filter from Color Efex Pro was added for a soft focus effect.
*The latest version of Adobe DNG Converter won’t run on my 5K iMac and its OS. My workaround was to install the newer version of the software on my 23-inch iMac that has a later operating system then transferring the image file to the 5K iMac. The entire process is awkward. But what’s a poor hippo to do?
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography with new copies available from Amazon for $34.39, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price around nine bucks and the Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.