  (Click on photos to enlarge) (Each pair of images shows "before editing" and "after editing") As a professional photographer, I’ve created hundreds of portraits for commercial, corporate, editorial, and magazine clients. However, it’s the magazines – mostly the business ones – that often are most open to unusual and offbeat images… the type I like to shoot. A typical assignment from them is to create an “environmental portrait” of the person being featured in a particular magazine article. My definition of an environmental portrait is a picture where the background and foreground are just as important (or maybe even more important) than the subject. Whatever is needed to create an arresting portrait is fair game. Making the subject look attractive is not the photographer’s main intent. Instead, the goal is to create a truly inventive and compelling photograph where the subject, though certainly important, is just one element of the final product. The magazine requests this sort of portrait because it wants something to make readers pause and actually read the article the picture accompanies. The job of the photographer, therefore, is to take often ordinary faces and locations and transform them into something wonderful.   For many years, I shot these portraits using a medium-format film camera (it produces 2¼” x 2¼” images, a size considerably larger than the standard 35mm film format). I primarily shot transparency film, which is made from the same material used for 35mm slides, but larger and without plastic or cardboard frames to encase it. The photo shoots usually took place where the subject worked. My assistant and I would arrive with bags of strobes, light stands, and supporting equipment. After finding a shooting location, we’d often spend up to four hours composing the shot and precisely lighting the location and the area where the subject was going to be placed, taking test Polaroids along the way to check our progress. When finished, we’d call in our subject and spend thirty to sixty minutes taking pictures. When done, we’d bag up our equipment, drop the exposed film at a photo lab to be processed, and head home. Since we were using transparency film, that was the end of our work. Retouching to enhance or improve the images required the services of a professional photo retoucher and, due to their high fees, was rarely an option. FREE T-SHIRT ...when you sign up for a One-To-One Workshop!! This is a Fruit-Of-The-Loom, 98% cotton shirt. It has my absolutely gorgeous logo (see top of page) printed on the front. Available sizes are men's medium, large, and extra-large. These shirts may also be purchased.   During the photo shoot, we’d use from one to six strobes (flash units). Providing enough illumination for a proper exposure was certainly one of our goals. But just as important was creating lighting that was dynamic and interesting. For almost any portrait, I think it’s the lighting that ultimately determines how successful it is. The lighting process was the primary reason for the lengthy setup time. We’d experiment with various strobe placements, strobe heights, and strobe intensities. In addition, we’d try out all manner of light modifiers on the strobes. It was an arduous task, but one that allowed me to begin the photo shoot with a well thought out lighting design. There was another issue as well. The lights usually were aimed at very specific areas of the subject, foreground, and background. The subject moving around even slightly could throw off the entire lighting scheme. This meant that he/she was pretty much locked into that one position. Changing it required repositioning the lights at least somewhat.   My shooting methods changed considerably after moving from film to digital, and especially when editing programs such as Photoshop became available. The lighting that took so long to set up using up to six strobes can now be done much faster in postproduction – and with almost unlimited possibilities! Further, since it’s postproduction, I can spend all the time I want experimenting with various lighting arrangements without inconveniencing the subject. So now, for an indoor portrait shoot, I’ll quickly set up two or three strobes and simply bounce their beams off bright colored walls and ceilings. When shooting outdoors, I'll use the ambient light while sometimes adding additional illumination with a portable strobe or handheld reflector. Whether shooting indoors or outdoors, I usually end up with soft and even lighting on the subject. It’s often flat and uninteresting, but allows for a greater area of coverage. This means the subject has a larger area to move around in while still remaining well lit. It’s then in postproduction that the images can be edited and relit to my heart’s content. The added benefit is that specific shot setups and modifications during the photo shoot are much faster now. We can do many more setups in the same amount of time it took to do a single setup using my half-dozen strobes.   This new shooting method also led me to stock photography. A stock photographer shoots a variety of images and then sends them to their stock photo agencies for display on their web sites. When magazines, businesses, ad agencies, textbook companies, etc. need photos, they often will purchase existing images from one of these stock photo agencies, thereby saving the expense of having to hire a photographer to shoot new images. When the stock photo agency sells a picture, the payment for that sale is shared between the photographer and the stock photo agency. Most of my portrait work these days is done for my stock photo agencies. I love doing this because no photo editor is telling me what to shoot, how to shoot it, and how to edit the results. Every part of the photography process is now almost completely under my control (“almost” meaning that my stock photo agencies have some minor shooting parameters I must follow).   I’m also having fun working with an assortment of models – the subjects for my portraits. Most are not professionals, but rather friends, students, and others who answer modeling ads I post online. With my updated way of working, I can set up and shoot quickly. Over the three or four hours we’ll spend together on a photo shoot, I’ll often finish with up to fifty different shot set-ups and a few hundred pictures. Of course, it’s then hours and hours I'll be spending in post-production!! Under PORTFOLIOS on my website are three portfolios showing some of my stock portrait images. They are entitled: COLOR ADDED, PAIRS OF FOLK, and ON THE BED. These titles, hopefully, are self-explanatory. The photos above also are stock images. |
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