It’s always cool to see what graphic designers do to your work once it’s in their hands. Here are two head shots I took recently, and then the resulting pages/ads designed by Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. I think she’s pretty good! I was psyched to be able to squeeze in a short corporate head shot gig and a magazine gig right before I left Santa Barbara for the summer and drove out to Colorado to begin the wedding season. Good timing, and it got the mind limbered up and the creative juices flowing.
Anyway, here’s the camera geek inside baseball: the corporate head shot was for a VP of a Santa Barbara financial advising firm. After checking out the office and taking a few other images, I decided I wanted to have her standing in front of the board room, arms crossed, looking like the boss in charge, the lady who knows what’s up, and the person who’s gonna get your money issues sorted. She had to look authoritative, so she had to stand out from the rest of the frame. So I lit her with 2 small flashes, one behind her for some rim light and the other to her right shooting through an umbrella. I got these ideas from the brilliant Strobist.com site.
The pic of Sam Tyler was taken in the corner of a kid’s bedroom, in front of the only white corner I could find in the house we did this shoot at. So he just stood in the corner, maybe 3 feet in front of the wall and a few feet from the wall on his left. I lit him with just one small flash at 1/128th power shot through an umbrella. It was so low power that I was able to stop my 85mm lens down to about f/1.8 to get a nice shallow depth of field. The idea was to have the umbrella light illuminate Sam and then bounce back off the wall to the camera’s right to fill in a little bit of his face.
The image was for a story about Sam, who makes documentaries. He’s going to produce a doc about what’s going on at the Santa Barbara News Press, my former hometown paper that’s hemorrhaging employees thanks to a billionaire owner who doesn’t understand the idea of a free press and instead uses the paper as her soap box. I’m glad I turned down a job there about 4 years ago! Since last spring, more than 20 (I lost count — I don’t have that many fingers and toes) editors, designers, reporters, etc. left because of disagreements with management. Without going into too much detail, it’s been unprecedented and extraordinarily ugly. As a result, the paper has become the laughing stock of California, and the readers in Santa Barbara don’t have a viable, reliable source of daily local news. Bummer. So anyway, Sam’s doc will likely be very revealing.
