Lunch Break Photo Shoot: Brian

One day our IT Director, Brian, asked if I could help him with his LinkedIn photo. How could I say no? One, he's responsible for me having a DSLR sooner than I expected, two, he's a good friend, and three, it's another photo opportunity!

I thought the 2nd-floor walkway was ideal. I've always wanted to take a portrait shot there. It has tons of natural light coming in through the building's skylights.


On the day of the shoot I tried to use one flash to fill the shadows cast since the light was coming from overhead. Unfortunately, my remote triggers did not cooperate so I ditched it. However, all was not lost. All I had to do was adjust my exposure settings and ended up with a few favorites. Here's one:

This was probably the ideal LinkedIn shot but  I wanted to take advantage of the few minutes we had left to do an environmental portrait to showcase his field of expertise.

We went to the server room and right away I thought it would be great to try something I haven't done before... a two-light setup.

The main light, an SB-20 in a soft box, was placed camera right and the other light, a bare SB-20 with green gel filter, would serve as an edge light,  which, at first was placed on top of a box fan.

Test shots did not yield good results with the edge light on the box fan so I decided to place it on an empty rack behind, to Brian's left and pointed it at around 45-degrees towards him to light the left side of his face.

Here's the shot with the main light firing as well...

I didn't notice the distracting elements in the background... the crooked blinds and some kind of silver foil. I should have fixed that before I took the shot and would have avoided 30 minutes of Photoshop repairs... here's the final post-processed shot with the two light setup.

Another favorite of the day was this one-light shot.

This time, I didn't notice the box fan that would have been easily removed in less than ten seconds as opposed to 10 minutes of Photoshop. Here's the final.

I learned a lot during that 30 minute session and the time spent during post... that I need to start saving for a more reliable remote, like pocket wizards, although my cheap remotes started cooperating in the server room (about 80% of the time), BUT the most important thing I learned is to do a "background" check before pressing the shutter.