Archive for July, 2011

60 Portraits in 6 hours

Time for an english blog post! Now, why is that? Did I suddenly go all international ? No, not really – I did, however, create a BTS video of a recent assignment. A video which I figure may have a wider appeal than just the local suspects, so I chose to annotate it in english – and this video/assignment is what this blog post is about. So there – english it is :-)

I was approached to shoot the entire staff of the GBS department – a subsidiary division of IBM in Denmark. They wanted a new profile so they initiated a little project to boost their presence, and for this they needed new profile pictures of each employee. The key points were that they wanted something “business like”, something fresh, something coherent that signaled that they were all part of the same team – and they did not mind moving away from the traditional portrait on a white background.

There were practical limits though – I couldn’t invite all 60 people to my studio, so Mohammad had to come to the mountain. The mountain in this case, being a generic and boring office space, with white walls, fluorescent lightings and where the most prominent piece of decor was a whiteboard ;-) In my scouting session, I did however notice the office space had blinds to cover the windows – a semi dark grey kind. Considering the traditional 8-bar logo of IBM my brain started working something out. I figured I could tone down the background, making it all a blue’ish tone to, if not emulate the logo, then at least, hopefully, create a coherent look for the portraits that made sense in some way.

The day arose and I arrived early with an assistant, setting up in the office space. The lighting plan was all mapped out in my head – and to my delight, it worked out like a charm just as I imagined it would – save a few tweaks etc. of course. My contact person had arranged for a “flowing approach” where my little photo studio was open for business for something like 2 x 3 hours during the day, and people could just drop in and get the picture done as they saw fit. That worked out fine, at the busiest points I had a queue of maximum 4 people – noone waiting more than 10 minutes. I, on the other hand, had plenty of time to drink coffee in between – with planning, this could’ve been executed in something like 2-3 hours; but with this many people you cannot expect everyone being able to fit their schedule to yours – so all in all, it was a sensible approach that worked out well.

The shot it self, was very limited – in the sense that all the portraits had to be reasonably alike to achieve the goal of coherence. In order to keep the blinds filling the background, but not get the window panes in the frame, my camera was pretty much locked down except for the height, in which I had some leeway. That, unfortunately, meant that I had to order my poor subjects around, asking them to move slightly around to position themselves correctly in the frame – they were good sports about that though. I was shooting at 200mm @ f/11, enabling me to keep focus on them relatively easily, getting a pleasing amount of blur on the blinds and totally eliminating texture from the outside. Having the outside as a background, over a timespan of 6 hours was a challenge. I did count on it, so I made sure I had enough room on both sides of the shutterspeed to both keep a sharp image (Yes, the flash freezes movement, but having ambient light in the exposure can introduce ghosting on too slow speeds – an artifact I am not too fond of) as well as staying within sync speed of the flashes. There were *some* differences in the background brightness throughout the day, but nothing I cannot live with.

For the lighting part, I chose a big key light, gelled with a full CTO in an octobox. I moved it abit more to the side, to light primarily only one side of the face, letting the other fall into semi-deep shadows. Balancing for the CTO in camera, enabled the background to fall into the blue shades I was after. Then I added an ungelled kicker behind on the shadow side to prevent the dark part from falling into the background. I made an effort of “overdoing” this a bit, giving the kicker room to draw attention to itself. It gave the impression of light falling from the background outside (same temp) and helped modelling the face in 3D. All in all, this lighting gave me the edgy, contrasty look I was going for. Finally, I flagged off the Key so it would not touch the background (very small area @ 200mm, so easy to flag off) and added an ungelled hairlight for good measure ;-)

A breakdown of each light:

Exposing for the background

Exposing for the background
No lights, with a rough WB of 3000K'ish, notice the blueish tones on the blinds



Key Light

Key Light
No diffusion material, notice how the blinds turn back to neutral, since the color-gelled Key now illuminates them.



Key Light

Key Light
Now diffused properly (look at the reflection in the background window.. Shadows are more pleasing. (Also loosing a stop or so of light)



Kicker/Rim Light

Kicker/Rim Light
Bare bulb, helping sculpting/modelling the face against the background



Key + Kicker Light

Key + Kicker Light
Now the background has been flagged off from the Keylight. (Almost, the white part in bottom right of frame is still exposed to key, will be tweaked later).



Hair-/Rim light

Hair-/Rim light
Alone, giving definition to the hair and rims out the shoulders.


Final Portrait

Final Portrait
All lights on, background properly flagged.


So, there you have it – 60 Portraits in 6 hours ;-)

Equipment used:
Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed a/s
Elinchrom Octabox 135cm
Canon Speedlight 580EXII
PocketWizard MiniTT1 / MiniTT5
Canon EOS 5D Mk.II
Canon EF 70-200mm / f2.8
Lee Full CTO Gel
Lenovo W701ds