Portrait: Laura

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Last fall, I had the chance to do some photo work for a local lawyer’s office. They were handling an estate with some vintage cars that were going up for auction and photos of the vehicles were needed. The cars were fun subjects to shoot, and the payday was nice, too! My contact on dealing with all of this was Laura, and it was a pleasant surprise when she contacted me recently to see if I could handle some personal headshots needed for an event she was part of. As someone that has largely been at the hobby level of photography, it’s rather nice when someone you don’t really know comes back to you with repeat business because they liked the first job you did for them!

We arranged to handle the shoot at her office (I even managed to lug all the studio equipment up the elevator in one trip) and it was a great time. The space we had to work in–a conference room–was pretty small and crowded, what with a big conference table and chairs taking up most of the space, but we made it work. Besides, it was just a headshot, so the needs weren’t too complex. It did, however, mean that I wasn’t able to get her positioned as far from the backdrop as I would have liked in order to help keep shadows and creases in the cloth out of the shot. So, the background wasn’t quite as I would have liked, but that gave me a great chance to practice some Photoshop techniques for cleaning it up, and I’m glad I had that opportunity! It meant I ended up adding in some Photoshopped “light spill” to help make sure the cleaned up background still blended nicely with the subject and I loved how it turned out. Here’s the shot that was my favorite, and to be honest, sharing this is really the only reason I wanted to even make this post!

Canon 6D | ISO 200 | 50mm | f/6.3 | 1/100 sec
Lit with one AlienBees B400, bounced into umbrella at camera left

Of course, what really helped was how Laura’s fantastic expression and pose worked so well with the angle of the light. I hope you (and Laura!) like it as much as I do :-)

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