Friday was about photographing bright young stars for their acting and modelling folios, a young man in the morning to be followed by a young woman later in the day. Each needed a selection of folio photographs including headshots so we packed a lot into relatively short periods of time.
William Ngai was photographed in a range of styles. We agreed to start off with relatively neutral and gentle lighting with a plan to use stronger lighting styles as the session progressed.
For the gentler lighting we used a couple of larger Bowens soft-boxes as well as hair-lights and lighting for the backdrop. The stronger lighting used two balanced Bowens Gemini Pros with strip soft-boxes and egg crates firing towards each other in front of William. One of my original Bowens Esprit (1000) heads with barn-doors to the rear left and another Esprit with a snoot and honeycomb above on the big boom as a hair-light.
We also took some shooting time outside to use the flat lighting.
All images were shot with the Nikon D800e 70-200ƒ/2.8
Honest Representation, Not Photoshop
As ever the aim is to get the image in the camera, not on the computer. Photographing to RAW will always need some post-processing but ideally this will be as little as possible.
Headshot photos such as these are are about the client, not the photographer. Lighting is used to communicate the strengths and features of of the sitters. Images should be realistic portraits of the sitters, and, although some Lightroom work has been applied to these images the have not been processed in Photoshop.
This is a small selection taken from the larger set supplied to William. Once worked up the images were supplied as both hi-res files and web quality files each with the appropriate colour profiles added.
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