There are a few problems with this, though.  We work in an office building, so there’s not a whole lot of places to shoot a good headshot, and, these people are pretty important – the kind of people you are lucky to get 5 minutes with on a good day, but this wasn’t a good day, so I was lucky to get about 30 seconds per person.  Great.

So, we had to improvise.  For the location we ended up in a conference room (I bet you NEVER would have guessed that ), which didn’t leave us with a lot of options.  We had a lame (think elementary school portraits) muslin background that we could have thrown up, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.  I’d much rather have a nice, solid, neutral background.  Luckily, the conference room walls were white (or fairly close to it) so we pushed the tables out of the way to give us some working room and setup our shooting position in such a way that there wouldn’t be much light falling on the background so it would drop to a nice gray color.

So, the background was taken care of – now we just needed a good lighting setup in a tight space. Enter the speedlights and CLS!  Big studio lights and cords would have caused all kinds of problems and hazards.  Using the little battery powered strobes allowed me to set up a nice cross-light setup in a very small space that worked quite nicely for these portraits.

For the key light I set up a Nikon SB-900 inside of the 28″ Westcott Apollo softbox and set it on camera left.  I wanted a solid aperture for these portraits to keep them sharp and detailed, so I shot at f/8 at ISO 200, which is cake for the speedlights.  I had the key setup in a nice 3/4 position to provide enough light on the VP’s faces and still provide some definition via shadow.

With the key set I set up a nice kicker/fill/rim light on back camera left just to provide a little more visual interest and pop to the photos.  This was done by setting up my Nikon SB-600 on top of one of the tables we moved out of the way into a silver umbrella.  I used the umbrella to provide some spread to the second light and soften it up as corporate headshots generally don’t lend themselves well to hard directional light.

Once the lights were up it was just a matter of dialing in the power for a good exposure and waiting for the VPs to come by.  I shot tethered so I could easily check focus and exposure, plus I thought it’d make me look a little more professional, which is important when dealing with important senior management people.

Once they finally came by I got about what I thought I would get with each one – about 30-45 seconds.  I had them stand in position, shot a frame and checked and made sure everything looked good, and then fired a few more off just to be safe and moved on to the next one.  I shot 13 VPs, including the CEO, all in about 8 minutes.  That’s what happens when you work with important people.  Best to be prepared and be flexible.  I pre-planned most of this the night before so I could set up and be ready for them.  Total setup time was probably 10-15 minutes and total shooting time was no more than 10 minutes tops.  13 VPs in less than 30 minutes total from start to finish.  Not too bad.

I edited the shots in the Lightroom 3 Beta, just to give it a shot.  Lots of other people have already talked about it, so I won’t get into it here.  It’s pretty cool so far – nothing too revolutionary.  I do really like the improved sharpening, though.  I probably spent an hour total editing these shots – once I got the look I wanted it was easy to sync it with the rest and tweak the colors where needed.

After I everything I’d say this was a pretty successful shoot.  I was pretty nervous about it, but thanks to everything I’ve learned so far it was pretty easy to set something up and make some good images.

Practice makes perfect!

The last few self-portraits have been pretty high-key so for this one I wanted to drop it down low…WAY low.  I’ve seen some pretty cool low-key shots done by people like Zack Arias and Dustin Diaz so I figured I’d give it a go.  I couldn’t decide which one I liked better: the one above was Josi’s favorite and the one below is my favorite:

Everything is exactly the same, setup-wise, just my pose is different.  I tried so hard in these shots to not have my typical glare, so hopefully all of you will appreciate that.

My aim for these shots was to have them be very underexposed to the point that most everything is pure black and what little is there fades to black pretty quickly.  I was working in my room again so there was light bouncing everywhere, which made it fairly difficult, but I think I did ok.  I used a single light source for this one: my SB-800 into my 43″ silver umbrella.  But, to keep most of the light off of me I feathered it away from me so just the edge of the umbrella was lighting me – then I dialed the power down way low, 1/64 to be exact, and fired off several shots using my wireless remote.  Here is the setup shot:

It was a quick setup and the whole shoot took me no more than 10 minutes tops from setup to teardown.  I’m not saying I was being a slacker, just that the shot I wanted this week was fairly simple to setup and execute.  I’ve got a couple of more complex shots in mind for the coming weeks so watch for those.

My goal for this coming week, along with my next Project 52 shot, is to do a fairly extensive blog post about my experience at Don Giannatti‘s Lighting Essentials workshop that I attended last week.  If you haven’t seen my shots from the workshop be sure to check out my Flickr set featuring my favorites. Several of those shots will be featured in my blog post this week as well, so watch for it!

I finally got around to getting Jessica and Sa’dia their CDs from this shoot so I figured it should blog about it too, ya know, for good measure.  We did the shoot almost a month ago, but we’ve all been busy so we haven’t had time to meet up until now – it’s NOT because I’m a slacker.  Well, I am a slacker, but usually not when it comes to my pictures.  Anyway…

I just wanted to share a couple of pictures from this shoot.  I had two goals when I agreed to this shoot – shoot most of it at night and try some new things.  The picture above pretty much sums it up.  I think we had a lot of fun trying new things, which is what all three of us wanted.  When I sent this shot above to the two models I said it represents the shoot because it is “fun, different, and unique.”  Works for me.  I don’t have setup shots for these pics, but I’ll quickly run through the setups, though they are pretty easy to figure out.  The one above was at ISO 800 and 1/10 sec to bleed in the ambient and still let me shoot at f/8.  The girls are lit by a single shoot-through umbrella camera left and the flare is created by an Sb-600 at low power handheld by my buddy, Aaron.

Now on to a couple shots of each girl by themselves.  Continuing with the flare concept we’ve got Jess:

If you haven’t noticed by now I kinda dig the whole flare thing, whether its a sun flare or flash flare.  So I tried to work it into some of my night shots by using my SB-600 instead of the sun.  It creates a nice rim/separation light and also creates that beautiful flare.  The key light was the SB-800 camera left in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox.  I think I’m going to order a 60″ convertible umbrella in the near future to play with.  I want to do some full body stuff and most of my current modifiers don’t spread light that much.

Now, here is Sa’dia by herself:

I love the way this one turned out.  I like the warm colors in the background and the soft light up front.  Combined I think it creates a very compelling, inviting image.  Plus, that look.  Her eyes just draw you right in.  Very nice and very simple.  Sometimes it’s the simple shots that turn out the best over the complex ones.

That’s it for this post.  I’ll have another one soon as I just got back from Don Giannatti‘s Lighting Essentials workshop and I have a bunch of pictures from that to share.  Stay tuned!

Could that title have any more hyphens in it?  Probably, but we won’t push it.

Sorry this one is so late.  Been playing Batman: Arkham Asylum most of the weekend and got the urge to watch Batman Begins again, so we just got finished with that.  Aside from that I had a shoot on Friday night and one this afternoon, plus I’ve been upgrading the hard drive in my Macbook Pro and upgrading to Snow Leopard, so it’s been a busy weekend.  Luckily I got this one shot early in the week so I just had to finish up the post-production.

I got the idea for this shot while re-watching Zack Arias‘ OneLight DVD.  On Disc 1 he does a quick shoot in the studio using a single flash – a Sunpak 120J – to create a high-key portrait.  He also says it would be difficult to do without a bare-bulb flash, so since I don’t have a 120J I decided to make it work with my Nikon SB-800.  I think the SB-800 did a fine job at making me look much better than I normally do, so I’m calling this one a win.

The setup, as the title implies, was rather simple.  A single Nikon SB-800 directly behind me on the bed at 1/2 power with the dome diffuser, aimed up at the ceiling.  There was a white wall on camera left to provide a nice bounce surface.  This blew the back wall out and created a nice wrapping light on me.  To spice it up just a bit I added a silver reflector on camera right to add just a little bit more light to my face.  Here is the setup shot:

Ignore the messiness of the desk and night stand.

I did a good amount of Photoshopping on this one if it isn’t terribly obvious.  I really like this look – the high-contrast, sharp, gritty, slightly desaturated look.  Maybe I should do all my shots like this and call it the Matt DeWitt Look.  Or maybe not.  Here is what the shot looked like fresh out of the camera:

Pretty drastic change. I think I’ve just about locked down my workflow for getting this look since I’ve used it on a few shots now. Hopefully one day in the near future I can write a blog post about achieving this look.  It’s really not that complicated.  Probably takes 30 minutes to an hour tops to do.  Until then, here is a quick look at my final layers palatte:

That’s it for tonight.  You stay classy, Earth!

Finally got a shot this week that I liked.  Nothing like waiting until the last minute.  In my defense, I shot two other setups this week for my project, but neither of them turned out good, so I kept trying.  Good thing I did because I really like this shot.

Josi can always turn the cuteness up to 11 when she wants to and tonight was no exception.

I wanted to play with some gels and adjusting my white balance since it’s been a while since I’ve had fun with it, plus I wanted to mess around more with the bokeh my 50mm f/1.8 can create, so I tried to cram it all into one shot – I think I did a pretty good job (I say that every week, don’t I?).

For this shot I dropped my white balance down to 3850K, which is getting into the blue realm of color temperature, and then brought Josi back up and added some warmth with a full CTO gel and a 1/2 CTO gel on top of that.  That was on my SB-800 in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox pretty close on camera left.

The nice thing about working at wide apertures like f/1.8 is that your flashes barely have to work so your recycle times are almost instant, which makes it much easier to capture the moments like this one.

For the rim/separation light I used the SB-600 bare zoomed to 85mm back camera right.  I also added a 1/2 and a 1/4 CTB gel – those along with the cool white balance helped to create that nice blue light.  I think the white fabric on the Apollo was picking up a little spill from the blue rim light and mixing it in some with the warm key light to give some slight coolness to her skin tones as well.  Pretty cool.  And I didn’t even plan that!

Here is the setup shot:

Another week done!  I’d really like to do a self portrait in a similar setup, but they are so hard to do at f/1.8 – getting the focusing locked in is so hard when you barely have inches to work with.  I’ll keep trying though and hopefully I’ll get a good one.  It took me 3 shoots this week to get a shot that I really liked and wanted to share, but if that’s what it takes then so be it.

Who knows what next week will bring…

I had a pretty cool idea for this week’s shoot…buuuut I wasn’t able to get it done, so instead you’ll have to settle for this much more boring headshot of me.  Maybe next week I can get the shot I want.  I don’t want to give too much away, but the name of the shoot will be “Streetlights, People…” after probably the best song ever: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”.

Back to this week’s shot.  Nothing too special.  Two-light setup done in my living room.  Josi was here this weekend to help me with it, so she actually snapped the shot – it’s just easier than trying to set up the tripod, getting the focus right, composition, etc.  Here she is in the setup shot (facing the wrong way, though for this week:

I did try a couple new tricks during post this week.  This week Scott Kelby featured Bill Simone for his Guest Blog Wednesday and Bill offered some great Photoshop tips, so I decided to mess around with them.  The biggest one worth mentioning is the use of Tony Kuyper‘s Luminosity Masks.  He has a great tutorial on his site about what they do and how they use them, so I won’t go into much detail about them here.  Just know that they rock and you should check them out too.

That’s about it for this week.  Nothing too special or exciting.  Not too happy about this week’s shot, but I know they all aren’t going to be great.  Here’s hoping that next week’s is better…

Well, looks like it’s that time of year again.  David Hobby over at Strobist has started up the next installation of Boot Camp, rightly named: Strobist Boot Camp II.  I missed all of the previous participation activities on Strobist, just from jumping it at the wrong time, so I was really looking forward to a new one that I could follow along with.

The first assignment of Boot Camp II, just like the first assignment of the original Boot Camp, is a headshot.  Awesome!  I love doing portraits, so this one shouldn’t be too bad for me.  I’m a big fan of environmental/editorial style portraits (like the great Joe McNally’s work), so rather than do a tight headshot for this assignment I decided to go with something that shows a little more context to the subject.

I’ve had this setup bouncing around in my head for a while now so I figured this would be a great time to bust it out.  The idea was to show the subject next to a computer. Fairly simple concept.  One of those shots that you get tired of shooting in the corporate world, but if done right can be a really interesting shot.  I wanted to be in control of everything, so I went to my office on a Sunday afternoon when no one would be around since there is some open space that would work well for this set up.  I knew that this shot would work great for anyone in the tech industry: bloggers, programmers, photographers, graphic designers, etc.  Since most of those describe me it was a great shot to use for this assignment, because part of the assignment is to submit a self-portrait using the same lighting setup.

I originally brought Josi along with me to shoot, but luck was on my side and when I got to work I ran into fellow blogger and programmer at “The O,” Hal, so I decided to use him for my shot instead.  He fit within boundaries of the assignment better, plus he’s lost a lot of weight recently and looks pretty good.  Don’t get me wrong, Josi looks great in front of the camera as well:

But I wanted to stay within the spirit of the assignment: providing a much needed headshot for someone (and myself).  I think it worked out for the best too; my favorite shot above (the one at the top of this post) might be incorporated into one of the error pages for my company’s new public website.  Ok, so let’s get to the technical details.

This was a three light setup.  One light for the key, one for fill and accents, and one for the background.  I probably could have used one more, but I only have 3 lights, so I had to make do with what I’ve got.  It turned our pretty well.  Let’s go through each light and the setup.

For the key light I used the Nikon SB-800 on it’s little stand that it ships with.  It was bouncing off of a couple of sheets of white paper stuck in front on my MAcbook Pro’s screen.  At 1/16 power this flash was more than enough to light up the models face and provide the perfect illusion of working late (that’s what all tech people do, right?).  It gave a nice glow around the laptop for an added affect.  It left a lot of the environment dark though, so we needed some fill.

For the fill I used the Vivitar 285HV.  It was also set at 1/16 power.  I wanted something less harsh than straight flash, but not something as soft and spreading as an umbrella, I needed some control for the fill, so I went with the Lumiquest Softbox III.  This is such a versatile little light modifier, and highly recommend by David himself.  It worked great here, providing some illumination to the back of the laptop as well as accenting the side of it with some specular highlights.  It did cause one problem though – it created a bad shadow on the wall of our subject.  Time for the final light.

To kill this newly created shadow and to add some separation from the background I used the Nikon SB-24.  I wanted one of those halo backgrounds, so I used a homemade straw grid.  After messing with the position a little I got it right where I wanted it, providing separation, killing the shadow, and creating the illusion of monitor glow in the wee hours of the night.  I even did some shots with a couple light blue gels on this background light, as seen in the top photo.

Here are two setup shots to help explain the setup even more.  These diagrams were inspired by Dustin Diaz’s 365 Photo Project as mentioned on Strobist.

So that’s it for my first Strobist Boot Camp II assignment.  I really like the first shot in this post, but I decided it wasn’t quite good enough to be used as a headshot, so I picked a different shot of Hal to use from the shoot, and also the best one of me since you have to turn in both photos.  Here is the final shot as submitted:

Don’t laugh too hard, there’s a reason I’m a photographer and not a model.  Watch for more posts as Strobist Boot Camp II continues to put me through the paces…