Headshot for Bill

Our good friend (and Tom’s best man) Bill needed a headshot.  He’s recently been elected Secretary of the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) and they needed a picture for the website and printed newsletter.

This is a simple, 3-light setup.  First, we hung a white bedsheet from the ceiling (there’s no room in our basement to hang a seamless backdrop).  Since it was quite wrinkled from storage, we knew we’d need to position Bill quite a ways in front of it, to allow the shallow DOF to render the wrinkles well out of focus. We also added a Canon 580EXII flash on a lightstand behind the sheet, just to help blow it out.  This flash was set at 1/16th power with -0.7 EV and set to 24mm zoom.

More, after the jump…

Next, we set up the main light.  In this case, it was another 580EXII, this time set at 1/8th power and 50mm zoom.  This was on a stand to camera left, with a convertible shoot-thru umbrella, with the black cover pulled down half way.  It doesn’t show in the shot above, but when used in full-length shots, this allows the light to fall off down the torso in a natural gradient.  The next post will demonstrate this.

With the main and background lights all set, we were looking for a little kicker.  So we added an accent light to camera-right.  We were out of stands at this point (well, we had more stands, but were out of umbrella adapters for them – we’ve really got to visit Denver Pro Photo again one of these days!), so this flash was mounted on a monopod and braced it against the exercise bike.  Any port in a storm, right?   This was another 580EXII, this time set at 1/32nd power at 70mm zoom.

All in all, it makes for a nice, high-key portrait and Bill was very happy with it.  Minimal post-processing here, just an export with the logo and uploaded.  Nailing the light in-camera really speeds up the post workflow!

Enjoy.