Recently, we had the opportunity to make some headshots for a couple of friends who are volunteering at a convention coming to Denver this summer, and needed to have some new headshots to be used in the programs at that event.  I thought I’d share a few pictures from the session and explain how we got three very different looks in one small hallway.

Our buddy Dave also came along on this shoot, and he brought some new toys – two softboxes, one 50×50 inch and the other 28×28.  These things were fantastic, especially since each one had only a single SB900 flash inside, though the 50×50 is quite large and did lead us to crack several (totally unwarranted) ‘overcompensating’ jokes at Dave, which he took with his usual good grace.

We had access to an office in the Republic Plaza in downtown Denver that had some nice walls, some cool long hallways and great views.  After looking around the area, we decided first to use the rock wall you see Brian in front of above.  The conference these pics are for is for the national Society of Exploration Geophysicists, so the rocks seemed appropriate.  Lighting for this is shown below, with the ‘Big Mamu’ softbox behind me to camera-right and the smaller one behind Brian to camera-left lighting the rocks back there. You can see Dave shooting a tight crop with the same setup below. (I shot all of these with the 50mm).  The third lightstand (you can see the legs below the ‘Big Mamu’) has a light but this wasn’t being used in this shot.

After getting a couple pictures of the two subjects that had showed up at this point, we got word that the other three that were supposed to arrive needed to reschedule for a different day.  So, since we had more time than we thought, we started looking for other angles in the same space.  The rock wall you saw above was on one side of a long hallway with some awesome repeating window alcoves down the other side.  I knew right away I wanted to use this repeating element in a pic so I positioned Nancy to the inside of the hallway and used the larger of the two softboxes to give her a nice soft light and then played with the aperture until I got a nice balance with the ambient light in the hallway behind her.

In this case, I left it at 1/100th of a second – enough to show up, but still lower than the light on Nancy, so she remains the focus.  Also, by leaving the ambient light levels slightly underexposed, the huge plant in the hallway behind her doesn’t jump out to be a major distraction.  I tried to hide it behind Nancy’s hair, but that plant was seriously large, which gives you some idea of how big that hallway was…  Only real problem I had was that I didn’t notice that her necklace had gotten caught up on her shirt button and isn’t hanging right.  Grrr!  Note to self – always check the details!!

One final setup – in my initial scouting of the area when we first arrived, I noticed that outside this hallway window was a great view of the “Cash Register” building, one of the iconic towers in Denver’s skyline.  I figured since the convention is being held here, I should try to get a Denver landmark into the shot if possible.

For this one, we turned off the flash inside the 50×50 and just went with the 28×28, with a warming gel on the SB900 inside to give Nancy’s skin just a touch more warmth and also provide a subtle complementary color contrast with the blue sky outside.  Trickiest thing about this one was finding an angle for the softbox so we didn’t get reflections in the window. Eventually, Dave had to lift the lightstand and angle the box down to avoid it.

So, once we’d scouted and setup the lights, the actual shooting went pretty quick – I’d say it was 45 minutes total.  This was a great learning experience for us, and I was definitely happy that we were able to get multiple looks from minimal space and in minimal time.  If the other subjects had shown up, I feel like we would have been able to cycle them all through the three setups fairly quickly and get some neat shots for all of them without wasting anyone’s time.

Also, I was impressed enough with the quality of light from the softboxes that I ordered one also.  I decided on the 24×24 inch Lastolite EZYBox kit, for a the simple reason that it folds up (mostly) flat and doesn’t need a huge trunk to cart it around.  I should be getting it Wednesday, so keep an eye out for some shots with it soon.