Jess

Yesterday I had the pleasure of shooting with the always delightful and ever entertaining (and geeky!) Jess. It was a studio portfolio shoot, to update her headshots and other standard fare for her acting resume/CV. Heaps of fun was had, as usual!

The trick with these shoots is to maximise the variety in a short space of time. There needs to be enough shots of different clothes and poses to give a good variety. Mix that up with a little bit of post (B&W, sat/desat, various crops, etc), and you can get a great range of viable images in a very short space of time.

For the shooters out there reading this, there are a few tricks you have up your sleeve to make it look like the images were taken across a dozen different shoots!! Try some of these on for size:

• Change your lights – different powers, different angles, turn some on/off, even try some interesting diffusers (ever used a tree branch shadow on a background?), and you have options a plenty!
• Change your backgrounds – most studios have “official” backgrounds like the cyc, paper rolls, and maybe some acrylic/perspex. But you can also use other backgrounds, particularly in some of the older, cooler studios. Window frames, doorways, roughed down walls, even the floor!! Take a good look around you, everything is potentially a background!! Including outside the studio!!
• Change your lenses – Depth of Field (DoF) tricks can make a huge difference!! I’ll shoot close-up headshots from above using my 24-70mm (at around 50mm), and I’ll do half-body crops using the 70-200 (at about 180mm). Anything is fair game, just be careful with the close-ups on wider lenses, you’ll get some proportion/distortion issues

The main advice here is that the shooter is responsible for mixing it up – I know it requires work, and actually moving stuff, but the results will be much more interesting and useful than if you sit on the one pose/one light setup for the entire shoot!! Do your models a favour and work hard for them!!

MUA/Hair: SammiJ
Studio: Aperture Studios, Richmond