Since we’ve been talking about portraits the last couple of days I wanted to share a story about a particular portrait with you.
Cleaning up the studio (getting ready for the move) has unearthed some forgotten mementos. Hidden in a stack of memories was the October, 1997, issue of Mountain Biker Magazine.
In this issue was an article I wrote and photographed at the Newsweek 24 Hours of Canaan (West Virginia) mountain bike race. At the time, 24-hour mountain bike races were relatively young and most often contested by teams of four …

This is the third and final video in the outdoor portrait series. We’ll take a little different approach this week, observing as a 15 minute family portrait shoot takes place. Rather than explaining technical details in this installment I thought it might be helpful to watch as I work with the subjects, getting to know them and helping them to be comfortable in front of the camera. After the jump below the video I’ll explain some of my thought process when photographing families and groups.
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Some further thoughts …

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The gallery of images may be found here.
Today’s video is a direct continuation of last week’s video episode 25, outdoor portraits #1. In this video we look a bit more at the approach to portraits and attention to details.

These images were shot wide open at f4 on the relatively affordable Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM Lens with the 5D. Shutter speed was around 1/80 of a sec at ISO 100 so a tripod was called in to duty.
White balance was set to daylight and I …

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For the next three weeks we’ll be looking at outdoor portraits. Hopefully this episode will help out if you’re interested in ideas on how to photograph a senior portrait. It’s pretty timely, too, since DIYPhotography.net is running their Portrait Professional 8 Giveaway at the same time. If you’re looking for portrait inspiration, check out all the entries so far in the DIYPhotography.net flickr pool.
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The day of video shooting was perfect in most all respects except for one challenge we hadn’t encountered before: swarms of deafening locusts! If …

Last week we looked at creating portraits with just one light. This week’s video is a natural progression, building upon the foundation of one light portraits. Adding additional lights should serve a purpose and here they help add greater detail and dimension, as explained in the video. There’s also a web gallery of the still photos that helps show the progression.
The most obvious purpose of this video is to further explain portrait lighting. I hope, though, that the video also helps increase your awareness of how light affects a …

In last week’s video we saw three different styles of one light portraits. I love one light portraits and there are photographers that have based their entire career on this style of lighting. Personally, I think it’s important to understand what just one light can do before moving on. But if you’re ready to move on…what if we add a hair light? And a background light? In Monday’s video we do just that, and build a three light portrait around our model:

In this video we’ll look at three fundamental styles of portrait lighting. Whether you’re using a studio strobe or a Strobist setup, this is a great intro to portrait lighting with just one light. Just as in last week’s quality of light video, we’ll be using the inexpensive Genesis 200 1-Light Kit from Calumet.

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View the still images from the shoot (along with EXIF data in this photo gallery:

Many thanks to our friends at Heyman Talent for providing the wonderful talent!

It’s time to shoot portraits! This one is a must see, it provides a great foundation in portrait lighting whether you use a studio strobe or a Strobist setup. In Monday’s video we’ll explore three very different styles of portrait lighting, all using just a one-light setup. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with just one light.
See you on Monday…