BTS – Headshot Portraits

This week I got a call to fill in at the last minute for a photographer who was due to take some headshots of some finalists in a business startup competition the National Varsity Pitch Competition. Here is a trailer from the competition in 2010:

I didn’t unfortunately have much gear on me, luckily I had my dedicated flash unit, and more than capable tamron 17-50 f2.8 VC, which did a great job in a tight and challenging office environment. The office, on one side had a great painted grass field, making a great chosen background.

An annoying (but stylish) window was beaming in summer sun from an awkward angle and the blind did not work, and I had no reflector to make use of it in a way that I could think of at the time. The lights above the area chosen, gave pictures a ‘tungstenny’ glow, but gave some neccessary light, and I fixed this by fiddling with the temperature setting on Nikon D300 DSLR. I then grabbed a whiteboard and used this as somewhat of a reflector to fill in the shadows created by only having the one flash, as I wanted to light from the side of the candidates face’s to avoid annoying “deer in headlights” / flat pictures.

iPhone 4 snap:

The candidates had roughly 10minutes each before needing to move on to be filmed for the competition, so it was a bit of a machine gun line. However, all worked out, and the shots came out as below as you can see here in full size