Corporate Location Portrait Session

Long time friend and clinical psychologist called me up a week ago and asked if I could do some portraits for his group practice website. Of course I agreed! (He offered to trade for professional services, though he had me at “can you take some portraits…”) So this afternoon we met at his office in Irvine and had a ball!

Lots of large windows in his 5th floor office and boardroom. Most of the lighting was pretty straightforward: a single SB-800 / shoot-thru umbrella combo, and a reflector on the shadow side for fill as needed. SU-800 commander worked great in the all glass environs.

All shot w/Nikon D2x and Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 lens. For those images with strong window light influence in the image, I set the camera white balance to tungsten to turn the daylight more blue, and gelled the flash with a full cut CTO gel to match the camera WB for normal skin tones (a trick I learned from corporate photographer David Tejada). Bill really liked the contrast of the blue-tinged background with the warm skin tones.

Anyway, a couple proofs from the session…just basic processing in Lightroom at this point…nothing too fancy….yet.

Thanks for looking!

Gourds by Booker – the Shoot

My good friend, Booker Preston, is a podiatrist by day, and award-winning gourd artist by night.  I had done some portraits of Booker a while back, but today had a chance to do some studio shots of some of his beautiful pieces for a website. See more examples of his work at: Gourds by Booker.

Couple more posted in my gallery HERE.  Here’s the lighting setup shot for most of them.  Key light is the SB-800 at upper right, lighting a 3×5 diffusion panel.  There’s a second SB-800 clamped to the back of the chair via a Justin clamp.  It’s gridded with a Honl 1/4 speed grid, and throws a small circle of light on the background for accent. Disc reflector at the left softens the shadows a bit.  That’s Booker peeking around the diffuser to make sure I’m doing it right.

Here’s a couple photos of Booker from our portrait session in his studio last fall:

Booker’s exhibiting his work at the Laguna Art-a-Fair, which starts this Wednesday, June 24, and runs through the end of August.  If you’re in Southern California this summer, stop in and say hello!  And be prepared to fall in love with his artistry.