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| Author Tiffany Calligaris photographed in Toronto in the fall |
To see a larger copy of the picture above please go to https://hollinrake.com/portfolios/authorscelebrities.
I haven't written a post here for a while so I'm happy to be able to share some thoughts I hope may be helpful as things open back up again and photo shoots resume again.
Preparation: what do you really need?
Sometimes I get the impression that headshots are viewed as a commodity somewhat along the lines of a loaf of bread...easy to get, supply is ubiquitous, they're not all equal but they are equal enough that not a lot of thought needs to go into them and they shouldn't cost too much. You can look at a menu board/price list and just order one. It's "just a headshot". I'd like to promote the idea that there is no "just a headshot", any more than there is "just a haircut" (well, for most people). It can be tempting
to want to keep things simple. You know you need something better than
something you could shoot on your phone so you hire a “professional” … I’ve written about this before (http://khollinrakemakemepretty.blogspot.com/2015/08/10-ish-questions-to-ask-when-looking.html) ...but are you setting yourself up to get what will serve you best?
It might seem easier to go with “I just need a headshot”, but skipping the pre-shoot part of the process, the thought, the discussion, decision making, and planning may result in pain and disappointment later. Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge that there is such a thing as a simple headshot which may be a fairly quick and straight forward undertaking, but the details still matter…even a simple headshot has a job to do. I also often hear the term “headshot” being used interchangeably with “business portrait” in a way that I'll suggest may underestimate and (I'm sure inadvertently) misrepresent the scope and importance of the job.
Before or at least while you are booking a photographer it is important to understand what you really need and to make sure you and the photographer, and your designer, if you have one, are on the same page. The success and usefulness of your images may depend on it.
Make sure your designer is in the loop (and make sure the photographer knows you have one).
I had a weird situation a while ago which almost ended with a client not getting what they wanted because they neglected to confer with their website designer prior to hiring me. When they came to me they seemed dead certain about what they needed. They showed me examples online and I even did a test shot for them to make sure we were on exactly the same page, and on the shoot day at their location I was careful to get their approval in real time. All good. Great shoot.
Except that some time after the shoot when all the retouched selects were delivered to them they told me their designer (why didn’t we know there was a designer?) declared the portraits off-brand because the background was the wrong colour. They didn’t have the budget to pay us to do the extra digital work to replace the backgrounds so it wasn’t a good situation. Instead of thrilled clients, perfect portraits, a glowing testimonial and the promise of successful and ongoing business relationship we had portraits that weren’t right. Ultimately the designer did a bunch of work to adjust the backgrounds to look the way they wanted them to, but had we just known what was needed in the first place we would have shot differently. The good news is that we do still have a great working relationship with this client, and now we do the post-production every time we do a new portrait to match them with the set, but it could have been way less painful if we’d shot to get them what they needed in the first place.
I also had a call from someone else’s client a while back. They had done a personal branding photo shoot at a location with furniture and various props in the background. The lighting was on the dramatic side but very nice, and the short depth of field made for nice soft edges around their face and shoulders. The shots were really nice (that's three "nices"!). But it turned out that what this person actually needed was a background more on the way to white. The question to me was could I help by replacing the dark backgrounds with light ones, and unfortunately the answer was no, because the way these images were shot they were not conducive to “close-cutting” (ie. cutting out the person) or to featuring a light background. There was just no reasonable way to do this digitally, so the shots were no good. All that money and effort for the wrong product.
Plan the shoot with final image use(s) in mind.
You will not always know what all of the end uses of an image will be, but there are advantages to putting some thought into this because the way the shoot is done may effect the usefulness of the shots later, per the example above. Maybe portraits are like loaves of bread! Not all bread makes good sandwiches. It may be delicious but just not the right shape or texture or flavour to make the kind of sandwich you want, or even a sandwich at all. (However, please remember that photo shoots should cost WAY more than bread.) Anyway...
We actually shoot frequently with background replacement in mind, but the point is it's much better for us to know we’re doing that before we shoot. In another recent case we did a whole shoot with subjects full length on a white background. We knew the background was going to be replaced with a light coloured background...until it was decided that one shot in particular needed a dark background. When we know a subject is going on a dark background we recommend shooting on a darker background so there’s no white fringing. Or we shoot on green screen which allows you to easily put in light or dark backgrounds. The point, once again, is that the more we know before setting up the more effectively we can shoot for a specific end result. It may not be impossible to change direction post-shoot, but it may add time and cost, and the quality of the final product may be compromised.
Communication
Just as designers should be looped into the planning, it can be tremendously helpful for people booking portraits for others to engage them in the process as much as they are willing. Their input can help guarantee a positive outcome, that is in line with their desires and expectations. I know sometimes there is no allowance for this, but imagine this scenario: the photographer and assistant spend an hour meticulously preparing a portrait set-up only to have the executive walk in and declare that they have something in mind that cannot possibly happen in that space. This is a recipe for disaster and leaves little possibility for a fantastic outcome. No amount of thinking on the fly or problem solving is going to change a white walled boardroom with a plain, pale table into a sexy modern space with a gorgeous table and cool interior design features blurred in the distant background. No matter how great the shots are there is no possibility they will look like what that executive was hoping for. The point again…whenever possible take the time, communicate, and plan.
A picture is worth 1000 words
Think about and talk about what you really want. Where is the picture going? What shape does it need to be? Does the colour scheme matter? Where do you want to look like you are (ie.; a studio or an environment of some kind)? What message do you want it to communicate? A picture is worth 1000 words so precisely what 1000 words do you want your portrait to communicate? What kind of look, wardrobe, background or environment is going to support the communication of those 1000 words?
And again, if you’re not sure that’s OK, but be sure to have the shoot planned to provide flexible outcomes, understanding the pro’s and cons of shooting a particular way (the photographer can help you with this). If you’ve been reading my posts you will know by now that IMHO the best way to create the ultimate flexibility is to shoot against a green screen. Yes, you may sacrifice a few possibilities this way, such as interacting with your environment -- eg. sitting on a couch or leaning against a wall -- and your choice of backgrounds may be somewhat limited by way the lighting in the portrait does or does not mesh with the lighting in the potential background shots, and you can't wear green, but the cut-outs are easy to do, and next to perfect, with no dreaded white fringe like you can get if you shoot on white.
One final word about being able to change what you shot to what you need (if they’re not the same thing): almost anything is possible. A talented professional retoucher is like an expensive magician whom you pay by the hour. For most people this would not be an affordable option. I mention it only to address the oft-repeated belief that “you can do anything in Photoshop”. It’s sort of true, but not on a practical level. So planning intentionally will be the best option. And while planning will help get you the most useful images possible, just consider that if you really need a bunch of distinctly different images to convey a broad range of messaging, maybe, realistically, you might looking at a bigger shoot, or more than one shoot.
More Author Portraits
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| Author Ted Cadsby in a business environment |
Ted Cadsby, author of a number of books, including most recently Hard to be Human is a “corporate director, consultant to organizations, bestselling author and researcher, writer and speaker on tackling complex problems, and the human condition” (words borrowed from his website https://tedcadsby.com).
Ted was referred to me during the process of redoing his website. He needed to cover a few bases with updated photographs, so we planned to shoot three distinct looks including more formal, more casual, and speaking, as in public speaking to a big audience during a pandemic lockdown when there was no public speaking. Given our limited access to any viable locations we planned to shoot him in studio against a green screen and do a separate mini-shoot (no lights, no set-up) at his condo to capture potential backgrounds.
In studio I created flattering “room lighting” on Ted for
the first two shots, then changed it to pseudo-stage lighting for the speaking
shot. After the shoot, once I composted the background shots into the selects we
agreed that 1) they were a bit too similar to one another, and 2) the style of the
condo spaces didn’t really support his brand. So we needed to go to Plan B. I sourced a free stock shot I
felt potentially had the right look and feel and manipulated it fairly extensively until it looked
like the location/background I would have wanted. This photo below became the background in the image above.
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| Photo - Unsplash.com |
The second, more casual portrait needed a totally different background to give it a distinctly different feel. For this I used a background I had shot (from my archive) with just this kind of portrait in mind.
For the speaking shot I sourced a free stock shot of a curtain, and a bunch of stock shots with backs of heads in them to create this auditorium shot:
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| Curtains and heads by Unsplash.com |
The trickiest thing with this shot was subtly degrading the quality bit by bit so it didn't look too perfect, because too sharp and perfectly lit would not mimic a shot actually created in this kind of environment.
A couple of comments I think are worth making:
Even if we had been able to shoot at these actual locations what my lens would have been able to see behind a physically present Ted would not have been what I was able to place behind him in my manipulated backgrounds. Physics and reality can be very limiting; the size of the room, distance possible between the camera, subject and background, camera height relative to the subject and background, subject movement during shooting, all these things and more can dictate outcomes in ways that may not be ideal and may compromise the success of the image. These shots literally could not have been done in camera.
It is way easier to cut a person out of a green screen to reposition them into a background than it is to cut a person out of a shot in which they are already against a background that has details, colours and textures. It is also way easier to tweak a person’s body shape or clothing shape if they are not already on a detailed background. For example, let's say you want to poke in a hip a wee bit (at the client’s request…no judgement here!!), whatever is in the background goes with it, unless you take extra steps to mask (ie., manually separate) the subject from the background, and even then you still have to create the part of the background that was covered by the body part, which takes time (and costs money), and which you wouldn’t have to bother doing if the subject was already separate from the background.
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| Photo by Unsplash.com showing what can happen when you try to change the shape of a subject standing in front of a background when the subject and background are one shot. |
With green screens it doesn’t matter if the subject moves when you’re shooting; they will never end up drifting from the spot where you wanted them relative to the background. And you can tweak the angle to be the most flattering possible without worrying about how that is going to affect the look of the background relative to your tilted lens. Sometimes the most flattering angle for the person, ie. where the camera is positioned…especially camera height, means you can't have the part of the background you want where you want it behind the person. Green screens erase that issue. So the photographer has ultimate control.
Tiffany Calligaris is the author of multiple works of fiction, in particular the Lesath saga and Witches Series. https://www.tiffanycalligaris.com/eng/autora/
Last time we worked together she wanted to be photographed in
her neighbourhood and condo so the shots would be personal and authentic to her and convey these parts of her life to her fans, and this time was no different except that she wanted to feature the fall colours of her Canadian home. She typically needs a variety of portraits, 4-5 images, that can
be used for PR, social media, website, etc. for Canadian and Latin American audiences. We planned two shoots…one to capture backgrounds on a sunny day, and one in studio for the actual portraits. The image at the top of this post is one of my favourites and used a background image from my archive. The alternate below uses a background from one of her favourite parks.
To make sure I was shooting the backgrounds with the right amount of blur I shot a few test shots with her on our background walk for reference. (I spend a lot of time staring at movies for portrait-relative-to-background-blur references.) These also gave me reminders regarding the way natural light might fall on hair. One danger with green screen is the phenomenon of not being able to unsee the green screen once you know that was how it was shot. It happens to me. This can make people afraid that viewers will think a portrait looks fake. I challenge you to start looking at close-up frames in movies, and photographs that you can be pretty certain were shot real and notice the sharpness of people against blurred backgrounds. They don't look like phone pics. I also think part of the challenge is that people are used to seeing badly or not at all lit outdoor portraits. When I shoot outside, I use lighting, pretty much always, because natural light is often not our friend.* As such my portraits that actually are shot outside often look pretty much the same as the ones I shoot inside. Here is one of Tiffany from our previous shoot.
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| Tiffany photographed outside a few years ago. I had lighting. And she was freezing. |
If you assumed I was always doing green screen shoots you might see this is being as an example. But it was shot outside. The point is, I ask you to beware the tendency to think good, and polished equals fake. And, it’s a stylistic choice. When clients want very natural looking light we do that. But the goal is always to show the subject in the most flattering way possible.
*After I published this post I came across a good example which I've added here below of a shot that one might think could have been done on green screen and which illustrates the difference lighting outside can make. The test shot at the top was taken at about 1:00 p.m. on an October day when we were just starting to set up. The shot below was about an hour later when the sun's angle had changed considerably and was coming less from the side and more from behind (look at the highlight on the tree in the background behind the subject). At all times the subject was in the shade. We had to balance the level of light on him with the natural light in the background, and make him look nice.
One more thought on the issue of natural light vs. artificial lighting: gorgeous, stunning natural light does happen...it's what makes some of the most compelling images around...but as professionals we generally do not have the luxury of waiting or hoping for a natural light miracle at the time and place we need to shoot, so we create it. And we get to decide what our little miracles are going to look like. It's part of the art, and one of the ways photographers differentiate themselves.
Necklines
I know this has been a long post but before I wrap up I just want to leave you with a few thoughts on necklines. This goes for portraits and for video calls. Of course it is up to you where your neckline sits but in my humble opinion best practices suggest erring on the side of conservative, partly for aesthetic reasons. It just doesn’t look good when your neckline plunges below the edge of the frame. It can draw the viewer's eye down away from your face and that’s not what we want. Ideally your face is framed within the frame of the portrait, or the video call frame.
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| Top: Neckline goes off the edge of the frame. Bottom: Ideal video call framing which works best if the full neckline is included in the frame. Photo by Unsplash. |
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| Left: overly plunging neckline in a portrait. Right: Modesty panel added in Photoshop. |
One day a while ago I was about to hop onto a video call when I realized that my v-necked dress looked on camera to have a deeper 'v' than I’d thought. I didn’t want to change my framing as it was set where I wanted it, and I didn’t want to change my dress so I slapped on a piece of duct tape and voila! Problem solved. It was bit uncomfortable and not really beautiful, so I set about looking for a better solution and found these:
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| Modesty panel (you can get them on Amazon.ca) |
Now I have a a set of these modesty panels at my studio, in different colours, and can deploy them in one of two ways. A client can either wear one (yes, of course I launder it after someone wears one), or I can put it in digitally after the fact.
It is not entirely uncommon for a woman to show up for a portrait session wearing something that is a little more revealing than she realized. In the case of this client pictured below we knew in advance the neckline was little low but the dress was perfect other than that, so she wore it and we accessorized with a panel.
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| Neckline temporarily raised with a modesty panel. |
I talk about necklines and other wardrobe recommendations for portraits here:
http://khollinrakemakemepretty.blogspot.com/2021/09/wardrobe-for-business-profile-portraits.htm
I will wrap up with a little horn tooting...I wrote this down right after it was said but I didn’t note who said it. You can assume it was someone important. ;) “You actually took a picture of me that I like. That’s like some sort of miracle.”
I look forward to helping you show up brilliantly. Thanks for reading!
kathryn@hollinrake.com
