Family time
I got a call a couple of weeks ago from a woman I haven’t seen in years. She saw some of my photos on Facebook and wondered whether I would agree to make a headshot for her. We got together for coffee to talk about her goals and to catch up on life. She’s a whiz in the rarefied field of nanotechnology. Her husband is an accountant who has morphed into an SQL superuser. They have two boys, ages 7 and 4. By the time we were done with coffee, she asked if I would make her husband’s headshot also, and take some family portraits as well. It felt like Christmas in July!
I was thrilled to be asked. The coronavirus has everyone feeling cramped up. I offered to do the shoot at their home. After a couple of weeks, we worked out a time. They had a flood in their basement and just had new flooring put down. When I got there, I discovered that the room they wanted to use was very small, maybe 12 feet square. She wanted the shots against a white background. It’s more challenging because you have to light both the background and the subjects and you must get the ratio of the lights just so. Too much light on the background, and you wrap around the faces of the subjects, or you blow out their hair. Too little light and the background will appear gray. I worked it out, but the low, 7-foot ceiling made placement of the key light exceedingly difficult. I just couldn’t get much height with a softbox on my strobe. An umbrella with a diffuser proved more flexible, but less than ideal. The shiny paint on the walls reflected ribbons of light in unexpected places. I tried to set up my V-flats to block the stray light, but they just wouldn’t fit in the small room. Photography requires on-the-spot problem-solving. In this case, I restorted to the blitzkrieg method: I took hundreds of photos.
After we got what we needed from the backdrop the storm outside let up and we managed to get some nice candid shots in their yard. Their boys played on some tree swings and climbed a backyard fort. By the time we wrapped up I had spent four hours on the shoot and took more than 650 photos. The editing took me several days, partly because I decided to do it in Camera One Pro, a fantastic raw image processing software. I could have sped things up in Lightroom, which I know pretty well, but I wanted to practice using Capture One. The thing about that program, you are tempted to spend more time on each image because you can do so much with it. After about 15 hours of editing, I finally sent the photos to my clients. I won’t charge them for the extra work. I will just bank the experience.
I am committed to making an assignment work, regardless of the obstacles I encounter. Some of the photos I took disappointed me. I had not noticed the stray collar flipping up, here, or the glossy goop forming under the 4-year-old’s lower lip there. I could fix some of these oversights but not others. Fortunately, I had plenty of good shots and came away with some additions for my ever expanding list of things to check before I leave for a session. My clients say they were thrilled with the work and they plan to send me a list of images that they want printed. When I got back to my day job as an editor I found an email from another friend asking if I was available to take some family portraits. Absolutely!
