The weather has sucked – there has been no reason or opportunity to go out with the camera, so I have been trying to do stuff in the house with the camera. Last weekend, I worked on an environmental multiple-exposure self portrait that fell flat. This week, I decided that I would try to take a portrait of Christine.
Bear in mind, she is NOT comfortable in front of a camera: when she is photographed alone, she struggles to smile for the camera and she doesn’t know how to allow the camera to flatter her. So I wanted to make the picture easy on her.
I quickly decided on an environmental portrait and the environment would be her exercise space. My initial thought was to use a flash with rear curtain sync while she rode the stationary cycle, but the lighting wasn’t right and the position to static when I tried the setup with Austin. So I defaulted to a portrait off the bike after her online spinning class on Thursday. In hindsight – and maybe I’ll try this next week – I should have done a multiple exposure: one with a flash for her head, arms, and torso, the other with a longer exposure for her legs moving.
My initial thought was for the viewer to see the juxtaposition between a subject sweating in a basement and the use of traditional portraiture lighting. In the end, I just settled for traditional portrait lighting with a subject who had finished exercising.
Some things I got right:
- key light – feathered from an umbrella
- reflector – positioned to her front side, successfully angled to push the stronger light from the flash in to fill her right side
- composition – not stellar, but I centered her in the natural vignette from the bare-bulb in the ceiling and I adjusted somethings behind her to reduce distractions.
- posing – I am content with the pose; I preferred a hands on waist pose from another image, but I preferred the smile/expression of this one
The things that I got wrong:
- the rim light is too bright
- her smile is a little too flat
- her eyes are a little too wide
- I forgot to denoise the image in darktable before pushing it to GIMP for composition (if it were a stunning keeper, I’d have gone back and done it all again)
- I accidentally kicked the leg of the tripod between exposures
- I forgot that I’d have to account for the shadows on the ground I combined different exposures (thus the crop below the knee)
What really happened can be attributed almost exclusively to my being too hurried. I only had 30 minutes to prep before Christine’s class, which started at 5:30 pm. I spent 15 minutes trying to develop/trial a rear-curtain sync image that I ultimately abandoned. I was then left with less than 15 minutes to setup to work on my fallback option: the key light and reflector of what would a 2-light set-up. Her class would continue until 7:15 and dinner would be ready before 7:30. So, with only a mere 10 minutes to work with after her class was completed, I tried to pose and set-up the lighting (including the rim light) as quick as I could. In the end, I took only 5 images with Christine because we needed to get to the table for dinner and the background was underexposed. But rather than taking a few seconds to think things over and reduce the shutter speed or boost the ISO a bit, I figured that I would just fix it in post, grabbing a second exposure of the background after she went upstairs to get out of her sweaty clothes. That second image, though (sigh) … she needed to be standing in the same place so that her shadow was on the ground. Then I could have grabbed a third of the background. And again, multiple exposures work best when they are aligned in camera; kicking the tripod when scuffling about does not help accomplish that end.
So there it is – a very less-than-mediocre portrait that missed the mark … again.