Shooting Teen Portraits is a lot like Foreign Films, either you get `em or you don’t. Personally, I like collaborating with clients helping them express who they are or, at least, who they like to think they are.

To do that effectively (for me) I try to to spend a few minutes either via email or phone and get to know a bit about them, what they want their portraits for (facebook, myspace, grandparents..) what they like to do, where they like to hang out, what movies or music they watch and listen to and usually, after a bit of back and forth conversation, we both loosen up and start to put together ideas for our portrait session.

For Nathan’s session we knew he wanted to use the photo for his new facebook profile and, he wanted to include both his boy-cave (our older RV) and his laptop (`cause he’s always on it). Initially we figured we shoot on the garden path leading to the RV – late afternoon, to capture the rich amber sidelight from sunset. Problem was, it’d been drizzling all day so we’d have to improvise!

Baseline settings

After composing our image and setting up the camera on our tripod I take a ambient light reading and set the shutter speed from 125th up to 250th (exposure -1stop under ambient) to bring the gloomy daylight down a bit underexposed so I could rig our strobes, baseline them and still have plenty of room to move flash output up or down as needed for our effects.

Background Light

The “Sunset” I set high (about 9′) off the ground, 25′ behind where I’d have Nate sit. Looking at initial lighting tests I realized the over the shoulder rim light wasn’t working the way I wanted. The CTO Tungsten gel(s) were contaminating and overwhelming the soft-blue glow from the monitor I wanted to fall on Nate’s face and Tshirt so I dropped the light to just above horizon (about 4.5′) and skimmed the light in through the trees effectively using the leaves as a natural gobo. Much better.

Main Fill and Monitor Glow

With the Main fill I wanted to light broadly (but not so noticeable that you’d recognize as softboxy), more of a subtle wrap to expose a bit of detail and fill in shadows. Using a stripped down Plume Wafer (reflective panels removed), and positioned a couple feet in front and about 10′ to his right we lit Nate nicely, opening up the shadows while not blowing out hi-key details on his Teeshirt. The laptop glow was a series of hit-n-misses using different hand-held flashes laying on his keyboard and bouncing off a reflector card mounted to his monitor. Gelled CTB 1.5 over an older Nikon SB-20 `Tater @ 1/32nd power.

The Final Image

The cropped vertical photo at left is the version Nate chose to grace his facebook page, personally, I rather like the full-frame at the top of the article but social profile images tend to be either square or vertical and agree with him that once the image is reduced to social media thumbnail/avatar size (60x60pixels) a lot of the detail visual information is lost and the overall composition gets crowded and becomes kind of a muddy blur.