Simple Head Shots | Photography Tutorial




Today on the Slanted Lens, we’re going to show how to get simple headshots with just one hour, one light, and one reflector.

So here we are. We’re heading off to a friends of mine, Tanya’s. She needs a headshot for her real estate business. She’s been asking me for a while to do this and I keep putting her off. So today we’re doing it.

I have one hour. We’re going to use one light and one reflector. We’re going to roll in, set up, and shoot. We’re doing it at her house so it’s easy for her to go in and change clothes. Her house doesn’t have a lot of grass or anything. So we’re going to have to keep the background out of focus. It doesn’t take 4 hours to get a shot like this. Really to get a nice shot of somebody it only takes about an hour, hour and fifteen. That’s plenty of time. After a while people get impatient. They’re not going to want to stick with it that long anyways. For those who say I don’t do simple things. Today’s the day.

Tanya’s going to use this image for her real estate business. So in preparation for the shoot, I went online to look at her competitors and tried to get an idea of what they all had done. I wanted to make sure I did something that was going to stand out and be interesting for her and her business. It’s really important to know the market and how the image is going to be used.

She needs to feel happy with the shot so I am showing her the images as we go. You know some people are uncomfortable doing that but in the end she has to be happy. So I wanted her to see the images, see the process, and feel positive about it. When we’re done she’s going to be a lot happier.

Yes, I gave in and brought out a second Baja B4 for rim light. Her hair is just going to look nicer with a little bit of light and brightness. I just couldn’t resist.

I’m at 200mm on my lens. I just love how out of focus the background becomes. But the background can be light or dark so I’m going to turn her slightly to get her in the right place so I can make the background look perfect behind her.

When the background is not interesting I go to the 200mm lens every time. It gives me the shallow depth and feel that I need to isolate the subject and make that uninteresting background just go away. If the background is bad just throw it out of focus and no one knows where we’re at.

We’re going to color correct the image that we shot of her in the white blouse and bring some color back into it.

This was a simple shoot but applied so many photographic principles. I hope you found it interesting.

So our one hour, one light, one reflector shoot turned into an hour and a half, two light, and one reflector shoot. So it was close. We didn’t use high speed sync. So getting pre-loaded was all we needed. We went to try it at one point and it wasn’t happening very easily so we just moved on. Keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.

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19 responses to “Simple Head Shots | Photography Tutorial”

  1. That was very good. Not so simple though. Simple for me would have meant the camera and either natural light or one speed light. I understand with my simple the photos would have come out different and probably not as good but I am really just commenting on your use of the word simple in a non simple set up. Enjoyed the video.

  2. Nice job Jaymeister – interesting/entertaining shoot.  BTW, with the softbox grid, folks should be aware the only light contribution from the reflector would be the ambient sunlight since the grid would effectively flag/block the spill light from the softbox.

  3. One hour and a half, two lights, one reflector and three people! Still, very interesting, although from here it seems that the most important thing was to get the blouse changed. The yellow one was very pretty, but it meshed a bit too much with the background. Again, nice video!

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