Studio Portraits w/ Chris Parks

For Advanced Techniques, I was ‘randomly’ partnered with Chris Parks to work together in the studio creating portraits of one another. Tuesday night we met at the studio a little after 11pm as we figured if we went late we would have as much time as we needed to toy around and not feel rushed. There was however a group that had beaten us to that idea and we didn’t actually get to start working until after midnight. Chris took portraits of me first, and including all of the setup and getting familiar again with the speedotron it took more than an hour and a 1/2 to finish up that half of the shoot.

I set up my shoot first with on large softbox on my left and a light with reflecter/barn-doors in hopes to create some sharp dramatic lights on chris’ face. It did not end up working as well as i had hoped, and in retrospect it may been because the softbox on my left was providing too much fill. My next move was to take the reflector to my right and replace it with another equally sized soft box as to the one originally on my left. This provided equal and smooth lighting, and all though it didn’t look bad, it did bore me. I then angled the soft box on the right a little to the right so as to not provide as much light on Chris. This provided some more depth and shadow but i still wasn’t happy with it. I decided to add a light behind chris with a reflector in hopes of lighting up some of the edges of his hair. It worked better than i had planned. Chris’ dreadlocks seemed to all glow when he had them tied up, and it was a nice accent. I had originally wanted to do more with Chris’ hair, as its one of the first thing’s you’ll notice about him, but after talking with him about he said he was tired of people always focusing on his hair and wanting to shoot it in someway, or as he put it, “I’m more than just my hair.”

Next, i took down the softboxes and used just a beauty dish. The lighting provided enough light to Chris’ broad side and fell off nicely on his far. The shots were OK, but i was exactly thrilled about them.

The lighting setup where i had three lights, with Chris’ hair highlighted from behind, interested me the most. I was not able to create some of the dramatic lighting that i had originally hoped to create which was disappointing. Even though we had as much time as we liked to in the studio, we both had early mornings the next day so didn’t quite have as much time as we both would have liked. I would personally like to get in there with just a mannequin and play with a whole bunch of different setups so i could get a fuller understanding of how different setups affect the lighting.