My previous post was about a shoot I did recently to create promotional studio portraits of a couple of very talented swing dancers.

My assistant, collaborator and general partner-in-crime Brence Coghill came to assist with the shoot and ended up filming a lot of behind-the-scenes footage (on a Canon IXUS point-and-shoot, for those of you playing at home).

Brence has edited together a fantastic little video giving a glimpse into what goes into producing the finished product, using video, stop-motion footage and the final finished images.

It’s only 6 minutes long and has quite a groovy yee-hah soundtrack (thanks to danosongs.com), so grab a cup of coffee and have a look.

Sharon Blance: Behind the Scenes – Dance Photography from Sharon Blance Image Workshop on Vimeo.

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Portraiture is my favourite type of photography, but my absolute favourite-est types of portraits are promotional shots for performers – dancers, acrobats, circus folk – general ‘show biz’ kind of stuff.

I had the great fortune to do a hugely fun dance shoot recently with Jess – she works as an event organiser but her alto ego is a crazy hepcat swing dancer, teacher and performer.

Jess wanted professional promotional images of herself in a dance context to use for a variety of promo, advertising and dance-related applications. Because swing is generally a partnered dance, she asked her dance partner Pete to come in on the shoot. I set up a white seamless environment and some studio lights and then had Jess and Pete do their thing.

Shooting these kinds of promo shots means treading a fine line between ‘dancing’ and ‘posing’ – if you have someone just ‘dance’ in front of the camera, often it’s hard to get a solid, well composed shot and things can end up looking quite random. On the other hand, if you try to do all the shots in a static, posed sort of way they lack energy.

Here’s the thing - dance is a 4-dimensional art form because a dancer moves through both space AND time. What looks amazing in a performance often looks less impressive in a still shot, because certain ‘moves’ look great in terms of their shape and trajectory through time, which, of course, isn’t captured in a still photo.

A balance can be struck by shooting getting the dancer(s) to do a certain move a few times while shooting, then review the image and evaluate it for composition and visual impact. Often little details like hand and arm position, angles of shoulders, legs, etc. can be improved to make the photo cleaner and have more energy and pizazz.

For a lot of the shots we’d shoot one or two, then I’d review the images with Jess and Pete so they could see the result and understand what changes needed to be made physically in order to improve the still image – e.g. “next time kick your leg a little higher” or “sweep your arm away a little more, palm facing camera” etc. Honing in on little details – including facial expressions – makes a HUGE difference to the end result.

In the end we achieved a nice range of photos – some more ‘posed’ promo shots, others more dynamic. Because the shots were to promote Jess specifically, in a number of them I used particular angles to give Jess more prominence in the images, while still retaining the spirit of the dance partnership.  Sometimes I’d ask Pete to look at Jess while Jess looked at camera - emphasizing Jess as the main ‘focal point’ for the viewer.

In the above picture it was about nailing little details like having Jess’s heels lifted off the floor and getting Pete’s right hand position exactly right to add a dynamic energy to the image. And I couldn’t have asked for better facial expressions from either of them!

You can see that Jess has a certain exurberance and enthusiasm that comes across – and that’s just what she’s like in person.

Here are the rest of the finished shots, clearcut to white but retaining some natural shadows for depth. Overall it’s a clean, highly professional look – great for websites, promo flyers, etc.

This just in – now you can watch a cool behind-the-scenes video of the actual photo shoot. Grap a coffee and have a look.

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A good friend of mine just bought her dream house and is looking for renters for the smaller house that she owns and has been living in for two years. She signed up with a real estate agency to advertise her rental, and while talking to them on the phone, asked if they had a decent camera with a wide-angle lens.

You see, nothing is more annoying to my friend (and thousands of others who peruse property ads) than amateur photos that show only one corner of the room and give no sense of the scale or dynamics of the property.

“Oh yes,” the agent gushed “We’re renowned for our photography, and we’ve got a wide-angle lens.”

Well, not only did they not have a wide angle lens, but the photographs they took did not show off the property very well at all, generally making it seem much smaller than it actually is.  I should know, because I’ve spent many an evening around there drinking wine and playing Settlers of Catan.

Here’s a lesson I would like everyone to learn: Real Estate Agents are Not Photographers – no matter what they tell you.

Good real estate photography isn’t about trying to make rooms look bigger than they really are, but about showing how the areas and laid out and what features they contain. For example, my friend’s bedroom has two separate built-in wardrobes, room for a chest of drawers and laundry hamper, a huge bay window overlooking the front garden, and access to an adjoining sunroom.

And here’s the photo the real estate agent took to show off the bedroom and all its features:

It looks tiny, like you can only fit a bed in and nothing else, and it also looks like there’s only one wardrobe. Obviously whoever took the photos was limited by the angle of view and could only fit in a small part of the room. But even so, they didn’t bother to take multiple images to at least show off the rest of the room.

So, my friend asked if I could photograph the house so she could make a new ad. Not only did I use a wide-angle lens to show off the rooms (the Canon 17-40mm f4 from the pro L series), I used some simple bounce flash (with the 580 EX II) to ensure the rooms were well illuminated. A bit of perspective correction and sharpening was added in post, and the photos were correctly resized for web to preserve their sharpness and ‘snap’.

Here are the photos I created of the bedroom:

Using the new snazzier house photos, my friend was able to put together a MUCH more attractive ad for her rental property, and ran it on the same real estate website as the original agent’s ad. Interestingly, the agent’s ad had already been up for a week and they’d had nobody interested in looking at the house. My friend put up her own ad with the new photos one day after lunch and within a few hours she had 3 different people booked in to view it that evening.

If you own a property and are looking to rent it or sell it, either hire a professional photographer (and not your wedding photographer, but one that specialises in interiors!) – OR be adamant that your agent uses a professional photographer. If you think the agent’s photos aren’t up to scratch, tell them so and organise a photographer yourself.

Here’s the photos of my friend’s property – both the original agent photos and the new ones I created. Which house looks more enticing? (all photos are shown at the actual size they appeared online. I resized my images to exactly fit the image frame size of the website on which the ad was to appear)

Exterior and front yard:

Agent photos

Photographer Photos:

Lounge

Agent photo

Photographer photo

Dining area

Agent photo

Photographer photos

Kitchen

Agent photo

Photographer photo

Second bedroom

Agent photo

Photographer photos

Bathroom

Agent photos

Photographer photos:

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On Friday night my phone rang. My friend multi-talented friend Alister (physiotherapist by day, sound engineer by night) wanted to know if I could come to Al’s Bar that night to photograph a concert by a New Zealand Led Zeppelin tribute band, aptly named “NZeppelin“.  Now, I don’t think of myself as a Zeppelin fan – for no particular reason other than I haven’t been exposed to much of their music – but I jumped at the chance.

My partner Brence Coghill recently bought a Canon 5D MkII and I wanted put its high-ISO capabilities to the test and photographing a rock band at Al’s Bar would be the perfect proving ground. In fact, photographing a gig like this is an absolutely excellent way to put all of your photographic skills to the test, because the conditions are fairly demanding, photographically:

1. It’s darker than the Batcave in Al’s Bar – ISO capabilities are generally maxed out in order to get any kind of breathing room for shutter speed and aperture

2. Did I mention how dark it is? I was shooting pretty much wide open on whatever lens I had on, which varied from f2.8 to f1.4 – therefore the ability to focus accurately on the subject would be key.

3. Nothing stays still. Rockers move around on stage. A lot. Unpredicably. Being able to get focus in the right place with a wide-open aperture can be less than straightforward. Plus, given that your subjects are all moving targets, having a fast enough shutter speed to prevent every picture being a mess of motion blur is no picnic. Did I mention how dark it was? I was lucky enough to push up to 1/250th in a few cases, but often my shutter was slower than that.

4. Totally Erratic Lighting. Even if you squeeze enough juice out of your ISO to get a vaguely usable shutter speed and aperture, and even if you mange to get focus in just the right spot, and even if you hit the shutter at the exact right time to capture an awesome expressive moment, you are still at the whim of Al’s Magic Light Show. You see, Al himself works the stage lights. Which essentially consists of Al standing behind the master control panel, totally rocking out on the spot and mashing the control buttons like a monkey on a typewriter. Essentially the light show is like a mood ring depicting just how rocked up Al is feeling at that given moment. So you could have all your photographic elements line up beautifully like a lunar eclipse but at the decisive moment Al might hit the ‘red’ light button and your photo looks like an over-saturated nuclear explosion happened on stage.

So here are some takeaway tips that I learned pretty darn quickly:

1. Shoot on manual because if the lights are flashing all over the place like an epileptic’s nightmare then your auto-exposure ain’t gonna be worth jack.

2. Max everything out. I spent most of my time on ISO6400, dipping down as far as 3200 now and then when Al was more in a ‘bright light’ mood. Shoot wide open. For me it was about maxing out every parameter in order to get as fast a shutter speed as possible. Grain/noise is preferable to unwanted motion blur, IMO.

3. Line up the shot, then: shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot. Hopefully one of the frames will have decent lighting. Expect a lot of dark frames or all-red blown-out burn-victim frames if Al is feeling particularly moody.

4. You will have Very Few Angles to work with. I shot some stuff from the near corner of the stage and then spent a set on stage behind the band. But the stage was so crowded with gear and general band stuff that my working position was pretty fixed and I just could not get some of the angles I wanted. Sometimes the best you can do is shoot loose knowing you’ll crop out the junk later. Here again, the awesome resolution of the 5D MkII is a godsend. I also happened to be right next to the smoke machine and spent a good deal of time Lost in the Fog. C’est la vie.

5. Get some shots including the crowd. A performance is all about connecting with an audience, so try to incorporate the audience into some of the shots. Not an easy feat – the band may be badly lit but the crowd isn’t lit at all.

6. Don’t forget to rock out and have fun!  As it turns out, I love Led Zeppelin.

Here’s my faves from the night:

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My partner Brence Coghill is also a photographer, which means a couple of things:

1. We have a lot of photos, usually with one or the other of us in them, but

2. We don’t have many nice pictures with BOTH of us in them, because one of us is usually behind the camera.

To remedy this dire situation we headed out last weekend to a favourite alleyway in Christchurch armed with a 5D and a couple of lenses plus a lightstand, flash, brolley and remote trigger. Setting up the camera on a tripod and using the self-timer function (which necessitated a lot of running back and forth), we goofed around taking photos of ourselves.

Lots of them looked pretty random, as we couldn’t ‘see’ what we were doing. We’d take a few pictures and then review them on the back of the camera and realise the angles all looked terrible or we’d done weird facial expressions. “What am I doing with my ARMS?” “Why can’t I smile like a NORMAL PERSON?”

But by doing shoot-a-few-and-review we manged to hone in on some ones that worked. We split the winners and each worked up a batch in Photoshop (we both have a fairly similar post-pro process, mainly adding a bit of saturation, selective lighting enhancement, local contrast enhancement and vignetting).

Here’s some of my favourites – these had post-production done by Sharon:

These last three had post-production done by Brence (the very last pic is our favourite).

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Author Allison O’Neill has a new book in the works and she wanted an updated headshot for her website and other promo materials. She didn’t need anything too fancy or overly creative,  just a good solid studio headshot.

Allison was a lot of fun to work with in the studio, and she has amazing big blue eyes which look fantastic in her photos. Here are a few of my favourites from our session:

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A little while ago I posted about doing a location scout on Christchurch’s Port Hills for an upcoming portrait session. The client needed a promo shot for her business website – a consultancy that assists people in applying to immigrate to New Zealand – and she wanted to have some interesting local New Zealand scenery as a background in her profile picture.

I scouted out a location near Sign of the Bellbird that would give us a few options for nice harbour and hills background scenery, whilst also placing the sun behind the subject for the morning shoot. (Squinting ferociously in a profile picture = not a good look).

My partner-in-crime Brence Coghill came along and we fiddled around with some bare off-camera flash to get a working setup.

Here’s what the final test shots looked like. Pretty spiffy all round, even though it was a little cloudy.

So… fast forward a week or so to the day of the shoot and – phooey balooey – it’s quite overcast. The ambient light is, as they say in New Zealand, “flat as”.  It was the only day and time we had to do the shoot and, as it wasn’t actually raining or wet, we went ahead anyway.

Turns out the shots I got weren’t toooo far off the first batch of test shots. I did end up doing some tweaking in post (mainly just ‘warming up’ the colour of the background hills to sunny-ify them). I think that, given the uncooperative weather conditions, the final shots came out pretty well. More importantly, the client is really pleased with the results.

Here’s the final pictures:

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One of my favourite clients, the ever-popular Coffee Culture, recently opened a new cafe in the town of Rangiora (a short drive north of Christchurch, where I’m based).

I went there this week to photograph the new cafe. It’s situated in a fantastic heritage building in the centre of town, and I’m sure it’s going to be hugely popular with locals (there was a steady stream of patrons on the Monday morning I was there photographing). In addition to the usual exterior and interior shots I do for Coffee Culture, co-owner Murray asked if I could get some ‘behind the counter’ action shots, as well as some general promo shots of him and some of the staff.

It was great fun and I got some fab images that Coffee Culture will be able to use for all kinds of promtional activities. Here’s a sample of some of my favourites.

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This morning I went location scouting up on the Port Hills. In a couple of weeks I’m doing some headshots for a businesswoman who owns a New Zealand immigration advisory service, helping people who want to immigrate to New Zealand with navigating the paperwork and processes involved.

For her website she wants a photo of herself showing off some nice New Zealand scenery as a backdrop, and we’ve decided to head up to the top of the Port Hills to take advantage of the view of Banks Peninsula and Lyttelton Harbour.

It’s all a game of working out various angles. We want a nice sunny morning for the actual shoot, so I had to find a location that gave a nice scenic backdrop if I’m pointing the lens due East, so that the sun is behind the model, otherwise the photos will all be incredibly squinty. My partner, assistant and photographic collaborator Brence Coghill came along to help scout. We stopped at 3 or 4 places along the hill before we found one that has all the right requirements. Easy access from the road, on a slope so that the camera is at the right height to capture model and background nicely, and a great backdrop of harbour and landscape.

Brence hopped in as a stunt double as we set up some off-camera flash to balance out the exposure and generally muck around with various settings. Even though the sky is fairly cloudy in the pictures the sun was shining for most of the time we were there, giving some really hard light over Brence’s right shoulder. Here’s some quick test shots:

Exposed for the background with no flash. Poor Brence looks dark and murky. Overall a pretty blah looking picture. You can tell from Brence’s facial expression that he’s not impressed either.

Adding a single off-camera flash (camera right) adds pop, separation and depth. Brence looks nicely lit now.

I added a second off-camera flash, using a low-powered fill light to soften the shadows. Main light high camera right, fill low camera left (sitting on the ground actually, because we’d only brought one light stand with us). I’ve also moved myself relative to the subject to get a different background view.

By making use of flash it’s possible to tame the sun and control the exposure on the subject without completely caning the background. It’ll be interesting to see how the actual shoot goes and what weather conditions we end up shooting in. Stay tuned.

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I can’t count the number of times I’ve clicked on the ‘About Me’ page of an otherwise professional website and cringed at the out-of-focus snapshot being used for the headshot. Why go to all the trouble of designing a nice website only to let it down with a lackluster photo?

I was in Auckland recently and saw a huge promotional billboard for a local Member of Parliament – with an absolutely terrible photo that was both backfocused and badly lit. It was clearly a point-and-shoot snapshot that the head had been cropped from and blown up beyond what the resolution could handle. What a shame.

What is a ‘professional’ image?

Promotional headshots are so important to anyone who needs to project a professional image: corporates, politicians, real estate agents, personal trainers, MCs, public speakers, actors, entertainers, authors and writers, and, of course, photographers.

And when I say these people need a ‘professional image’, that doesn’t necessarily mean ‘conservative’. An entertainer or stage performer may want a quirky or comedic headshot to suit their style, but it still needs to look professional – correctly focused, well lit, well posed, high res.

An experienced professional headshot photographer will know how to bring out the best in you. They’ll select what lens to use and what angle to shoot from to best flatter your features, as well as an appropriate lighting setup. Lighting design can be used to flatter particular face shapes (e.g. broad-lighting vs short-lighting) as well as to convey a feeling (e.g. moody softbox look vs. hard-edged cross-lighting).

A professionally executed headshot – where pose, composition and lighting are all carefully orchestrated – will give the right impression to the viewer: “This is a person who will conduct themselves in a professional manner and do things properly. I trust them with my money/project.”

Creating trust with your headshot

A promotional headshot is about trust, and fostering trust on the part of the viewer.

If you were hiring a performer or MC to entertain at your 100 guest, 1940s-themed 40th birthday bash, would you trust the one with the blurry snapshot photo, or the one with the professionally lit, sharp and well composed photo?

The first photo says “I do things on the cheap and get away with the least amount of effort required.”  The second says “I place great importance on, and invest the time and money in, doing things properly and to a high standard.”

Having a sharp, well-lit and well-composed photo isn’t just so people can see what you look like – it’s also so they can place trust in your professionalism.

Conveying the right image

A promotional headshot is also about image – and conveying the right one. This is dependent on the line of work of the subject and the image they wish to portray. I view ‘image’ here as the flavour or personality in the photo. All headshots should be professional (technically well executed), regardless of the chosen image desired to portray.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Award-winning New Zealand novelist Rachael King needed updated headshots for the ensuing promotional marketing machine that would accompany the release of her new book Magpie Hall (which, by the way, is a fantastic novel). Rachael writes deeply engrossing, detail-rich novels with elements of mystery, tragedy and intrigue. She wanted a good, solid promotional headshot suitable for use in magazines, newspapers, point-of-sale displays and on her newly designed website. But she didn’t want to look ‘too boring’, as she’s not a conservative person by nature.

I created professionally executed headshots of her that captured her sense of fun and personality. Rachael loves the photos so much that she insists that magazines and newspapers use them rather than sending a photographer to take their own.

Let’s look at a more corporate example. My partner Brence Coghill works for a software development company. The company decided to make ‘personal profiles’ on their management staff to make available to potential clients, so that clients could read about the skills and experience of the team members – essentially an exercise in creating trust (there’s that word again!) showing clients that the people they’d be hiring are professionals who would do the job properly.

Staff were asked to submit headshots for their profiles. Brence asked if I would create a headshot for him, as the only headshot that had been done at his company was snapped by the receptionist and he wanted something more professional. I set up studio lights and took a series of corporate style headshots, and we selected the best one for his profile.

Who would you trust with your important software project – the guy who was lined up against an office wall and snapped with a point-and-shoot camera, or this guy:

When Brence submitted his photo some of the other staff members were jealous that he looked so professional in comparison to their photos. “No fair,” one guy protested, “Brence looks like the CEO!”

Image is everything, and for people who need to create trust in their potential clients, your promotional headshot should speak volumes. It needs to say “I’m professional. I care about doing things properly. I won’t let you down.”

What does your current headshot say?

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