My friend Emma Robertson is a fabulous hair and makeup artist who also does a bit of modelling, and I’d been meaning to tee up a photoshoot with her for ages. I finally managed to get organised to tee something up, and I did a shoot with her a couple days ago.

I asked Emma to do some outlandish glamour/theatrical makeup. I’d seen her in a performance wearing rhinestone jewels on her hips and I specifically wanted the bejewelled lips with some accompanying colourful eye makeup in a glam/jazz/cabaret/theatrical style. I knew I was going to be shooting mostly against a blue background so I asked Emma to keep the makeup colours in the warm tones, for contrast.

Why the blue background? That’s a good question. Originally I was just going to shoot against black but I came across this Karl Giant image online and was totally inspired by the background colour (BTW the image is of cabaret singer Meow Meow, who I’ve seen live before and if you haven’t seen her perform, well, I highly recommend it).

The rhinestones, by the way, are actually sold in cheap dollar stores as ‘cellphone jewels’ – you are supposed to stick them on your cellphone to bling it up, but they they make fab makeup accessories.

We ended up with a sort of 1970s disco glam look, which I was totally digging.

The above photos (apart from the first one) were done with a gridded spot and softbox on the model (both high and directly behind the photographer). A separate gridded spot on the background gave the blue vignette. Two bare speedlights positioned behind the model at 45 degree angles acted as hair lights and provided rim lighting.

Next we changed up the lighting setup. One of my all-time favourite photographers is George Hurrell. The man was a complete lighting genius. His work completely blows my mind. I think if I practice studio lighting every day for the rest of my life I might be lucky to get half as good as Hurrell was. Just do a Google Image search on his name if you are not familiar with his work. It’s achingly beautiful.

Anyway – I wasn’t out to try to recreate a Hurrell portrait, but I just wanted to use some of my favourite pics of his (like this one of actress Loretta Young) as inspiration to try some harsher top-lighting. A studio strobe mounted on a boom provided a direct top light. Bare and/or gridded was a bit harsh, but with a small umbrella I managed to get the sort of illumination I was after. I put Emma in a floor lenth faux-fur trimmed velvet ‘Cruella De Ville’ style coat I own.

I love the mix of the classic lighting with Emma’s crazy-weird makeup. I really like the photo below on the right – she looks like a spooky broken-down doll.

Finally, Emma asked if we could do some photos of her in a corset she had brought with her. She said she hardly gets a chance to wear it anywhere and thought it would be fun to do some pictures. For these photos I turned off the background light and Emma was lit with 2 umbrellas either side (one slightly stronger than the other), plus a gridded spot set up low to illuminate just the corset, and a softbox up high and feathered so it was just lighting her face.

I had a ton of fun shooting the photos and it also gave me a chance to play around with the new Bowens lights I’ve got, courtesy of Diederik over at Lightworx. As always I was ably assisted by my amazing lighting assistant Brence Coghill, who did a stellar job of wrangling the lights and helping me pretend I was channelling George Hurrell

Accor Hotels is the world’s largest hotel and tourism group. In New Zealand they own a number of major hotel chains including Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure and Ibis.

I was told it’s generally quite difficult to organise headshots for the various managers because their schedules were so busy. Therefore the one-hour conference lunch break presented an opportunity to photograph them while they were all in one place rather than scattered around the country.

I turned up the next day at the Novotel Hotel in Cathedral Square (which, incidentally, is a very nice hotel!) to set up. I was able to use a dedicated boardroom with lots of space and nice plain textured white wallpaper as a built-in background. The subjects would sit far enough forwards of the wall to render the wallpaper texture moot, as it would not be within the range of focus.

I was hugely impressed with the Accor staff and how willing they were to have their photos taken, and the fun they had while doing it. I had a constant line of people waiting, often joking with each other and trying to crack up whoever happened to be in front of the camera.

I photographed 30 people, covering everybody needed a headshot as well as doing a few impromptu group shots. I always take multiple shots for each person and choose the best one in post to make sure everybody gets a good picture.

A lot of other headshot photographers will simply deliver the images straight out of camera or just with a bit of sharpening added, but my standard post-production process includes a lot more subtle tweaking and polishing to get a really professional image, including: adjusting skin tones, localized adjustment of exposure and exposure ratios across the image, hotspot  and ‘shine’ taming, plus tweaks to sharpness, saturation and local contrast enhancement in addition to my standard portraiture techniques of blemish removal, shadow reduction and skin smoothing.

Note that I didn’t light the background as I prefer to allow ‘white’ backgrounds to record as light grey (unless specifically requested otherwise). Pure white backgrounds look extremely clinical and can have a ‘stock’ (i.e. fake) feel. They also become problematic when used on websites with a white background as the whites blend together and the image becomes a floating dismembered head unless the image is given a border.

Here’s a selection of some of images created:

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.

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.

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).

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:

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:

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.

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?

Michelle Sullivan, web designer and blogger. Photo by Sharon Blance

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?