I thought it sounded like amazing fun

After a couple of postponements due to wet weather, we finally got the sun to coordinate schedules with us, and my ever-awesome partner-in-crime Brence Coghill and I packed up the gear and headed for the hills.

Hannah and her family live just outside Little River, a lovely picturesque green hilly spot between Christchurch and Akaroa, on a lifestyle block – a hobby farm of sorts.

We spent the afternoon with the family, dogs in tow most of the time, capturing relaxed images of mom, dad, wee baby Aubrey and of course the ever-present pooches.

Hannah wondered if we could possibly get a photo with everyone in it: the three of them plus their two dogs, and their beloved pet donkey. No problem!

It was a great day of shooting and Hannah is over the moon with the pictures, saying: “These are so lovely! The one of Aubrey and the duck brought a tear to my eye – you are amazing.”

I was recently visiting my hometown of Chilliwack, British Columbia and was asked by my good friend Kristen to do some casual outdoor portraits of her with husband Chad and their two gorgeous dogs, Sammy and Maggie.

The autumn colours were in full swing and made a fabulous setting for portraits. We did doggie pictures first, which were a little challenging because neither Sammy nor Maggie are fans of ‘sitting still’, or indeed the concept of ‘looking at the camera’, or even in my general direction at most times!

Patience always win the day when photographing animals though, and we got some great pics of the pooches, capturing both their gorgeous looks and their quirky personalities. The picture at left of Maggie pondering a falling leaf is one of my favourites – it’s just cute as hell!

(The dogs’ leashes are visible in the photos because technically we were not in an ‘off leash’ park so we needed to leave the dogs at least semi-tethered)

Then it was time for the family photo – we wanted to capture a portrait of everyone together which, again, involved a fair bit of canine-wrangling and me making increasingly louder and crazier cat-like noises to capture the dogs’ attention. Apparently there was a very smelly spot on the ground nearby that was FAR more interesting than anything were were doing.

Finally we put the dogs back in the car for some quiet time and so we could do portraits of Kristen and Chad together, once again making the most of the amazing fall foliage. I love the photos against the purple and orange leaves – magic!

I really enjoy doing actor headshot sessions. Actors are generally a fun bunch of folks to work with, who often bring a willing and vibrant energy to portrait sesssions.

Actor’s headshots are an important marketing tool, and play a pivitol role in whether their resume even gets looked at. The image  has to jump off the page and be instantly engaging – especially at thumbnail size in a sea of other headshots on agency websites.

Standard actor headshots need to fit certain parameters. Although some photographers are shooting horizontal format headshots these days, I think that a vertical format is still the default, go-to style. If you only have one style – go vertical I say. It remains the industry standard, it’s best for printing as a full-page image to accompany a resume, and it works best as a thumbnail on talent agency websites.

You’d think this next point would be obvious, but it bears repeating that actor headshots need to look like the actor. That’s kind of the point. Some photographers go way overboard on the retouching, treating the images as if they were commercial advertising shots. But there’s nothing a casting director hates more than when an actor walks in to the audition and they look like a completely different person to their headshot.

The pictures here are from a recent headshot session I did with a lovely actor and voice artist by the name of Susannah. We did a two-hour session with a few different wardrobe changes to get some different looks. Susannah’s got a fabulous smile and these well lit, crisp and polished images really show off her charm and professionalism.

Part of the job required individual portraits of three key team members. We were on location at the new Christchurch City Council building, which is fantastic because it’s got some great ‘readily available’ backdrops for this kind of thing.

Everyone involved in the photo shoot had a tight schedule (it took many weeks and several reschedules just to be able to get everyone to attend the shoot) so I wanted to get the portraits done as quickly as possible to let everyone get back to work.

I scouted the building prior to the shoot, and I knew I could shoot againt three good backdrops in the lobby. I barely even had to move – I just shot one portrait, swung around to point in a new direction to shoot the next one, etc.  Highly efficient.

For these first two portraits a single speedlight on a lightstand was shot through an umbrella, with a reflector held just out of frame on the opposite side. Again, it was a nice quick setup with minimal fuss but giving a great look.

For the third portrait I changed up the lighting a little to have the flash more on-axis, keeping the lightstand next to me.

The textured concrete wall in the lobby provided a great backdrop with light skimming across it coming from the main glass entrance doors on camera right, and you can’t even tell that a giant Christmas tree is jusssssst out of frame on the left

Shayne is one of the nicest clients I’ve met. He’s completely open, friendly and chatty, was not in any way nervous about having his photo taken, and did whatever I asked of him. Rockstar!

There weren’t many options in the office for clean backdrops so I scouted out a location in the kitchen/lounge area and rearranged the furniture a bit to get a nice backdrop and colour scheme. Shayne had a blue shirt on so I swapped the blue couch for a purple one that was against another wall so we could have a bit of colour contrast in the image. I also carefully stocked the bookshelf behind him

Lighting was partially using the ambient, with the main light source a single shoot-through umbrella positioned fairly close to Shayne, just next to the sofa. It would have been easy to simply bounce a flash off the ceiling for lighting but I like to use directional lighting whenever I can. Some people use flash just to get an even exposure, whereas I like to try to use it to also add depth and shape to the image.

For his portrait he wanted something ‘not too formal’. We spent about 15 minutes playing with slightly different poses – here’s my favourite:

Shayne then asked if I would do a second portrait for him that was more ‘unusual’ saying he wanted something a bit quirkier he could use online in social media for a profile picture that was a bit more ‘out of the box’.

I scouted round the office and decided to use a very small meeting room that had an interesting triangular table and a large whiteboard it in. It had some great directional light coming from a bank of windows, so I just used a bit of on-camera bounce flash on the ceiling to even things out and keep the ratio workable.

My idea was to create a ‘Hi, this is me!’ image that would be fun to use online that was a bit quirky but still shows Shayne in an office-y setting. I like the total simplicity of the image. I like the basic-ness and human-ness of the scribbly fat arrows pointing at Shayne, and I’ve echoed them by turning the triangular table so it acts as a giant arrow pointing at him from the bottom of the frame.

I also knew that for this image to work he absolutely needed to be holding the pen.

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 lips 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 a 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).