Aaron came over with Ryan for breakfast one morning, and it gave me a chance to use them as models to try some of the techniques I learned from Sid when I was in New Hampshire. I still had to do some work in Photoshop to keep the midpoint where I wanted, but it was still quite minimal compared to my work with colour lately. This type of portraiture is very different from what I normally do, where instead of using an out-of-focus background to make the subject stand out, I’m using the contrast of light.
I turned on Chicken Run to keep Ryan occupied while we ate, and Aaron kept getting distracted by it as much as he did. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if it was the son who took after the father, or vice versa.
Would love to hear about how you are doing the lighting for these portraits. I love how that looks :)
I used one off-camera flash as a slave and one on-camera flash to trigger as master. The flash was set on manual, at 1/1.
Then I dialed up the aperture to around f/8 to f/16 and set the shutter speed to 1/160. Then you can change the shutter speed to adjust the exposure of the subject, and change the aperture to darken or lighten the background. The key is finding the balance that makes the subject exposed correctly, while the background is dramatically underexposed. Your histogram is going to be mostly to the left.