Studio Headshot: Alan

As headshots are often our introduction to new people and/or organizations, having them convey the core impression that’s most important to the client is key. In Alan’s case, the words he used to describe what he wanted to convey were: trustworthy and competent. For him, as an expert witness, those two words absolutely encapsulate what he needs his headshot to say.

Holding those two words in mind, we worked through a few lighting setups, camera angles, poses, and minor wardrobe changes (can this man rock a bow tie and hat or WHAT?). Our preferred solid black background serves to truly force all of the viewer’s attention to Alan’s face, which is where his natural charisma takes over.

Because our studio gear is fully portable on purpose, we are able to travel to and setup wherever the client is most comfortable, leveraging familiar surroundings to help alleviate the nerves that often come with sitting in front of a camera. For this session, we traveled to Alan’s home and setup the studio in his living room.

We absolutely loved making these headshots with Alan and love the resulting photos.

For the first portrait, we used a 22” beauty dish with a diffusion sock on a 400W monolight as the key light and two 200W monolights as rim lights positioned behind and to his sides. In front of him, we placed a white reflector bouncing light upwards to open up the shadows under the chin and splash more light into the eyes. This is shown in the first lighting diagram below.

For the rest we moved the beauty dish to camera left and brought in a reflector on the camera right side to open up the shadows on the left side of his face. This is shown in the second diagram below.