Senior Portraits: Ricky

Ricky and his parents live in a lovely area of Mequon, WI with beautiful natural scenery surrounding their home. Leading into the senior portrait session, we decided that we’d make use of their property as well as setting up the portable studio in their home to do some more formal portraits as well. The weather disagreed with our plan and while we were able make a few lovely portraits of Ricky outside, the cold was joined by rain to chase us back indoors.

Equally at home in the studio as we are on location, we were able to quickly make the portraits that we had planned, ensuring that met his school’s yearbook photo requirements. But, when the client has booked a full session experience, and you have such an incredible face like Ricky’s in front of the camera, you don’t let the time or the opportunity go to waste. We filled the rest of the session with working through different poses and expressions with Ricky and were able to stretch our and his creative wings.

By the end of the session we had a great set of images.

Ricky and his parents chose this pair for the yearbook:

But the images that we love the most are a pair to be framed as a diptych, side by side. Inspired by Robert Maplethorpe’s portraits of Peter Gabriel for the album art for “Shaking The Tree”, we took a moodier, edgier approach with the lighting configuration and made these:

Outdoors, we took advantage of the soft, even light that overcast days provide. Indoors, we used a 22” beauty dish on a 400W monolight as the key light, along with two 14”x63” strip boxes - each on a 200W monolight - as rim lights set behind him to each side. The lighting configuration was rounded out with a 24” reflector placed directly in front of him to open up the shadows under the chin a little.