Scott

This morning, while Scott was getting ready for a new job interview, he asked me to make a photo of him while he was dressed up. Scott is camera-shy, and not the easiest person to photograph. After several attempts of trying to get him to relax, he started to joke around. It gave me the chance to catch him off-guard and get a more natural image of him.

The sun was overhead, and it wasn't the best time to be shooting a portrait, but I decided to give a try, anyway. I'm also not the best portrait photographer around. I'm a trained photojournalist, so usually my photos of people are unposed and more natural-looking.

I didn't do much editing on this one--not even a crop. The compressed jpg looks like it could use a bit of warming, but the original file doesn't appear like this. We lose so much when we compress files. That's one reason I stress to my students to always begin with the largest photo the camera is capable of producing. If I wanted to take this a step further, I'd probably add a little bit of warmth to it, but it's late, I'm tired, and I already gave him the full resolution file which doesn't quite appear as cool (in temperature).

I placed him in the shade, so he wouldn't squint. Because the sun was overhead (11:41 am), I chose to use a bit of fill flash so he wouldn't have "raccoon eyes". My flash is set on -1 eV and in my camera, I underexposed about -1/3 stop so as to not blow out the whites in the sun. My camera was set at ISO 200 (because I forgot to set it to 100; shame on me), in Aperture Priority mode at F5.6 and my shutter speed set to 1/250. I used my 18-55mm lens at 55mm. If he had looked directly at the camera, as he did in some of the others, he couldn't relax. Sometimes it's better to have them look away from the camera.

He calls this one "looking to the heavens for his next girl friend". I don't know if that tactic will work! :)