May 19, 2011

• Superman or Clark Kent | Fremont Family Portrait Photographer

  Well I have to say I am probably more like Clark Kent than Superman, so when I recently spent some time shooting family portraits for Jaclyn’s family I was in a bit of a dilemma.  We decided tomeet at Jaclyn’s place but the problem was there was not enough room in her apartment to really get a good shot.  So we walked around a little and found that her complex had a pretty nice clubhouse that we could use.  Now my only problem is that I thought it would be nice to use the couch for a semiformal looking family portrait but my problem was that it was facing away from the window.  So aside from the fact that I did not want to rearrange the furniture the other problem would be if I turned the couch around then I would have a much less appealing background and since like I said I am not  Superman I could not just turn the whole building around either.  So one issue is if I shoot with the window behind them it means if I don’t do anything else to the image, I would end upwith mostly a big white thing behind them. So this is one of those instances where the use of lighting helped to create the image that we had in mind. 

   

  So the goal in this was to provide a nice family portrait.  Being that there was a nice window it was of course preferred to get some of the view out the window since it was fairly pleasing with the pool and landscape but at the same time there were some guys standing out there that we wanted to blur out, blow out, in general remove fromthe equation.  I also did not want thisto look overdone in a sense I wanted it to still look like we used some nice window light even though it was not possible for us to do so.  Once I figured out how to expose what was outside the window the way I wanted, my next step was to light the family.  I managed this by using a small octobox and umbrella.  So I looked at the image and thought it looked okay but to me one thing still bothered me, those white window frames going up looked so plain and there was sort of this dark area between the couch and the window.  What was the solution?  I added one more flash with a gel to warm it up and shot it through a plant to give it some warmth and texture.  So in the image it might look like there was some sort of sunlight coming through a window but in reality it was pretty much all created using small flash units. 

   

  So in the end it was fulfilling to come up with this solution but really the most important thing that day was I got to meet Jaclyn and her family and provide them with the images they were asking for.  They were all so nice and good natured that I almost felt like I had known them for awhile. I love photography and my passion continues to grow constantly but really what I enjoy the most is the interaction I get to have with my clients.  I guess that is why I focus on wedding and portrait photography.  My thanks to Jaclyn and her family it had been a long day up to that point but I truly enjoyed our time together and they actually helped to reinvigorate me for the rest of the evening. 

   

  Here is the image I was describing.

   

   

  Here are a few of the other images from the day.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  • 2:51 am
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