I met with Rose today to update her acting headshot. She wanted a simple, but not bland, photo of her to bring to a movie casting next weekend. I thought about cool lighting setups for the head-and-shoulders portrait, but I ended up going to back to one of the most basic- umbrella’d strobe and a short telephoto lens.

Rose Guess. Photo by Ivar Vong.

From a technical standpoint, this shot is pretty straightforward.

- Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8 IS at 115mm, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/200th.
- Speedlite (Canon 430EZ at 1/4 power) into shoot-thru umbrella, triggered w/ CyberSyncs slightly camera right and up.
- Tethered via EOS Capture which auto-fed into Lightroom 2. This allowed on-the-fly, detailed image review. Plus it adds a lot to the cool factor.

The setup shot for the shoot with Rose Guess in my makeshift studio. Photo by Ivar Vong, taken on a Motorola Droid.

I ‘guessed’ the settings before firing the first frame and ended up being about a stop off. I knew I was going to be at 1/200th because that’s the max sync speed for the 5D2 and I wasn’t going to use any of the ambient. I also knew, from practice, that ISO 100 and 1/4 flash power would get me a reasonable aperture- roughly between f/2.8 and f/8, based on lighting modifiers and distance. The two or three stop light loss from the shoot-thru umbrella puts it towards the wider end of that. So I guessed f/4, but the short working range (~4 ft) made the final exposure f/5.6. It also made the apparent light source size bigger, softening the light more. On a shoot like this, I don’t have any problem evaluating on the LCD or in Lightroom to make exposure adjustments. The tools are there to do it, so do it, why not? It makes life easier and faster. The purists probably disagree.

Being able to show Rose the results in near-realtime and do the edits in front of her is a huge plus in my book. The goal is to make the client happy, and including them in the process and letting them give feedback based on high-res images final images shown on the laptop is great.