This image was made during a day shooting portraits and interiors at a hotel for a national UK chain. Its a good example of what can be achieved in difficult lighting conditions with only a few minutes with the subject.
I had planned to spend 30 minutes with Arve, the head chef, but busy schedules and the need to get lunch underway meant that I had 10 minutes maximum to light and get the shot. As usual, with environmental portraiture work, I don’t know what conditions I’m going to find until I get there. The client wanted me to shoot Arve in the recently refurbished lounge.
This image was made on a January morning and hard winter light was streaming in through the large windows. There were lots of shadows to contend with and there was no time to position multiple lights in the large room. Also, its a working hotel not a film set so rigging half a dozen lights for fill-in was not an option. As a location photographer I need to be able to work around what I’m presented with and still get a shot that fits the brief and that works in my style.
Arve arrived wearing, as you’d expect, his chef’s whites. This meant that my key light on him had to be soft enough to light him and hold the highlights. I rigged up a small softbox and shot the image as tonally ‘flat’ as I could to give a good base file for the post-production work. I shot a dozen frames and this is the one that we went with.
Once I shot a few frames I could envisage the look of the final image, which would be gritty and hard and desaturated to take the emphasis off the primary coloured furnishings and put the emphasis on the character of the subject.
This was done in post-production resulting in this image:
Which just goes to show that sometimes, when your back is against the wall either technically or with time-constraints, necessity really is the mother of invention.
You can see a larger version of the final in the “people” gallery on my website portfolio
Until later…
J
