Breaking in the new studio with my first corporate portrait shoot

  I have done one shoot outdoors at the new Hidden Hills Arts space, but it was time to break my first version of the indoor shooting space. This will be a regularly evolving beast, but day one was pretty simple, I had a friend who needed business portraits for her new job (web site, business cards, linked in, etc) Professional portraits are a new genre for me, so figured it would be a good challenge but a pretty simple set up. I also figured that since my subject just happens to be very photogenic it would be good for my portfolio as well.

 It seems beauty runs in the family, this is the client's husband and was our handy assistant for the shoot. Can't wait for it to be his turn in front of the camera.

 Ok, it makes my main model grumpy when I talk about her man instead of her, so back to work. Backdrop was my Savage reversible/collapsible backdrop, once again proving its' worth. Main light was a speedlight with a gridded Cheetah QBox on camera left, fill was a speedlight and white umbrella camera right and I added a third speedlight with a Rogue speedlight grid on the backdrop for separation and a little vignetting.

 Pretty simple set up and it worked fairly well. Overall I was happy with the lighting as well as the final looks. The one lesson I really learned that I will have to remember next time is that women's clothing opens towards the left side. The only thing I really didn't like in the final shot above (my favorite from the set) and the shot I opened the blog with ( my second favortite ) is that the opening of the shirt faces into the camera and becomes a bit distracting. If I had thought of this before hand and set up the main / fill opposite of how I set it up, I think it would have worked better. Still, it was a fun quick shoot and I think we got some great images. 

 Of course, just for fun we had to end the day outside, since it was a beautiful day, and I wanted to test out my new RoundFlash modifier. I like it so far, full review coming soon once I have used it long enough to give a good accounting.