Battle Ground Senior Portraits

11/21/09 – Rebecca Getsfrid – Commercial and Senior Portrait Photographer in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon

A Battle Ground High student, with one of the most amazing smiles ever, called me up to get some past due senior portraits done. We opted to shoot at the school itself, and upon arriving I was disappointed with the situation. Nothing was inspiring me. I just didn’t like the look of any of it. Once she arrived however, and we started shooting, I knew I could be shooting in garbage filled vat at a waste disposal plant and she could make it look good.

I also originally planned on using nothing but the LumoPro since every source I could find was predicting rain for the day. Thankfully it was a perfect for shooting dry overcast. With the sky clear, I pulled out a B800 and the vagabond. To quote David Hobby “I am an available light photographer. Meaning, if a light is available I will consider using it.” And really, I can’t argue with having 400 watt seconds of light available to me, and if conditions aren’t wet or perilous, I’m almost always going to pull out the big boys. Or boy, in this case.

After getting the safe and easy stuff in the bag, we headed over to the daycare area with its little jungle gym thing, which made for some sweet shots.

Alien Bees B800 with 1-1/4 CTO.

We then walked to the stadium where I dragged the shutter for some blur effects. The cool thing about using CTO gels to turn the background blue is that you have complete control in post of just how blue it is. In this case, since there’s very little blue in her shirt or anywhere else on her, I can drop the blue saturation to 0 to really make her pop off the image. You’ve got a selective color effect with no masking or anything complicated at all. I know a lot of people frown on selective color, and it’s an easy effect to overdo, but it’s a nice thing to know how to do.

After a few more locations/poses we were worried it might start raining so I put the B800 away and pulled out the LP120 and we went under cover. It was dark enough at that point that I could just full zoom the LP at 1/2 power onto her face and cut the background into full black. We used the light to dramatic effect by turning off her smile for a bit.


Unmodified LP120, Full Zoom.

And that, as they say, was a wrap.