Sunday, September 12, 2010

Senior Portrait Outtakes

Saturday proved to be a great chance to get a little practice and experience in shooting senior portraits.

I went with @n8smith on a shoot he had booked. The subject was his nephew Dustin. Contained within this post is a collection of outtakes I was able to capture during the process.

Oh what fun we had. This first outtake was shot during a clothing change. Appropriately, Dustin was only changing his shoes, but that didn't stop @n8smith from hamming it up a bit.

We started the shoot, at the request of the mom, at the family farm capturing some of the safe shots. The farm itself was absolutely beautiful with a great deal of backdrops to work from.

Here Dustin is in front of a broke-down GMC truck that was located in a barn that had seen a similar number of years of neglect.

I was able to capture an occasional shot while @n8smith worked on changing his lenses. No artificial light here, just pure natural late afternoon sunlight warming the surfaces of just about everything.

Dustin was a great subject; patient and open to experimentation. A graphic artist himself, Dustin proved to have a fantastic grasp on the creative process and offered some of his own ideas for poses and shots.


The shot to the left is of my own design. While many of my shots were taken in conjunction with @n8smiths breaks to change lenses and configure settings, @n8smith did allow me some freedom to pull Dustin away for some shots of my own.

I tried to keep at a minimum, since I was invited to help with the shoot, but occasionally I stole Dustin away to take advantage of a backdrop that hadn't been used yet.

In the shot on the left, I fell in love with the window and the reflections it cast. A little Rural Grunge to contrast the clean look of the subject, Dustin.

Like I said, the location was ripe with natural and beautiful backdrops.

On to the next



Once the mom-approved safe shots were done, we experimented with different locations in town.

And while the different locations in town were contained within a couple of square blocks, each location was it's own goldmine of textures and shapes and lines.

It was a little slice of heaven in a rural town.

I decided to play around with a little creative coloring to give to Dustin. Something a little different that he can keep for himself.

Selective coloring is, for the most part, an overdone effect, but there is something about it creatively that I like. And while I don't do it a lot, I do it occasionally to give a client something unique that pinpoints something unique to them and helps make their experience unique.

So the image on the right and below are colored to highlight things that make Dustin unique, at least in the way that I perceived him.

Above, I selected his headphone and shirt for the coloring because in a day where teens are sporting tiny ear buds and in a world were smaller signifies better, Dustin's headphones stood out as a truly unique feature to him.

His shirt, in the above photo, was colored to accentuate the headphones. Because another trait of Dustin is that he has style.

To the left, I chose the jeans because the cool blue of the jeans made a great contrast to the hard sharp feeling of the background. The fact that I was able to coax him to bust a move speaks to just how comfortable his is in his own skin and to me that just speaks volumes of cool.




I was looking to deliver to Dustin a rock star shot and I think that I did it in the photo on the right.

Not much else to say about that photo.




An finally, The Wall. This wall is a the actual exterior wall of a local business. Talk about the dream back drop.

So that it is for the outtakes. Now to finish producing the rest of the images so I can get them delivered to Dustin.

Thanks @n8smith for letting me come along. It was a great experience and I look forward to doing this again with you.

To see Nathan's fantastic body of work, fo visit him at http://www.smithfineart.com/.