Inital Shoots

With my initial idea of grouping age ranges of people I planned to gather a group of 20-25 year olds and do a studio shoot in a very similar style Martin Schoeller. I contemplated and planned for this but then decided that I didn't want to just rip off his work. I wanted to change a few things and make the shots my own although still linked to his style and the theme of identity.

I was very selective with my subjects and I just said to them 'I'm going to take a headshot of you'. I gave no more direction than that. This opened up the chance for them to do what they wanted, given the chance most people will smile and I think you can always spot a forced smile in a shoot. So I let them do what they wanted, some smiled, some laughed some did nothing!

I didn't spend too long shooting my images because they were so simple. I was using a 30mm f1.4 prime lens. This was the obvious choice from the start. I knew I wanted to throw the background completely out of focus but still retain pin sharp focus in the foreground. This wouldn't have been as effective with anything f4 and under. I could have shot on a longer lens to add more depth of field but I really liked the intimate feel of the 30mm.

I tried to keep the composition of my shots the same. I was using a set focus point on my camera and I'd pre focus on the eye and then re compose to get a fairly balanced composition.

All of the shots I've chosen to use were outside, I chose to shoot outside and use natural light just because I think it's much kinder to the face. Studio lighting done wrong can be really unflattering so for simplicity and continuity I stuck to shooting outside. Since I was shooting wide open at f1.4 I had to use a relatively fast shutter, I was always somewhere between 1/500th and 1/2000th and ISO 100. Some days were brighter than others so I just had to play around on the day.

I shot in RAW and then pulled my images straight into lightroom to do some very minor adjustments. I correctly exposed all the images as some had some blown highlights and then chose the images that I felt were the sharpest and most accurately focused.

Some of the images needed cropping slightly to fit in with the others but this wasn't an issue at all. I then applied one of my Lightroom presets to add a tone curve and increase contrast amongst a few other tweaks.