Conductor headshot

If any of you happened to watch Nationwide on RTÉ television last Friday you may have seen a short interview with my brother Conor as part of a piece about a Waterford-based composor, Pierre O’Reilly.  Conor was featured in his role as conductor for a composition of Pierre’s called “Patrick – The Story” which was premiered in Cork last March.  Conducting is playing an increasing role in Conor’s musical career, and with a high profile gig coming up this summer he needed a suitable headshot.  A few weeks ago he asked me to take one when I was next in Cork, which was last weekend, and I intended to.  The only problem was when I finally got the chance to, I had forgotten all about it, and was lucky to have my camera with me, but had no other gear at all.   So I was faced with a challenge – how to create a headshot suitable for publication, with one camera, one lens, and no lighting equipment.  Oh, and did I mention it was 10pm at night.  And I had about 10 minutes.

The 10 minutes was divided up into two – 1 minute to rack my brains, and 9 minutes to improvise.  It being late meant it was dark, and initially I thought this was going to scupper me.  Afterall, with no lighting gear – not even a flash – I was going to have to make an available light portrait.  If this was for Conor’s Facebook profile picture or something I could have put him in front of a wall, and set shutter speed and aperture to give me a proper exposure under the ceiling light, and taken a shot.  It wouldn’t be pretty, but it’d have done fine.  But this wasn’t for a Facebook profile picture – this is likely to make its way into a programme for a concert he will be conducting during the summer, and so needed to be better than “fine”.

Conor had done a little bit of Google Images research and showed me a couple of conductor headshots he liked.  One, I could rule out straight away, as it was a high-key portrait on white, and with no lights I just couldn’t do that.  The other – a low key tight crop against black – was more promising, and made me realize that it being dark was actually probably a good thing: I could use the lack of ambient light to start with a black canvas.

We were doing the shot in a room with a baby grand piano, and with not much in the way of blank wall space… two of the walls in the room have windows with red curtains that hang to the floor, and they would have been a distraction in the background, so a black canvas as a starting point was no bad thing.  All I needed to do was find some light source to stand in for the flash I would have used had I remembered to bring it.

I got Conor to kneel on the ground next to the piano, and positioned a nearby table lamp on the piano next to him – him kneeling meant the light came from 45 degrees above and adjacent to him – where I might be inclined to put a main light if we were in the studio.  As a proof of concept, with my aperture, shutter speed and ISO set to fufill three requirements – shallow depth of field, a black background, and low image noise – I took a shot.  It was workable – Conor was underexposed, but lit, and importantly lit with some direction to the light, giving a sense of dimension to his face.  I walked the shutter speed up a little until the ambient light falling on the background was taking it just away from black.  As I did so, my main light – the table lamp – being a continuous source – also effectively got brighter.

So unusually for a lit portrait I was finding myself using shutter speed as a power control.  Except that as I opened it up both the subject and the background were getting brighter.   The ratio between the two was too little, so I had to increase it.  But both being lit by the same source, the only way to increase the ratio was to play with distance.

I repositioned the table lamp so as to be as close to Conor as possible – this did two things. Firstly, it allowed me go back to a faster shutter speed and still have him exposed – that in turn made the background darker again.  The ratio of light falling on the two was wide enough to get me the effect I wanted.  Secondly, it being closer to Conor made it a softer light – also good for a portrait.   I didn’t modify the light from the lamp in anyway other than how the lamp shade was bouncing it (and so diffusing it a little) before it fell on the subject, but it was looking pretty good as a poor man’s softbox.

One remaining problem I had was that the camera-right side of his face was too dark – all the light was coming from camera-left, but with that light so close, not alot was getting to wrap around his face.  I had him hold up a nearby A4 sheet of music just barely out of frame to add some fill, without needing a second light source.

All that remained was to get the composition just right, including that baton to emphasize him as the conductor, and to do a tiny bit of post-processing in Aperture to keep that background nice and black.

It’s not a perfect head shot – I’d like to have separation between his black jacket and the black background for instance, but I’m more than happy with it.

Here’s a setup shot, which Conor probably won’t thank me for publishing, what with his expression of confusion.  Mind you, when you end up kneeling next to a piano, holding a baton in one hand, a sheet of music in the other, and facing your brother’s camera as he holds a lamp up to your face, you might well be a tad confused!