The quick portrait shoot-how to

Ron Anderson, Author of a book on Abraham Lincoln.

I recently was given an assignment to take a portrait of Ron Anderson who had written a book on Abraham Lincoln. Rather than just doing the photo in his office, which was the original suggestion I had been given, I had seen a nice bust of Lincoln at the Utah State Capitol while there for a previous assignment. I asked Ron if he had time to ride with me up to the Capitol to take the portrait next to this statue, which I explained to him would make a more dramatic and dynamic portrait. He agreed and I picked him up in front of his office and took him to the Capitol. As is frequently the case with most newspaper portraits, you are very limited on time and thus not able to set up very elaborate lighting schemes.

So for this portrait I took two Canon 580 II EX strobes and I set one up as the main light on top of a light stand with a small Photo Flex softbox and with a 1/4 CTO filter taped over the head of the flash (Camera, left). I then placed the second strobe on a railing at camera right and set the head to zoom to 105mm (giving it a narrow more spotlight type of beam) and focused it on the Statue to give it a little rim light which helped separate it from the background.

Lastly I set my camera (Canon Mark III, lens Canon 16-35mm) on RAW but shot on tungsten color balance. This gave the background a blue tone and with the CTO filter on the main light it kept the flesh tones on the subject warm.

The whole shoot from picking Ron up setting up the lights, taking the photos and returning him to his office took less than 30 minutes. 

I was happy with how the image turned out. Hopefully the subject liked it as well.