Eyes

When I came across these two young ladies and their very beautiful, striking eyes I knew that I wanted to do a portrait of the pair of them.  I wanted that portrait to be focused, with a laser like intensity on their eyes.  I also wanted both of their eyes to be in the same image and I wanted the viewers experience of the image to be dominated by their eyes.  Taking a portrait this close up means that the lighting has to be done carefully or the reflection coming back at you will be distracting.  I could have done it with natural light, I had a window right nearby but I wanted a dramatic intensity to the light that would punch up the image.  I had discovered a very cheap way to convert an off camera flash into a pretty decent ring light by a company called DIY Lighting Kits.  It’s kind of a folding plastic contraption that captures the light from your flash and reflects it outward in a ring.  I put the camera’s lens through the middle of the ring flash, dialled in the exposure manually to darken the background and shot away.  I wanted a dramatic intense look so I upped contrast and saturation in the eyes.  You have to be careful when doing this as you can really ruin the skin tone if you take it too far.  Viveza by Nik allows you to focus your adjustments on small areas, (like the blue of their eyes), and not ruin the rest of your image.  I also added a vignette to further darken the edges of the photograph.  

For a different lighting setup of another closeup portrait check out this image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

I also did a black and white version but settled on the colour because of the striking blue grey in both their eyes that has such a different character in each of them.

The only issue that I have is that I did not adjust the model on the bottom so that she was straight on to me.  Her head is very slightly tilted to her left and I wish that I had noticed this when I did the portraits.

That Peculiar Silence

A headshot that I took of an intense young actor with remarkable blue eyes. Canon EOS 7D 50mm f/1.4 at f/5.6 1/200 ISO 400The young actor steps into the light.  She feels the warmth of it touch her cheeks, she feels the boards under her feet, she hears that peculiar silence of 200 pairs of eyes watching her, and she feels their anticipation.  The theatre is old and battered, a thousand different actors have walked these same boards and felt these same things.  She can feel their eyes watching her too.  She takes two steps to the right, downstage centre right, and breathes deep and slow.  It is time... to tell her story.

I teach theatre and I always take headshots of my actors as we prepare to perform.  I knew that I wanted to do something to accentuate the red hair and blue eye of this young lady.  I felt like putting her in a pose that was looking up at me, partially through her hair would draw the viewers eye in dramatically.  I was using two off camera flashes using Cactus V4 radio triggers to light her.  The key, at camera right, was in a shoot-through umbrella and was at a slightly higher power than the one at camera left.  I wanted fairly even light but this did produce a small amount of shadow.  Both lights were set low enough and the background was far enough back so that it went to full black.  I also made a slight increase to the saturation levels of her eyes and hair in Aperture.

-Russell Berg

Below is the picture I took just before the image above.  I feel like the two of them tell a bit of a story.