Doing the Classic Head Shot

06-19-2009 Holly-8, originally uploaded by ted.sali.

So what exactly do you need to have at your disposal to to a really good looking head shot?
Well, if you subscribe to the ideology of Joe McNalley and David Hobby, all you really need is a camera, and the ability to fire a couple hot shoe flashes off camera.
That's how I got this shot of Holly Fossen, an aspiring model. I used one flash through an umbrella just off to her right, and a second bare one off to her left just giving a wink of light to make sure she wasn't too dark on the left side there.
To pull that outlandish blue sky off, I used your other best friend, the CTO filter.
CTO have become one of my favorite tools as late, as I have recently really learned how to use them. Basically, you chuck the CTO onto your flash heads (by means of the super expensive dollar store tape) and then set your camera into tungsten white balance. The CTO's make your flash the same color as a tungsten light, that is warm and orange, and that means the camera's white balance shifts to the blue spectrum.
The result is that your lit subject is now nice and warm, and your background, in this case a cloudy sunset, it pushed into the blues much more.
This does a couple nice things to your photo. First of all, it makes your subject look nice and warm, like they are lit by the golden glow of a beautiful sunset, like a nice artificial magic hour going on. The other thing it does is by pushing the background into the cooler spectrum is creates a sense of perspective, known as temperature perspective, making your subject stand well out of your background.
I've recently just discovered the concept of temperature perspective whilst reading one of my books, so I'm knot just making this up.
Turns out there are three very good ways to provide a sense of perspective in a photo. The first being linear perspective - this is what we all think of when we say perspective, parallel lines converge into infinity, closer objects look larger, the stuff we all learn in middle school art class.
The second is called Atmospheric perspective, and landscape shooters use this a lot. You know how on those especially great mornings if you are lucky enough to live in an elevated location, you look out your window and the distant hills get more and more hazy? That's atmospheric perspective, a sense of distance is provided by atmospheric haze, the more haze the more of a sense of perspective, fog can do this too, giving the sense to relatively close objects.
And finally, there's temperature perspective, which is what I exploited here. Basically, if you warm your subject more than your background, the mind separates them and says "oh, I like warm things, so that must be closer" or something like that. If you cool your subject, and warm your background, they will seem to be much closer together. To be honest, I don't really get or care about the psychology behind it, all I gotta know is that it does in fact work, so I use it.
Yay for books!