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!

How much editing?

Before and After, originally uploaded by ted.sali.

Sometimes, a whole lot.
I said in my post last night that this shot was very boring out of camera. I did want something more memorable, but right out of camera I couldn't pull it off, this one needed editing in photoshop and lightroom.
Now what's really interesting is that it looks like I may have spent a long time on this image, when in reality I only spent a few minutes. Now that I really understand how the orton technique works in the digital realm, I've gone ahead and created an action to perform it automatically. To create the dream like quality in some of my other portraits now only takes a few moments of my time, and to blow it over the top like this only takes seconds more in lightroom.
The result is an image that the client will look at and think "wow, that's amazing" without knowing that it's actually a combination of techniques the photographer uses every day.
Still, saying that it's simple now betrays the fact that getting a really good handle on the orton technique takes some time. I've been messing around with it on and off for about six months, only recently getting a good grip on it. It's simple to do this now because I've done all the work already, and now I know what works.

Orton + Lightroom = Unearthly

Orton + Lightroom = Unearthly, originally uploaded by ted.sali.

So, I have this ho-hum photo of the bridal gown from a wedding a shot a few weeks ago. It was hanging in front of a sheer curtain and wasn't doing much for me.
I decided I'd try a few things with it, using the Orton technique to see if I could bring some life to this otherwise drab and very ordinary photo.
So I take my boring photo into Photoshop, make my layers, overexpose them, add the blur and blend them.
Okay, so that worked pretty well, so I take it back into lightroom, crop, straighten...much better but still not really amazing.
Then I start playing with the presets. I mouse over the cold tone and WOW! Now that's what I'm looking for!
The straps hanging the dress disappear, the window blows way out, and the detail in the corset becomes a magnificent pattern of cool blue tones, all with a near angelic feel courtesy of the Orton Technique.
Oh ya, this one is going in my portfolio now.