The Environmental Portrait
Lately I’ve been wanting to move away from doing studio head shots. They work and have their place, but a nice environmental portrait I feel has more interest.
So what is an environmental portrait? It’s any photo of a person taken in their environment. A studio could be considered an environment, but it’s not the subject’s environment, it’s the photographers. The best environmental portraits are as much about the environment as they are about the subject. They work together to tell a story better than just a picture of the person.
My work for The Builders Journal has expanded my skill set in this respect. While the subjects are the primary focus of the image, the background is also very important.
The subjects above are Logan’s Hammer, Mittendorf Quality Construction and JD Bergevin Homes.
The same techniques can be applied to business portraits or head shots to make them more interesting.
The subjects above are David Gregory of DSG 4 Design and Heather Jellerson of Calluna’s Gardens.
Of course in all cases getting the lighting right is one of the biggest challenges. For David’s shot above there was a large bank of windows just in front of him and it was a bright but overcast day. I only had to add a little light to camera right and bring up the background to a suitable level. I had studio strobes already on location for the shoot we were doing, so it was pretty quick to get the levels correct.
Heather’s portrait didn’t go quite as I had planned, but quick repositioning saved the day. We went to the Bellevue Botanical Gardens on a partly sunny/partly overcast afternoon. I planned to position her in the shade if the sun was out.
I brought along two speedlights (Canon 580EX), one for on the camera to provide a nice catch light in the eye, and the other on a light stand to add some directional light. I changed the batteries in both my speedlights before the session so I wouldn’t have to worry about them.
When we got to the spot I wanted to set up I turned on my speedlights and found they were both dead. The rechargeable batteries I had just put in had apparently sat around too long and at least one of the batteries in each set had lost it’s charge, rendering them with not enough power. So now I had no supplemental lighting to work with.
After a test shot I saw that the shadows from our current location were not flattering. So we moved into full shade and I had her face towards the sun hidden behind the clouds. Using my 200mm lens and a small aperture I was able to nicely blur the background so Heather remains the focal point of the image.
