Studio Shoot- Making a Nice Guy Look Intense

Chad Giese looking intimidating

I had a real challenge at a shoot in my studio recently.  How can I turn one of the nicest (and friendliest) guys I know into an intimidating athlete in an image? I had the opportunity to have a portrait session with a local professional cross country ski racer, Chad Giese, a couple of weeks ago.  Chad is a legend in Minnesota endurance athlete circles, and the goal of this session was to make Chad look intense, and I think we achieved the goal.

I obtained the idea of how to approach this shoot from a post that Blair Bunting had done on the Strobist blog about shooting football players here.  I took the framework of Blair’s lighting design, mixed it with a little bit of Dustin Snipes lighting technique here and I attempted to recreate the shot with about 1/3 of the lighting arsenal that Blair had in his shoot.

Set up-

• I set my Nikon D3 on Manual Mode, 1/250th at f8 @ ISO 200
• I had the key and fill lights set to be about f8 on the subjects face.  The key was high and camera right pointed down about 45 degrees.  The fill was low and pointed up from camera right.
• I had the kickers set at f11 to make them a little hotter on the edges of Chad’s face.  I also had them about 8ft up and pointed down and towards the back of Chad’s head to sculpt the edges of his face
• I had the hair light also set to f8 to bring out his black hat against the dark background pointed down and towards the front of Chad’s head.
• The reflector was placed parallel to the ground and was suspended with a reflector holder to angle slightly towards Chad.

Post-Processing-

• I started with a RAW image file and imported it into lightroom
• I made some curves adjustments and slight cropping
• I then exported the file to Photoshop
• I used some curves adjustment layers, dodging and burning, and ran a High Pass filter at a low opacity to finish it off.
• I then converted the dark grey background to solid black with a final adjustment layer

Gear-

• Nikon D3
• Nikon 24-70 f2.8 lens
• 2 Alien Bee 800s on 10′ stands shot bare as kicker lights
• 1 SB-800 on a C-Arm & boom arm in a small  softbox for a hair light above subject
• 1 White Lightning X800 as the key (main) light shot into a large softbox on 13′ Stand
• 1 Nikon SB-900 shot through a white shoot-through umbrella as fill on a Stand
• 1 Silver Reflector below subject for additional fill connected to a reflector Holder
• 3 Pocket Wizards
• 2 Flags (black mounting board) on light stands to protect the kicker lights flash from hitting the camera lens
• 9′ Grey Seamless background

It was a fun shoot and Chad was excellent to work with.  I have also included another shot from our session below.

Chad Ready to launch

Tags: alienbees, cross country ski, lighting, Nikon D3, pocketwizards, studio

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Athlete Portraits, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.