Hey there!

I recently had an exciting photoshoot for the circus Kathmandu. I am into photography since years but I mainly shoot landscapes, street and friends. So when the circus asked me if I could take some portraits of the artists, I honestly did not have much of an idea what I should go for. I watched some youtube tutorials and apperantly there is plenty of stuff to learn from.

"The Rembrandt Lightning" ?!

I did not know how many different setups for your speedlights exist (apart from the fact that I do not posses a speedlight). They have a lot of fancy names and everyone has different opinions about it. Watching and reading all this stuff actually made the whole thing worse. I got really nervous about the whole shoot and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

I got there in the middle of the day and the sun was really bright. Since no photographer likes his/her subjects in direct sunlight, I advised the artists to stand in the shade.

Work with what you got!

The perfect lighting and a model which looks bad is worse than semi-good lightning and an authentic shot of the person. If the sun is out, shooting in the shade with indirect sunlight is a great way to get nice lightning.

I learned that you have to communicate a lot with the people and tell them where to look and to smile or to look serious. Just as I had no idea how to shoot portraits, my subjects had no idea how to pose for one.

On the internet you find a lot of portraits like this:

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A beautiful women, perfect makeup, perfect lightning even the background-color matches the skin tones. This is exactly the kind of stuff I am trying to avoid really hard.
Why you ask? For me this is more of a fantasy than reality, it is all so set up, it lacks a certain essence for me. I want to see texture on the skin, I want to see all the little scars and pimples. Do not get me wrong, I really appreciate fine art portraiture but for me it is far away from authenticity.

So I shot my portraits against a grey wall, with indirect sunlight coming from the left. In post I just added some sharpness and put some reflections in the background because I wanted it to look a little playful.

If you google "Prism Bokeh" you will come up with a lot of nice lightning effects for you picture, the resolution does not really matter, just put it as a new layer in photoshop, scale it on the required size and set the overlay mode to "screen" and play with the opacity. This is what one of my prisms looked like:

This is all done without any flash or fancy equipment. I am really happy with the outcome and would love to do some more projects like this one.

Have a look:

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So whats the moral? Do not panic too much, work with what you find on the site and for your first shots, take a lot of pictures to be on the safe side. Portraiture is not as much magic as some people make it look like :)

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Enjoy this beautiful sunday with some dubby vibes of Fat Freddys Drop.