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Six Styles of Headshots

So what we're gonna cover right now is six styles of business hedges. It is not the sixth style. Some business headshots. These are the six most common that I get asked to do all the time. Now, there are so many ways to do this. You can You can do it however you want. I know photographers that just use they have a natural light studio, and that's how they do stuff in the work. Looks great. I know photographers that just go super intricate. And that looks great, too. And I everybody's you're gonna take this and you're gonna make your own style. And if you're gonna make it your own, I'm gonna teach you the six ways. Six most common things I do. And you will be able to take what I give you and apply and immediately, with a little practice, go out and actually start doing. I'm trying to create lower the barrier of entry so that you can go and do this stuff. Is that cool? Aren't Yeah, it's cool. All right. Starting one high key classic. Now I know that on the interweb somewhere there's a gu...

y who just pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Guilt. Technically, that's not high. Kihei Key advantage. Remember, I know that sounds better than girl on white background to say hi key. Okay, it's a cooler sounding thing, but basically what I mean by high key is a white background. Okay, so be sure to, ah, note guy who is gonna correct me on Twitter right now that yes, technically is not a classic, high key image, But I call it High Key Classic. This is the thing I do the most. This is the thing that you will find yourself doing a lot. Any guesses why you do this a lot to, I'm gonna say, because it's easy to extract. It's easy to extract, and it's easy to replicate. How many different shades of blue are there? 50 billion. I don't know. More than the human eye can see. Right? How many shades of pure white are there really like, if you were to take the little dropper tool in photo shop and boom, make that white. If you could make something pure white, then that's it. So if no matter what size company, if a lot of times they'll want that pure White just because they know that the next photographer could do it. It's really easy to match, so it's really common also really easy to extract, very common. So this is a thing I do the most. All right, so let's break it down. Evenly lit white background. That's the number one feature. That's pretty obvious, right? It's important that it's evenly lit that you have white all the way around, and that could be difficult to do in the studio. It's one of the things shooting with a high key background is hard for a lot of people to get into. Because sometimes if you're special, if you doing full length, you need like, four or five lights just to make a big white background evenly lit. That could be tough when you're shooting a head shot. You just got this little bit of white that you got to make pure white, everything else who gives a crap, right? So that's how I feel about it. So I'm not gonna bring out six lights to light a background that's not gonna be in the photo. I'm gonna light right behind their head and make sure that's evenly lit. So how many life? So I need to do that to one. You could do that with one like and I'm gonna show you how to do that with on light today, I'm gonna show you how to do that with one line. But I want you to realize that we're talking about how to do this as simply as possible. Deep depth of field. This is important for a couple reasons. One in your traditional business portrait, you have tohave sharpness from the edge of the nose to the back of the head and the shoulders. All of it has to be crisp sharply and focus. Has anybody ever had the experience where somebody wanted an extraction? But she shot it at F two, and you try. You ever try to extract an image with really blurry ears and shoulders itself? It is really dang near impossible to get it right. So knowing that there's a high likelihood that this will be extracted and in fact you may be the one having to do the extraction. Sharp edges are key. So most the time I find myself shooting at around F eight or higher, even F 11 because you really on a head shot with a long lens. You want it to be sharp brings me to lens compression. What that basically means is I see a lot of people using all different kinds of lenses to great effect. But when you're shooting in these by classic, I typically mean it's in focus from back to front. The lighting is typically directional and its use, and that you use a longer lens. Anything 85 or longer is going to give you the right amount of compression for a head shot. And so, typically, most the time I'm using a 72 200 if you don't have it, and 85 is fine. A is fine, but most the time shooting at about 120 to 200 millimeters is where I live for these type of shots. That's how you get that classic look. If you shoot to close with too wide of a lens, you know, you get that, you get somebody with a giant forehead. Here you go, get a giant forehead. It doesn't look right, you know, it's all stretched out. That's called barrel distortion lens distortion. You don't want that in a classic head shot. You want toe look normal and proportionate, especially if you're shooting in Mass because you're gonna get people of all different body types, different heights, different races, different hair styles, and you want him toe look normal and proportionate. We with that school open directional like this, is gonna be key to the sort of quote unquote classic look. If you look at some of photography textbooks, you'll see Rembrandt lighting. Anybody heard that term before closed loop lighting. This would goes way back to the old masters of painting, and you see that a lot. So basically, the object is to try to create a triangle under the eye on the opposite side of the main light. And the way that triangle is made is by joining the shadow from the nose to the shadow side of the face. And when that when those shadows touch, that's called a closed loop, right, that's a photography term. Or Rembrandt lighting when that shadow is broken from the side of the face that's called open loop. So we want a directional light that is open because Rembrandt lighting, depending on the shape of somebody's face, is kind of hard to do, and it's precise. And when you're shooting 10 12 people in a row, you don't have the time to be precise. So over time, that's developed into a particular style of open directional light. You want the light to bi directional, but you want that loop to be open because you don't want to have to sit there and try to get Rembrandt lighting on the 100 people in a row with me on that. And some people's faces are weird, and they're not conducive to that highlighting. So this will pretty much work for everybody. Smooth transition to the shadow. You don't want the shadows to start really abruptly. You want, like a nice soft fall off from the lit area of the face to the shadow side of the face. You with me on that, the harder the edges, the the less flattering it can be for large groups of people. You're gonna have all different skin types. Some people gonna have perfect skin like me, and some people are gonna have not so perfect skin like Sheldon. So there's, you know, there's all different skin times, kid, buddy. They all take a different skin out there. And so if you make sure that the lightest soft and the shadows aren't too harsh, then it's gonna be more pleasing to the eyes That makes sense. You know, when you do like glamour, lighting that flat straight on light, why everybody looks good because it hides a lot of imperfections in the skin. So when you're using directional lighting you have to use, you have to use certain techniques that make it softer. And then one or two stop shadow difference between the light side in the shadow side of the face. That's gonna be typical. What we call that is like a 2 to 1 ratio or a 3 to 1 ratio. Essentially, what that means is on the shadow side of the face, you want it to be about one stop darker than the lit side of the face. So what would that mean? If this is F eight, This measures F eight with a life meter light meter life meter. The shadow side of the face would measure F 56 Does that make sense? You don't have to be that precise. I eyeball it. I can't even tell you. Last time you used a light meter. I just You know, you're going to get used to that. Look where you can see all the detail in the shadows, and roughly you're gonna get kind of a one stop difference. Okay? And I'm gonna show you how to do all this. I understand the idea, and then we're actually going to show you how to actually physically do it. Okay, Usually crop vertical classic professional headshots are almost always cropped vertically. You don't have to. You can do it any way you want. But I'm telling you, this is what I do. A lot is when I get asked for all the time. Okay. Hi. Key Modern. The new hotness. This is what he asked for. Ah, lot. Also, this is really something that you can Something you could pull off really easy with the exact same equipment that you do with classic ikey. But there are a few differences. Fundamentally. So now that we've sort of spent on that first image talking a lot about lenses and lighting ratios and stuff like that, we're going to assume knowledge on the following images as we move. So we'll move through these a little more quickly. All right, here's a breakdown of your hiking Modern look. You wanna have a light to white background. Perfectly even isn't necessarily as important. In fact, don't even necessarily need white. It could be just like a the window. Or it could be a soft box creating a light background. The idea is that it's sort of bright and clean looking, and however you achieve that background is gonna be totally up to you. I still mostly use seamless paper because I'm too lazy to take it down. It's been hanging in my studio for like three years, but, you know, maybe I'll go outside. I'm in Florida. It's like 100 and five degrees there. Right now. I really like shooting in the studio, All right, shallow depth of field Now, if it's a little harder to tell sometimes on a computer monitor. But I shoot these typically, like F four, have 56 and you're gonna see a fall off like the buttons on his shirt aren't sharply and focus. His ears are out arm or out of focus than his nose. You don't have sharpness from the front to the back because the differences I'm shooting this for what it is. I'm not looking to extract this or change anything about it. I like it to look just like it looks. But you do want certain things to be in focus. This is a professional portrait, okay? It's not a conceptual art piece, necessarily. So we want to make sure that the mask of the face is in focus. The mask of the faces, from the hairline to the chin and from the outside of each eye. Everything in that oval that is the mask of the face should be in focus. The nose, the eyes, the lips, the forehead chin and then it falls off gently. From there, you can do whatever you want. This is how I do it. I highly recommend that the eyes, nose and mouth are in focus, so just keep that in mind. Variable lens compression. Sometimes I'm up close with an 85 it gives it a little bit of a distortion. Sometimes I use a longer lens. I've seen people do this with a 24 to 70. It's not traditional, so you don't necessarily have to push. You can be a little more creative with this, but I do this a lot. Soft, flat light People like it especially makes most people skin look really, really good old. And Mills has been doing this for like, three decades. It's called beauty lighting. It's just big, flat, soft lighting that makes everybody look really good. It hides flaws. It hides wrinkles, makes everybody look a little younger and prettier. There is a drawback. What if someone has a really wide face? Directional lighting can make a face look slimmer. You can make you thin, slim somebody down, and we'll look at that in the next couple images. So although this lighting works on most people and it flatters skin tones and it flatters, you know anything that might be problematic there, it can also make somebody look artificially wide. So this guy is very slender and fit, so it was perfect for him. Minimal shadows. You want to make sure that image is pretty evenly lit from top to bottom. Sometimes there's a little fall off from the masculine face, depending on the size of the light source in the distance from the subject portrait or landscape. I do both all the time. Use your creativity. There's no set rule. This is modern. So play with it a little bit moving on. Classic Muslim. This is the thing that traditionally every photography, professional business headshots, professional business portrait, corporate headshots does this 10,000 times. All right, Lana, I'm gonna say you got to do it. And you're gonna say I don't want you ready, Lenny. You got to do it, Lenny. You got to do it. You got to do it. Okay. As a as run of the mill on bread and butter, Is this my scene? This is gonna be the thing that you could really use to make a lot of money. Have you ever been to the courthouse or been to a chamber of commerce? Or been to the bar association? This is you'll do this all day long. Classic muslin backdrop. The Muslim is sort of the material the backgrounds made out of, and they're all they look like a really cheap Impressionist painting. That's typical. But that's what's been done in these things forever. And you get these very large companies that this is what they come and ask you for. Here's the thing about it. There is no magic wand where if you buy this one lighting set up and learn this one technique that's gonna work all the time and anybody who tries to sell you that is selling you something, do you understand what I mean? You have to be able to do lots of things. Think of every photographic skill you know how to do as adding something to roll index. You got anybody not know what a role indexes. It's very possible. It's a little thing with all people's phone numbers on it. Um, you're at every time you learn a new skill. You add that skill to that role index. And so when you come to a particular situation, let's say harsh lighting outdoors and you pull. You know, I've got five things I know how to do to deal with this, right? You pull one out, the one that you use becomes over time, your style, But not knowing how to do things does not make you a better photographer. Choosing to be ignorant of the way things have been done in the past is not gonna make you a better photographer saying that I don't want to learn anything cause I'm happy with the way I'm doing things is not gonna make you a better for talking. And it's certainly not gonna make you any more money. You can't turn something way just cause it's not super exciting in this business. And I get asked to do this for attorneys accountants, like, I've done this set up thousands of times. And you know what? I'll do it 10,000 more before I die. As long as the checks clear. No problem. So let's keep that in mind. I'm gonna show you how to do this with one Like, which is really cool. All right. Evenly lit canvas Muslim. We don't want a lot of great in and stuff like that. Um, you pretty much just want it to look even from end to end. You want that deep depth of field front to back. You want the greater lens compression again? You're gonna be using that longer lens any time. It's classic. You're going to see some of these same things coming up. Directional lighting at that open loop about a one to stop different smooth shadow transition one or two stop on the shadows and separation Lighting is optional, depending on the background. If you've got it a little darker background or somebody with darker hair, you might want to add a little bit of kicker to separate from the background. You'll find that if using something sort of ubiquitous, like a medium grey or a medium blue like this, you don't actually need it all the time. As long as you're making sure there's detail in the shadows, you should be OK because the thing to consider when you're going to decide whether to add another light for separation from the background. How dark is the hair of the person I'm photographing and is it gonna be a problem? But in this case, you know, he's got, like, the hair that four billion people on the planet have that color brown. I think I have that same color hair. Um, that is gonna work almost all the time, with one like and maybe a reflector here in there. Low key. Classic. This is something that I don't do. It's probably out of like the six. It's probably like number four down on the list, but this is something that you do get a lot. Justus. Muchas Some people they like that clean white background I get asked for black. Sometimes now black is not key for, um, extraction. It can usually be problematic, but this has its similarities to the other types of classic looks, but they're a couple of key differences, so as again, you want a dark or black background, the deep depth of field front to back. This thing's gotta be in focus. You want that lens compression just like the others. Directional light, soft transitions 123 Stop ratio. When you go to a low key, you can play a little bit more with the shadows. But stay in that same range, depending on whether you're doing it in Mass or for an individual, and then that separation lighting is not negotiable. For this look, you have to have light that's going to separate your subject from the background. Let me talk to a little bit about this. People use kicker lights or edge lights or separation lights for so in so many different ways, there are lots of different styles, and I'm not gonna tell you how to use it. I'm gonna tell you how I use it to get this particular look some people want to see ah, hot highlight around the edges. Some people like that halo. Look, they, you know, they just really like to show those kickers off. And that's cool. I think that looks great. But for me, when I'm doing one of these classic business portrait's, the light needs to be there to the point where you are like, is there one that's you want to think of it almost like, almost like wearing makeup, right? Like if you're for you. I know Sheldon, you probably will make up all the time, right When you're wearing makeup, right? Isn't the object to look like you don't need any a lot of the time in the day to day basis? You know, you don't want to look like the person that has to wear a ton of makeup. You That would be a great compliment. Would never you look like you could use some more makeup? You want to look natural. It's like believable. And so the idea of this edge light isn't to go bam on edge like the idea that edge light is to provide detail in the shadow areas so you can see the hair and so it will separate it from that dark background. That's why it's there, and it's a little hard to see from this single. But there's a little tiny hair light or edge light along her shoulder to she's got a dark suit on a dark background. You don't want those toe bleed together. So just enough A little, you know, just not not like a boom just like home. You want a little bit of edge like you don't want to go nuts here because I want it. There's edge light on both sides of this image, but I could probably convince you that there isn't if you really wanted to argue about because. But the detail is there, and the separation is there, and that's I'm going for with these low key looks in a classic mode, you have to have it, and I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways that I do it as we move forward. Loki Modern. This is one of my absolute favorites because I do this in the studio and I like to make it look like it's not in the studio, but, um, it's a little more moody. It's a little more casual. You know, um, sometimes I'll do photographs for, like, a startup, and maybe they design APS and whatever, and they're not gonna want something classic. So sometimes I get a request to do something that feels a little more editorial. That's a little more personal. That's a little less serious. And that's I'll go to this as my go to a lot for that, because when you look at a picture like this, you look that guy and you go, Yeah, looks kind of like a nice guy and he's leaning towards me. He's interested in what I have to say. There are all these casual things about this image that could give it a certain field. So we want a dark or black background. This could be a actual background. This could be a wall. This could be just about anything you want. We want to keep it low, and you want to keep it. Moody shall it. Up the field. You notice in this image that his eyes, nose, mouth and sharp has ears or soft and the zipper and the collar. All that stuff sort of falls off. It's almost a little bit of a floating head technique. But this is a much more modern look, that shallow depth of field sometimes what you can quantify a style nine times out of 10. Somebody's using depth of field because it's such a powerful tool to create, um or, ah natural feel. If you look at the way you see things, your eyes operate very similarly to the lens of a camera. Now, if you look at my face and focus on the edge of my nose, is the wall in focus now? That's because we see things most of the time in a shallow that the field. That's why it has that sort of powerful effect on us. When we look at it in a photo, it has a more realistic feel because that's how we see the world. Ah, lot of the time our eyes work very similarly in that fashion. So you're gonna really use that toe leverage off really natural feel lens compression again variable. This is gonna be up to you. I am such a sucker for the long lenses, So I really like to get in there and get tight on a headshot, especially when I'm doing something that's a little editorial, directional or flat light? It doesn't matter. You can. You can use one of the other. I typically like a little bit of direction just because I was sort of. That's how I was trained in photography. And so getting to flat lighting if Europe. If your photographer who grew up photographing portrait's like in the film days flat lighting was pretty much just reserved for Olin Mills. I'm Duck Emmy and it was like photography Studio Porter Photographers look down on it, and it has become a totally different world now toe where it's it's great and people love it, and I do it all the time. But I always kind of fall back on like what I first learned. It gives me sort of interest. If you look at somebody's face, it's a little more visual interest. You could Seymour lines in his face. Sometimes it tells a story. If that's the type of image that you're wanting to make, then you can use that. But you can do whatever you want. This just how I do it, and I may be a complete idiot. Smooth shadow transition Still there Is there a really very few situations where I want a hard shadow. Um, sometimes if I had, if I had a guy who is an author, I photographed the cover for his book jacket or like his photo on the back. And he's, Ah, mystery writer suspense. And so I created a real dark and moody portrait with hard shadows, you know, But most the time I'm going for smooth and shadow detail is important. So you want you want it to be booty. In this case, maybe, but I also have detail in every pixel. You don't want to lose it digital blocks up. Have you heard that before? Artifact ing blocking up where the black sort of get muddy? It's where of reflectors come in really handy, which will come into and again your separation lining is optional. But here you get a kind of really natural feel. Adding a, um, kicker light to something like this can give you a lot of more of a cinematic look. And by that I mean, like, they would like somebody if they were in a movie. Every show you ever seen from Full House to the West Wing to The X Files, people are lit from the front and the back. There's lighting on the face and lighting on the hair edge, lighting key lighting everywhere. So when you add that into your images, you have amore filming kind of a feel you can create a more cinematic look, but this is optional. That's gonna be a personal taste. But the overall look, we're going forwards more natural, and then you want the feel to be more casual in editorial. I pull this one out all the time. I photographed this in studio with constant lights from Sweet Light, and I have a fake background that I printed that I went to a place where I like to shoot a lot in downtown Orlando and I took a photograph of it and I printed it on sweatshirt material and made it into an eight foot by 10 foot background that looks like a kind of street scene, and I'm shooting it so out of focus most of the time. But it doesn't look like a studio background, you know. So that's a cool way to still be in studio getting editorial feel. So that's just a idea. I know you're all thinking genius. No lazy. I don't like to go outside. Look how pale I am. I don't like to go outside. I live in Florida. I have to go to like New Jersey in the summer to visit my wife's family and hang out by the pool to get a tan. I don't go outside, all right. And then the last one we're gonna talk about and we're gonna break down is the F type. It's effing awesome. Now, did you say you tried to look this up like the F type lighting? This is named after my friend James Ferrara, who's a terrific photographer in New York. This is kind of a modified version of something that I learned from him, and I call it the F type in his honor. And it also sounds fancy, so it's Ah, it's a really cool style of lighting, and I use it largely for my high volume corporate events because it makes people look really good and it's really interesting. It's something different that people don't you don't see a lot, so the way that it works is pretty different, but it's got some cool characteristics to it, so it's a mixture of the classic in the Modern, and we're gonna actually do on the last segment on the last day I'm going to set that up in show to you would be my grand finale. So, Jim, if you're watching, it's for you, buddy. I gave you credit like I promised I would, and I think he is watching this. Really cool. Hi, Jim. All right, so let's break it down. I use a Grady Int gray background all the time. And how I create this is I use a black background and I just put a bear bold light on it, actually with a little cone or whatever, and it just hits the background in the middle, and it just falls off naturally. And it creates kind of a Grady in because I don't want a flat background. I want a separation between I don't use any edge lighting for this, So this is gonna be two fold. It creates visual interest by not making a natural vignette around the image. And it also lights behind the person's head so that it separates them from the background. No matter what color hair they have. With that cool medium depth of field, I'm shooting, probably like a 56 or 63 So I'm not super shallow. But I am shallow enough to where it doesn't look sharp from the nose to the back. You can see that back shoulders a little out of focus. I wanted to kind of fall off. Naturally. It's got slightly warped compression most of the time. When I do this, I'm about 2.5 feet from the subject. Three feet, maybe with like an 85 millimeter lens on a full frame camera. So when you haven't even in 85 can create a little barrel distortion, a little lens distortion when you're close enough to the subject. And so I really like to get in there and mix it up with this because I use it cause it looks a little bit nontraditional. It looks a little bit unusual, and it's soft, flat light. I use an 86 inch parabolic umbrella with a soft cover on it, and we're gonna do this tomorrow and I sit right in front of it. It's right like my back is on it. That's how close I am to the thing, and it creates this really just a big soft light because if you want to know anything about the characteristics of light, one of things that happens with your light sources, the larger your light sources, the softer the light is gonna be. Now that's relative. If I have a eight foot soft box and it's 20 feet away from the subject is relatively quite a bit smaller than it would be if it was three feet from the subject. So if you have a very small light source very far away, it's going to create very hard shadows to be very hard speculator, like when you bring it really close this subject like Look at my hand. Okay, I'm gonna step off the car for a second. Look at my hand. It's getting bigger. It's getting bigger. Is getting bigger? Is getting bigger, right? Like to the same way? So relative is to distance the size of the light. But I use a massive light source really, really close, and that's where you get this really soft like that looks. This is actually straight out of the camera, has not been touched, has been converted from Raj a pig, and that's it, because most of time when I'm doing this, the person is seeing the image right away and picking their image right away cause I'm doing this for large scale corporate headshots. So they're seeing it right away. This is really flattering light to see yourself. You are my number one response that people get is Oh, it's really good, like that's me because they're not used to seeing themselves that way. When do you get to see yourself in like that? Pretty like never. This time we're in Applebee's with, like a light above our head, and we just you know, we want Teoh show people their best, but this gets really cool now. Minimum shadows, just as before. Unusual catch lights. Now this is really cool. So had the conversation with ah, said photographer Mr Ferrara of the F type. If you look in the catch lights, I am in the pupil's because I'm in front of the light. And so the whole light, the whole iris, is lit by this gigantic soft box. And right there in the middle is me my little signature on every picture. I've actually had a guy email email me and he goes, Did you mean for to to be in every picture. You know, actually, kind of, Yeah, it's pretty cool. So I always thought was kind of cool thing, and Jim and I share that philosophy. He's the one who taught me this, but I kind of dig it So you get an unusual catch like eyes, no matter how dark, no matter how bright. Everybody's eyes look spectacular in this, and that's the thing that grabs people a lot about this. Lighting is their eyes are gonna look amazing and I'll be in there like this. Actually, every picture I'm like this, you know, he's just me with my elbow up. That's my silhouette of me doing this in every picture. But I dig it because there are rules, hard and fast, kind of like, but you have to know them to be able to break them. So somebody would say, I've heard somebody say You can't have a studio portrait with more than one catch life. That's just not how it's done. And then I go, Yeah, you can. You can do anything you want. This is an art that is this subjective. You can learn the rules, and then you can break him off and do whatever you want. So this is a really cool departure from traditional, Which is why I like it so much. Why we're saving it toe last. But think about how much you can use this to make almost everybody looking. And I'm gonna show you and I shoot this. I did this picture three frames. She sat down for 15 seconds and that's that's what I do. 99 times out of 100. Want to use this lighting as I have about maximum 30 seconds with each person?