Environmental Portraits of the CCBR Director, Part II

Continued from Part I

Our time with Dr. Andrews was limited due to to her busy schedule, so the photoshoot was broken up into 15min slots spread over two different days. This would give us the opportunity to create a couple different looks in various locations, as well as having Brenda in different outfits for the images. We had some simple headshots in mind, with basic backgrounds that could be used for almost anything, as well as some standard "Scientist in a Lab with a Lab Coat On" shots planned.

In addition to the safe portraits I wanted to do something creative with coloured lights that looked cool just for the sake of it. Dr. Andrews and her collaborator, Dr. Charlie Boone, have set up a cool custom-built robot room which I thought I could give an interesting tech-y sort of look by making the room turn blue with Dr. Andrews lit up in the middle of it. The room is a bit cramped for space, needing a wide angle lens to capture the group of large yeast transferring robots.

Ideally, I could turn the lights down, or minimize the shutter speed of the camera to both kill some of the ambient exposure as well a the warm colour of the lights present. Unfortunately there are a large number of windows surrounding the room, and on a sunny day the ambient light levels are too high to effectively work with the sync speed and power range of the small speedlights. So I needed to work with the ambient light levels and make them part of my overall exposure. One technique that I've used before to get a "blue hour" evening look to a photograph involves cooling the colour temp of the White Balance on the camera to Tungsten and warming the key light with a CTO gel to compensate. This gives a "normal" looking white to the flash but renders everything else lit by ambient daylight to a cool blue colour as demonstrated below.

Once again, I am testing the lighting with Jovana to get everything nailed down before our shoot with Dr. Andrews. I wanted to restrict what the warm key light was going to hit, so I decided to put the light inside of a small soft box, up high at camera left. The edge of the light is just barely hitting the closest robot, but is exposing the face of my subject well. I have positioned a bare speed light on a stand all the way at the back of the room, and gelled it with a dark blue Roscoe Just Blue filter. The speed light is aimed back towards the camera to light up the robots and ceiling of the room. The dark blue filter combined with the Tungsten WB gives the room a very rich blue hue, but required the flash to fire at full power. I felt like the closest robot was looking too dark and fired another flash inside of it, gelled with 1/2 CTB filter to light up the interior and give it some interest.

I think the image is looking pretty good at this point, however the lens was set to a fairly wide angle and we were going to have to be careful not to distort our subject too much because Dr. Andrews was going to be towards the side of the frame and we also didn't want to push her too far back into the space. Here is the lighting diagram for our setup:

Here is our final shot, corrected for distortion and lighting balance across the frame.

Overall I'm happy with the way the shot turned out and I think it's pretty cool looking. I also took a shot with both Dr. Andrews and Dr. Boone together, which Jovana has already used in an article that was featured on the Donnelly Centre website and in UofT News in April.