Quick Weekend Portraits – Teenage Boy Alert

The funny thing about teenage boys is that they hardly ever want to get in front of the camera but when they do, they can be the goofiest ham-bones around.  Such was the case this past weekend when my son and his best friend decided that I should take pictures of them.  Of course they were wearing long underwear shirts and goofy glasses.  They also wanted me to put them on the Internet so here are the fruits of that labor.

The lighting setup was pretty simple.  I set up two 600ws flash heads with shoot-thru umbrellas on eight side of the boys, above and about 45° from each of them.  I then took a Nikon flash unit and put it on a table behind them and then gelled it with a Honel blue gel from the Honlphoto Gel Kit.  I set the flash to act as a slave remote and then set the power to about 1/8 power and pointed it at the black background.

As you can see from these image, the guys were going for that “I’m a tough guy” look so I let them run with it.  The post processing was a mixture of Lightroom and Photoshop.  I imported all of the images into Lightroom and did some basic processing like white balance, exposure, black setting, sharpening, etc.  Then I imported the images into Photoshop where I did a little more tweaking to the image like hitting the faces with the healing brush, skin softening, a Little Topaz Adjust, and finally some sharpening and resizing.

The best part of the whole shoot though was showing the finished images to the boys.  They just loved them and that makes it all worth while.

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Quick Tip – Adding Canvas Size
2. Another Quick Video on Custom Sorting Images in Lightroom
3. Quick Image Prep in Lightroom
4. Double Processing with the New Lightroom 2.0 Beta
5. Travel Alert: TSA bans Lithium Batteries in checked bags