Brendan and Patrick - Children's Headshot Session

For a LONG time, headshots were always meant to be black and white and taken in a studio.  I love that the new headshot trend is for natural light, outdoor, full color headshots.

This is my first time shooting headshots and in a lot of ways its easier for me than regular portraits.  Instead of trying to capture emotion, you're trying to capture the simple essence of what a person looks like.  I also learned a lot from this session and realized while editing these that I need to work more to capture different looks and emotions to show the kid's versatility and acting capabilities.  But I'm ok with them for a first shot!




I shot these at a local high school because I figured they'd be up for a lot of parts as school kids and I liked all the different kinds of architecture to interact with.

Oh and look, I'm actually watermarking! I've been meaning to do that forever.  It's subtle, but at least it's something!

Oh! And I shot a super fun maternity session day before yesterday at the Pasadena City Hall.  Can't wait to share those!

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Tuesday Tips & Pics - Headshot Preview

In a lot of ways I think shooting headshot's are a lot easier than shooting regular portrait sessions.  Engagement sessions and maternity sessions and family sessions are largely about capturing the emotions between your subjects, and this can be really tricky when they are so aware of the camera pointing at them.  But headshot's are more about capturing the essence of what a person really looks like.  They should be nice clean edits that clearly focus on the subject.  It's awesome to capture some personality as well, but most casting directors aren't going to look at pictures that are overly edited with haze or vintage actions or that have unique and artistic compositions or back grounds.  Headshot's, are about clearly capturing the faces of your subject.  After all they are called Head Shots for a reason!

I shot a headshot session for these adorable brothers, Brendan and Patrick, who have a casting agent here in LA.  They first went to studio for headshot's and got, what was frankly some pretty cheesy studio shots with some awful 80's backgrounds.  They came to me for some more natural looking headshots. Here's just a couple so far of these cuties.

Oh another tip--long lenses work great for headshots so you can blur the background and make the subject pop and capture some great detail.  I shot these with my Nikon 85mm f/3.5 Macro. I love that this lens is great for macro and for portraits!

Here's Brendan...

And here's Patrick...


They are definitely a bit different from my typical portrait session shots, but I think they still look like my work! Link up what you've been shooting below!

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The Coastal Redwoods

Continuing on in my vacation series, I bring you the Redwood National forest of Northern California.  On our drive home from Canada, we went through Seattle, Multnomah Falls Oregon, and then we went through the Coastal Redwoods.  It was an amazingly beautiful drive, and we stopped here and there to hike through the beautiful giant trees.

Sometimes there were clusters of trees that grew into one giant twisted up tree!

I shared this one already but worth it again for the Redwood post. The forest was covered with these giant banana slugs!
 



I love the POV of this last one.

I'm still reeling from the shock of my layoff last week, and despite having two promising interviews during my first week off, I'm still worried about my future and nervous about the change and new direction. And I apologize, I haven't spent as much time in the blogosphere as I usually do. But soon, I'll take advantage of my time off and get caught up!

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Tuesday Tips & Pics - Everything Happens For a Reason...

I don't talk a lot about my job or personal life on this blog, but today I feel the need to.  For the past 11 years, I have worked for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and have absolutely loved every minute of it.  You may have read about it in the news, but The Tonight Show had a massive layoff on Friday, and my position was affected and I was laid off.  I went through shock, and denial, and anger, sadness, and all the stages of grief you might go through if you had lost a loved one.  I lost the only thing I knew, the only job I'd ever had in my adult life.  I started working there before I even graduated college.

I was hurt and dismayed and a little numb.  But I've been absolutely overwhelmed by the number of people that have called me and emailed me and reach out to me to tell me how sorry they were and how wrong it was what happened to me.  And every one of them reminded me that everything happens or a reason and it'll mean better things for me.  Well, this happened to me on Friday and I've already had so many people offer to make phone calls for me.  I'm nervous and excited.  WIll I find something else I like? Will I get a good offer?  I'm scared to think about how the decisions I have to make may affect my life and excited about the direction they may take me in.

I've been pretty overwhelmed by this life change all weekend and haven't had any time to spend in the blogosphere but I still have pictures from my recent vacation that I want to share, so today I am sharing a few pictures from Multnomah Falls, Oregon, which we drove through on our way home from Canada.  And my tip would be going along with what I was talking about a couple weeks ago and that is shutter speed.

To get the blurred water effect of these pictures, I had to set my ISO as low as possible, and close down my aperture as much as possible.  I believe around f/22 and I did 1 second exposures for these shots.  Just enough to get a little blur in the water.  I used a tripod for these.

Oh and guess what? I'm guest posting over at I Heart Faces today! I can't believe it! Click on over there to check it out!

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