Headshot Photo Shoot: CC

Sometimes a photographer is fortunate enough to have a wondrous sight in front of the lens and he gets credit for a taking a great shot.  When my friend Caitlin (CC) called me for a quick, last-minute headshot, I was excited because I know she’s experienced in front of the camera and the lens loves capturing her image.

On this day, the weather worked against us.  It was HOT and the sun was pouring down harsh rays.  I don’t have a studio, thus I work with natural light and it was giving us a challenge.  I had to improvise.   What you are seeing in the collage are raw pictures that were not edited at all.  She looks amazing right?  We’ll talk a bit about the process, a bit about CC and show you the final image that she used.  Ready??

I met CC a few years ago.  She was in Los Angels pursuing her music career and we met at a production studio.  We thought there were some collaborative opportunities and we met for tacos and beer.  Yeah, I knew she was cool after tacos and beer.  I learned a bit about her and trust me when I tell you that she’s one interesting young lady.  I’m not saying that just because she has that cool Aussie accent, either.

She had some success in the music biz, at home in Australia (her song was used in this promo for Hellcats) and was here tackling the American scene.  Below is a song “Pool Party” from her latest, self-produced album.  She has many talents, which is one of the reasons that I love working with her.  She’s a #NoExcuses creative type and very much of the mindset to get stuff done.

After we originally met, we didn’t see much of each other for a while and she had left town, but connected when she returned. We have plans to get some stuff done…possibly a music video in the near future!  Today was about a headshot, though and like I said, the hot, bright sun was giving me fits.  We needed to get the sunlight onto CC, but with reflecting indirection.   There are photographers that do “door frame” lighting where they literally put the person in a door frame, which shades from the direct sunlight, but the reflection illuminates them.  It also helps to darken the background  so that it is not a distraction.  We did a similar thing with the opening of the garage in my building.

The garage gave us more room to work than a typical door, like we tried on the balcony of my apartment.  The garage also gave the background a subtle, industrial look that we could keep or darken in post.  We setup there and took a bunch of shots in about 30 minutes.  CC is great and we didn’t have to shoot for 20 minutes for her to get into it.    We were on a time crunch, so we went upstairs to see what we had and BAM, we had some good stuff.

CC also does photo editing and we worked together to pull get the stuff off of the camera and I worked on getting the RAW files pushed though Lightroom, on my PC to her Mac via my external hard drive.  It’s funny that we both selected the same image from the 120 or so of the shoot.  She cropped the landscape orientated shot into portrait.  She darkened the line around the eye that got a little washed out in the brightness of the sun and other minor touchups and came up with this:

You can see that she’s very well lit with a non-distracting background that had a nice, but subtle industrial feel to it.  She added just enough pop to her eyes, in editing, that we are drawn to them and they tell us a bit about her.  They tell just a bit and make us want to know more. They do the job that eyes are asked to do in a headshot. They introduce her story.

Do you have a need for a quick headshot that brings out your best and helps you tell your story?  I have some sizzling summer specials, so let me know what you need.  You’ll leave with your raw images or we can send one of them to CC and she’ll help you touch it up for a great price….and she’ll do it with talent and love! 🙂

Client: Caitlin Whitty
Twitter: @justsaycc
Web: http://www.justsaycc.com/about

Here’s another song, “Little Black Book” from her first album.