Three good friends of ours own a local pizzeria, so we decided to do some headshots for them...
However, instead of taking the traditional corporate headshot route, we wanted to highlight their playful, slightly unconventional personalities in the images, whilst also incorporating different pizza ingredients. The contrast between the hero-pose and pizza ingredients being flung at them gave the photos a quirky, fun tone, and underscored our initial idea beautifully.
To light them, we set up a 4.5' Octabox from the front - slightly above eye-level - as our key, and another strobe with a 7" Reflector directly behind them, acting as a backlight, and to bring out the details of the pizza ingredients. The greatest challenge of this shoot was overcoming the sync-speed limitation: if our shutter-speed was too high, our strobes would not have synchronized; if our shutter-speed was too low, we would lose detail in the ingredients. Quite a dilemma... We finally settled on 1/160s, as it gave us a good balance between the two.
It took a few attempts to get the exact type of look and feel we wanted, but once we were happy with the images, we brought them into Photoshop to do some basic skin cleaning and retouching, dodging & burning, sharpening and colour grading.
