Headshot Session for Will Kapcio

Will contacted me for a headshot session that included something traditional along with something more unique. He works in cyber security so I pitched an homage to the style used by Wired for their maagazine covers. The portraits that appear on Wired are certainly unique as individual portraits, but to me they are still immediately recognizable as a “Wired” portrait. Contrasty, punchy, saturated. Compositions put subject and expression front and center. No beauty brush or skin smoothening. They’re just, wired. 

Will immediately understood the concept and was on board. 

We met at the Gateway Media Arts Lab and got to work on a bright white background. Will straight up brought “it.” 

Boom. The first frame was great. I try to have my lights 90% dialed in for the first look before my clients arrive, in the off chance that their first test shot is a banger. 

Honestly we could have called it a day at that point if he was there for a bare bones headshot session, but this was treated as more of a good start than a fast finish. 

Slight refinements in lights and pose and expression produced a great group of bright white headshots. 

We then moved to a full dark background and changed the direction of his pose. Still great. Right out of the gate. Will has something here. He must crush it during zoom calls. 

With a number of great options for bright white and full dark backgrounds in the can, we moved on to the more interesting and experimental stuff. I covered the fill light with a deep blue gel and started moving the key around. This lead to flagging the key light so it didn’t reach all of his face.

Nice. Let’s dial down the fill light a bit, make the blue a little more subtle. 

Ok, that’s cool. Now it’s time to lower the power of the fill light even further and see how a small, punchy, saturated key light handles some heavy lifting. I forget what I had on as a modifier at this point. I think it was a tiny octa. Real nice. That’s like, a $10 light mod btw. I’m obsessed with this stuff. The photography equipment industrial complex wants us to believe that we can’t spend $10 and get good results, but it’s easy to see otherwise. 

We were working next to a white wall (I love working in corners; give me a corner any day and I will usually walk out of a session with something useful) and I wanted to see some juxtaposition between the dark background and white wall. 

Whoa. Cool. The dark background produces a strong figure to ground relationship for his face, the wall immediately next to him is bathed in warm tones from the key light, and happiest of accidents, the section of the wall facing me shows a weird amalgamation of warm key and cool, blue fill light, for a murky, magenta strip of light framing the entire composition. 

Couldn’t have planned for that if I tried. 

But, now I can. Sweet! This is why it’s always fun to work with a client that wants something different, and is willing to hangout while I test and experiment and move things around.

Thanks Will!