Back in early January, my friend TJ who works for The Pixel Connection approached me about teaching some demos on the expo floor at Imaging USA and I was really excited for the opportunity. After some deliberation, we decided a should teach a class called 10 Looks in 10 minutes. I thought it sounded really interesting and quite frankly I was excited for the challenge. I knew I wanted to teach something in the realm of headshots or portraits, but as far as the lighting specifics, I was flying blind.
After we finalized the class details, I immediately got to work preparing for what I wanted to talk about. Huge thanks to set.a.light 3d (SAL) by Elixxier Software for making that process extremely easy. If you haven’t tried SAL before, it’s a must have for any studio pre-production.
Now, let’s actually get to talking about the 10 looks in 10 minutes (insert air quotes). I didn’t honestly think I would be able to shoot it in 10 minutes, but a big part of that was because I wanted to actually explain what I was doing rather than just shooting. The fact of the matter is, it is possible to shoot a ton (or 10) different looks in a very short amount of time to give your client a lot of variety to choose from. Sure, after I finished the show I went back and thought of different ways that I could have added more looks, but you try teaching a live demo while keeping track of how many looks you’ve shot. It’s harder than it looks!
I do however want to share the live demo from the final day of the show. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, you may have already seen this, but for those of you who don’t (but totally should) check out the video below to see how to kinda-sorta shoot 10 headshot/portrait looks in 10 minutes. Oh and did I mention it was in a roughly 10x10 space too?!
Check out the gear I used for the demo HERE, and use code JEFFCIMAGING for 10% off except for the v-flat which can be found HERE!
If you're serious about taking your photography to the NEXT LEVEL, join one of our upcoming workshops, and download your FREE lighting guide HERE.
Until next time!
-Jeff Carpenter