A Challenging Portrait – 2 Black Labs and their owner

Last week I had the pleasure and challenge of creating a portrait of a young man – whom I have known since birth – and his two black labs! The first challenge lay in getting the dogs to stay in one place while I made a variety of sounds to get them looking happy and attentive! Alec’s parents were of great help in the wrangling department and as you can see we were very successful. The biggest challenge – as any experienced portrait artist will tell you – is in the lighting. You have to get enough light on the black dogs to be able to see their features and their hair so you don’t have two black blobs or silhouettes , while at the same time keeping much of this light off the person so they don’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost!! There is also the issue of getting the background to stay in the desired tone of the image which in this case is a “low-key” portrait so the background cannot go too light or becomes very distracting.

Well, I won’t go into all the technical aspects of this image but I will tell you it was 6 light set-up with a variety of light modifiers. Of course, there is a little bit of post-production enhancement but by taking the time to get the lighting as close as possible to my vision – “in-camera” – my computer time was kept to a minimum and the quality was at it’s maximum. While many of you have heard or even spoken the words, “you can fix that in Photoshop right?”  – the truth is this type of lighting correction affects quality. Now if you are only displaying the image on-screen or maybe in an 8″x10″ photo then you might be able to get away with it. BUT when the final portrait will be properly printed and appropriately sized for the wall in a 30″, 40″ or 50″ portrait those incorrect exposure and the corrections become quite noticeable. That’s why I take the time to know what each of my clients want before I create their images. By knowing before the session I can have my lighting set and can concentrate on just creating and capturing what is in front of me and my clients reap the benefits.

In this case, these images were very important to Alec and his parents since he will be moving away from home in September to attend university. They wanted a traditional style portrait which would stand the test of time and a portrait grouping to become the focal point on the wall in their open-concept home. We were all very pleased with these resulting images and I can say there were a few happy, emotional tears shed during their projection viewing. To me that means I have truly done my job.