Now, what is an environmental portrait? Well quite simply, it's when you
photograph someone, a person in their workplace usually undertaking their
profession or doing what they do.
And these type of workplace portraits or working portraits environmental
portraits whatever you want to call them they're in quite high demand in the
professional photography market from clients and the reason is that many
businesses rather than just have a standard portrait of them on a plain
background as their profile picture many businesses want to show what they do
they want to be represented in such a way that the portrait demonstrates a
little bit about the company a little bit about the services they offer and
these sort of portraits are also very common in annual reports those type of
documents and in the hospitality industry in particular I've shot many
environmental portraits over the years where you're photographing you know
things like the chef preparing food or you know the chamber maid making the
beds and those type of sort of reportage style shots people kind of a little bit
in action doing what they do or at least standing and placed in the environment.
Now the difficulty with them is that quite often you don't know what you're
going to be dealing with you don't necessarily know the person you're going
to be photographing, the outfits they're going to be wearing, the location, the
lighting, and everything else and you have to deal and manage with those
difficulties as the photographer. And what I've done in this series of
environmental portrait tutorials is teach you how to manage those
difficulties and show you a number of scenarios where we're confronted with
those problems and difficulties and how we overcome them I've also made a little
bullet point of extra things to consider that I wanted to bring up in this
introduction and then you'll obviously see the photo shoots take place and how
we overcome the problems but I wanted to make this introduction section to go
over some of these things and talk about some of the shots that we did and just
give you a little bit of extra information.
So let's kick off on that and you'll be able to see on our website that we've
got a series of these environmental portraits covering some different
working professions we were actually in Switzerland doing some work for broncolor
and while we were there we took a few days to task ourselves to do some
environmental portraits particularly for this. The great thing about them is that
we didn't have the opportunity to reccy (that's reconnaissance) any of them so we
turned up blind pretty much at every location and had to deal with what we
were dealt and that was a great way to teach you guys how to overcome some of
the problems. I would always recommend doing a reccy of the location if you're
able to but these examples are great because they showed us situations where
we weren't able to do the reconnaissance. Now we tackled an electronics worker in
a factory, a farrier that's a blacksmith working, a cake designer, a carpenter in a
woodwork plant and a whiskey sommelier in a whiskey basement shop as well and
each of these presented their own problems in terms of lighting, mixed
lighting, or no lighting, or small spaces and I was really pleased with how we
overcame the problems and all of the problems had to be overcome with studio
lighting but mobile, portable studio lighting so we used the Siros battery
pack lights for these and fairly standard modifiers and as is usual for
environmental portraits, it's about mixing the daylight element with the
studio lighting or whatever ambient light - mixing it with the studio lighting
or in a couple of cases, there was absolutely no daylight to work with so
it was creating a mood that felt like daylight totally with studio lighting. So
what I want to do now is take a look at a couple of examples of the images to
show you what we had to start with and area ended up and then also go through
some of these additional points. So let's start off with the cake decorator. I've
got a number of what we call buildup shots here these are the sort of test
shots that we've taken as we work towards the final result and these give
a good indication of what we've got to deal with the first image there that you
can see is actually a screenshot from the video guys making the tutorial and
you can see me crouch down right in the corner of this basement room and you can
see our subject sat at the table there now just to give you an idea this room
was completely pitch black it was an underground basement level room and it
had just fluorescent lighting in it and it was quite a compact room as well
so the first thing I did was figured out you know what my background was gonna be
in which area was gonna shoot with him you'll see that in the video but you can
see that the space difficulties that we were faced with and here how I've used
this table area that we had available in the foreground there and I started to
place a few bits to lead the eye into the shot but this shot is mostly just to
show you that we literally were working in a basement with no natural light. Yet
we were able to achieve this final result and what I managed to do with the
shot was create a bright, airy light feeling that looks like natural light
coming through some large windows, little sparkle of daylight, feels very light and
dainty and it's totally on point with the atmosphere that you want to depict
for this type of person and this type of career. You don't want to show a
beautiful cake designer, cake decorator in some dingy basement studio so we had
to set the impression to look completely something different and I think you can
see there from the previous shot compared to what we ended up with - but
how do we get from A to B and all of the steps in between? Well
there are some things that we need to consider which I'm going to come to you
but before we do that let's just look at a couple of other things here as well. So
if we go to the whiskey sommelier and we'll go to the
behind the scenes image - and this is again this was another one that was in a
basement so there was no natural light there was lots of little floodlights and
spotlights in the room you can see Tim there with the camera and while I'm just
sort of figuring things out and it was a very very busy environment lots and lots
of stuff crammed in there and very sort of difficult to do to know where to work
but there you can see what we had to start with in the basement and here
you can see the final result. Where we've selected the right depth of field, the
right mood, managed to get some lighting and glow and color coming in through the
bottles in the background and that wasn't an easy task but it's about
controlling that environment and basically creating the right mood and
the mood that we needed for the whisky sommelier was completely different mood
to the mood needed for the cake decorator and designer. Let's take a look
at another example and this one was the wood worker and the wood worker this is
the space that we had to work in. Here you can see some of the studio lights in
position and Ashleigh already down there taking some test shot on her phone. I
don't know why but there's the very busy scrappy room that we had to work with
you can see there's a lot of natural light coming in from a couple of
directions but that natural light alone wasn't enough. As a matter of fact, if we
look at the first test shot that is the first test shot with just the natural
light and no flash so you can see how dark the room would be when we have to
get the exposure correct for the windows and everything else so all of the rest
of the light that we are going to throw in there
artificial light but it needs to look like natural light and here's the final
resulting shot that I was very pleased with and this has the feeling of natural
light still coming through the windows at the correct exposure but still
natural light look to the portrait and to the room and to the machinery and
it's all about carefully positioning things repositioning things testing your
lighting and gradually working your way to the final result which you'll see in
the videos. But let's look at some other key things that maybe are not covered in
detail in the videos because they obviously focus on the techniques and
the step by step process but I wanted to talk about a couple of things that you
should plan to do in advance. Now the first thing is research the location. Now
one thing we did do with each of these was take a look at the website for each
company to see what existing pictures they had and take a look if they had any
existing environmental portraits some of them did some of them didn't the cake
designer did and we were able to ascertain at least what the room might
look like that we were going to work with just to get an idea so if you don't
have the opportunity to do a full-on reccy in advance, do some research look
up their website and try and figure a few things out there. The second key
point is to know what it is they actually do. There's no point going to take an
environmental portrait if you're not sure what it is that that company does
because you can't really represent them in a portrait if you don't know what
you're representing so do your research again find out what the company does
find out what the activity it is that they undertake what they specialize in
and what the person you're photographing generally does for a living. The next
important thing is don't assume that they have the right clothes many people
go to work in all sorts of odd garments and dress differently
different day some may have uniforms some may not and those clothes may not
be appropriate for the photograph so let the company know
if the heads-up about that and maybe just discuss that with them in advance
about having some options on the clothes. Now as I said normally do a reccy, if you
can in the examples we weren't able to do a reccy so it is it's a good
opportunity to see how we deal with that. The other thing to keep in mind is the
short availability of your subject. Many of these people don't have time for
standing around for an hour and a half while you do test shots to set up your
equipment so it's much much better if you've got an assistant taking assistant
with you that helps with loading and carrying the gear from the car or
however you're transport etc so first of all an assistant is fantastic for
setting up, testing lights, but most importantly for standing in as the test
subject you can get everything set up everything positioned use your assistant
as the standing and then when you're ready bring the subject in for 5-10
minutes get the shots done you don't disturb their working day too much and
then you're done and finished without the stress and hassle of having to try
and create a set around your subject while they're standing there breathing
down your neck. The next tip and bit of advice is to get there early.
Okay never arrive late, don't even arrive on time... get there early because if you
get there early you keep the client happy and you can spend an extra 15
minutes looking around and starting to get a feel for what you've got. Now the
whole thing about getting there early as well, which we did on all of these shoots
and you'll see is I spend that time looking around walking around the
location seeing what areas I've got to work with what opportunities are
available and then making the decision and then in that process
don't let the client guide you too much you know if you spot an area that you
think works really really well and the client is okay with it but they kind of
suggested another one go with what you know is going to make a good picture and
explain that to your client because there's no point just going with what
the client says if you think it's going to make a bad background or a bad
photograph. The next key thing and this is really really important and you'll
see us do this plenty in these is... don't be afraid to rearrange the set
rearrange the location when you find the right location you're going to find
things in the wrong place this is gonna be in your way that's gonna be in your
way or this would be better if you move it forwards a bit or if you take that
out the background so just do it. Don't worry about it, just do it but one thing
you must do is take some photographs on your iPhone or your camera in advance
take some reference images so that you can put everything back where it belongs
when you've finished the shoot. The next thing and probably the most important is
think about the mood that you want to invoke with the lighting. What is
the mood of the lighting going to describe? You have to think about the
profession, you have to think about the workplace, you have to think about what
they do and you have to think about the emotion that you want to convey and
that's going to dictate the lighting style that you go with and obviously if
you're not completely familiar with that we've got plenty of chapters here on
Karl Taylor Education that talk about lighting emotion and those topics. Now
the next thing is consider the existing lighting that's already there and what
you're going to use of that and whether you're going to mix any of that into
your artificial studio lighting. So for example in these cases where where
possible I brought daylight into the shot mixed it with my flash in other
cases in the basement there was no way I wanted to bring florescent lighting from
the ceiling into my shot so I switched all that off and went totally with
artificial studio lighting but made it look like natural daylight. The other
thing you want to consider is communicating with your subject. Make
your subject your portrait subject feel at ease have a good conversation with
them you can do that far easier when you know you've got everything set up and
everything's working, your test shots look great because then you've got the
confidence that everything's right. One of the things that I do in my subjects
to help put them at ease is just talk about what we're doing - so you know, we've got
this light setup up here and it's going to be doing this, it's going to be
lighting here, this one's going to be lighting the background and it's gonna
highlight this and the other . Now they might not really care but it's
something that you can talk about confidently that then inspires
confidence in them that you know what you're doing and that is a
really good icebreaker for the conversation to flow and to put your
subject at ease because it's much better if your subject feels they're in safe
hands because then they'll feel more at ease about having their picture taken.
The other thing is check your final images and this is really really
important is when you're taking those shots before you let your subject leave
you may have for yeah that looks really good on the back of the camera very
happy with that... I know my test shots were good, I know my lighting was good,
but have you actually zoomed in on the subject and checked that the focus
hasn't shifted have you checked that they're pin-sharp. Is the depth of field
sufficient? Are there any minor details that just looking at on a small screen
on the back of your camera aren't going to reveal - so go in and check those
details with the zoom button on the back of the LCD and pan around and have a
good look at the picture before you let the subject leave because there's
nothing worse than getting back after you've packed everything up, traveled an
hour or whatever it is you've done and then finding out - oh hold on a minute, my
focus point was set manually here and then they moved four or five inches
forwards and they're a little bit soft in the shot. So check these things, final
details because if you make a little error like that it's no problem to just
keep your subject there for another five minutes and then correct it but it's a
disaster if you have to go back to the client and say I'm sorry all of that
work was for nothing - so that's my final and main piece of advice on top of those
top tips. So those top tips will help get you going with environmental portraits
and those series of videos are going to really help you understand the process
and the way to approach environmental portraits for your business. Get my
completely free photography course with no signup required. You can also access
our free 90-page eBook just click the link or go to KarlTaylorEducation.com