Self portrait as test shot © David Hartung

No Assistant

Whenever I’m assigned to shoot a portrait I always try to arrive early to get set-up and do some test shots so that when the subject arrives we can get right into shooting without having the subject watch me monkey around with my lights and camera. Typically I work with one assistant but sometimes I have to work alone which slows down the entire process. The other day a last minute assignment came in and my regular assistant, Sing, was already committed to another job. So, for the test shot, I set the camera to self-timer and I jumped into the scene. I’m sure that the people watching this process thought that I was some extremely vain dude as I kept going back and forth from camera to lighting to self portrait over and over.

Technical Info: Image shot on a 5D RS with a 16-35 f2.8 lens exposed at f8 for 1/5 sec. Two Godox Wistro AD360 strobes were used, each mounted with a small Chimera softbox and honeycomb grid. To light the wall holding the shield one of the grids on the softbox was left slightly open so a bit of light could highlight this area.