Behind the Scenes - Portrait of a Skier
Rain, high winds and overall bad weather led to a mountain closure and a down day this season in Bariloche, Argentina. Since I didn’t want to not shoot anything this day I made a plan to capture some portraits since we weren’t able to get out on the mountain. Behind the lodge we were staying in was a new construction project that was partially completed. I had poked my head in a few days before and liked the look and knew I wanted to get in here to shoot at some point. I knew who was doing the construction so I asked for permission and got the go ahead to head in.
I asked Vicente Katz if he was interested in shooting some portraits and he was down. I had a loose vision of the images I wanted to create, but since I had only been in the space quickly I didn’t have a specific plan. I liked the idea of the new modern skier with clean fancy gear and next to the grungy grittiness of the construction.
For my work in Argentina I normally try and pack pretty light and keep my overall kit limited. This means I’m making a tight selection of gear to bring, but this year in addition to my normal camera kit I brought the Elinchrom ONE. It’s not the most powerful strobe and can’t fully overpower the sun and gives you that bit of extra light when needed. It’s great for portraits and on overcast days when the light is lower, or if you can have the flash close to the subject.
We got into the building and the first image I wanted to shoot was down the hallway with leading lines going towards Vicente at the end of the hall. I wanted backlight to create rim light and have shadows stretching out towards the camera. I set up the light directly behind and put on the 7-inch reflector and left the frosted dome on the head to add a little bit of diffusion. This would create the hard shadows I was looking but still be slightly softer when falling on the ground and the surrounding walls.
Since I only had one light I needed to rely on natural light for the fill. With the window in the hallway I was able to set my exposure for the amount of fill I wanted and then dial in the backlight to be slightly brighter to create the light and shadows on the floor. Once everything was dialled we shot for a few minutes until we got a frame we were happy with. It took a slight bit of retouching in post to remove the light stand and a little bit of tweaking to the colour, but the shot out of camera was close to the finished result.
After capturing the first image we switched up the set up for the second shot. I moved the light to the outside and positioned it to fire through the window. Again I used the 7-inch reflector with the diffusion dome for the hard shadows created by the window, but still a little bit softer then just the bare bulb. It took a little bit to get the light positioned exactly where I needed it and to have it line up in a position where Vicente could comfortably lean against the wall. Since Vicente’s face was being lit by the flash I didn’t need as much fill light, but still wanted a little bit so the rest of the hallway didn’t go completely dark. While shooting we moved the position of the skis of few times but finally settled on them being just out of the light as they were distracting when directly hit by the light.
This second image required a bit more retouching the first. The lightbulb was visible down the hallway, but we didn’t have access to power to turn this on. I didn’t want the bulb to look off and have the end of the hallway look dark so I brought the image into photoshop to turn this on and create the subtle yellow orange glow it would give off.
For a day I wasn’t expecting much to happen, I was happy with the images we created.
If I were to do this shoot again and hadn’t been as limited by gear I would have added some atmosphere to the air for the shot down the hallway. This would have created some beams in the air and added to the mood of the environment. I tried to do this when shooting using some dust, but it wasn’t light enough to hang in the air and create the look I was going for. The solution I would have gone for was some atmospheric haze, but this was not something I had access to on this shoot.
Gear
Canon R5
Canon RF 24-105 F4
Elinchrom ONE
Elinchrom 7 inch reflector