Tyshan Knight

+2 in the comments - the original SOOC and setup shot and technical description/ camera jargon below...you've been warned.

 

Here's my favourite portrait that I had taken that evening! Tyshan was going for a conceptual look for the cover of his single: Out of Control, so we had a few props infront of him on a table and I shot both 35mm and 85mm to give some different looks and decided I wanted to risk shooting wide open on both because I knew if I was able to just nail the focus with good light and a pose he liked, it would look really incredible, rather than settling for stopping down to f/2 or something like that, because I bought these lenses to shoot wide open and I'll shoot em wide open whenever I have the chance!

 

This was in between setting up and posing, I was trying to get some more distance (I was sitting infront of the sofa right across from him) and ended up shooting a few more that were further away in perspective, but when I saw this frame, everything just seemed to work perfectly! I love the way the buttons on the sofa turned to bokeh, the soft light with falloff on the right side of his face, catch lights, solemn expression, framing, everything turned out exactly how I wanted it. Again, some self criticism...(these things are always hard to spot when shooting and chimping here and there, I would really like to shoot tethered so I can catch more errors while shooting instead of finding them after the fact) If I had to change some things in this shot, I would preferably have more light on his hair since it fades into the background and is also slightly chopped off, but I can live with that. The position of the light was a bit far off to the side and should've been a bit closer and higher since you can see that shadow on his nose is off to the side instead of more of a Rembrandt look under the nose, and I'm not so hot about the highlight on the sofa beside his arm, but that's just how I think the 'perfect' image should look and I'm still really happy with the results I got!

 

I'm also overjoyed that I had stuffed my Tiffen ND 0.6 in my bag on the way out, because to achieve these shots, I had already dialed the AB to 1/32nd power (the lowest setting) and my camera was at iso 100, so the only option at that point would have been to stop down (or go to iso 50, but there's actually just as much noise @ iso 800, so I tend to stay away from it) The ND did the trick and allowed me to shoot wide open :)

 

I love mixing soft, somewhat subtle light with shallow depth of field and get so much inspiration from awesome contacts like Emily Soto, Brian Storey, Andrew Litsch (drewshoots), Ed McGowan (isayx3), Evan Dell and a few others that use strobes and shallow d.o.f to create amazing images!

 

Huge thanks to Kasper for letting us use your house for the shoot! It was incredibly fun working with Tyshan and Kasper, they were incredibly chill, easy to get a long with and we hit it off right from the start, talking about Diplo, A$AP, pumping Usher's Climax, freaking out to Les Twins videos and shooting outside while cars slowed down to see what was going on at midnight.

 

Strobist

Canon 5d mk II (thanks Renee)

Canon 85mm f/1.2 L II @ 1.2 with Tiffen 0.6 ND

Ab 800 boomed @ 1/32nd power with Westcott Apollo (yey it works with AB's too!)

Vagabond v1 for power (thanks Bahram)

Cactus v5's for trigger

Done