I don’t have much experience shooting children, but the few times I have, I ended up working with boys and I think they start to feel more comfortable in front of all the lights when I show them how good my fake fart noises sound (Thanks to my friend Kurt for teaching me). Some of the poses in the shots below are pretty much your standard portrait poses, while others were totally spur of the moment. During this photo shoot, I thought to myself, what if I told Kyle to tell me a story. Turns out that it really helped get some great shots. By telling a story, he forgot that he was being photographed and started acting more natural. In addition, some of the better laughing photos were  the result of fake flatulent sounds. I’m 26 and I still think farts are hilarious!

Like my other white background shoots, it is fairly straight forward. Two umbrellas bouncing Alien Bee 800′s at the seamless white background and one medium softbox for the key light. Whibal for white balancing roughly 5300K. Camera’s shutter set to sync speed 1/200th of a second and the aperture at around f/11, ISO 100.

 

I set up two Alien Bee 800 strobes with umbrellas to blow out the background and a Alien Bee 800 with a  medium softbox attached for the key light. We used a reflector to even out the light since the key light was slightly to the left of Jovon. I also shot a few with just the key light.

99% of the time, the white area by the feet never gets completely blown out, so I open the image in Photoshop and set it as my top layer, then I open the same image again, except this time I click on the “Highlight” button in the RAW editor so that I can see the blown out parts of the image and I increase the exposure on the image until all the white (including the area near the feet) is completely blown out. I then place the image on the bottom layer and create a mask on the top layer. Using a 0% – 20% hardness on the default brush, I just work around the problematic area until it is pure white. I find this method works really well and lets me leave the shadows near the feet in place so that it doesn’t look too processed!