The trick with portraits is that nobody is really a stranger for more than about ninety seconds. You just have to get through the first ninety.
This one was organised with Sony — a studio in Sydney, a run of models, and a day set aside to shoot. I take these whenever they come up. Paid work keeps you sharp on what you already know how to do; a day like this is where you get to try the thing you haven't tried yet, with the same standard applied and nobody's campaign riding on it.
I went in with the Canon R1 for stills and the C400 for motion, and one rule: run both off a single lighting setup. Stills and motion usually get treated as two jobs with two plans and two schedules. Off one setup they come back looking like one piece of work — the film grades to the stills, the stills cut into the film.
The look was decided before anyone walked in. Coloured seamless, one hard key, a warm rim through the hair to lift the subject off the background, and enough negative space that they hold the frame rather than fill it. Once the light is right you can stop thinking about light, which is the entire point of getting it right early.
What's left is the part that actually matters. Somebody you met four minutes ago has to stop performing for a camera, and the only way through that is to talk to them like a person and keep shooting while it happens.
It produced some of my favourite portrait work, and a fifty-four second film out of the same session. [JK: add a line on the models and how the room ran.] I'll keep saying yes to these — new rooms, new faces and new problems to solve are the reason this job hasn't got old.
