Celissa, Drink and Click Portrait – Austin, Texas

Later in the evening, after most of the Drink and Click participants left, I did yet another portrait experiment. This time with Celissa, who works at Precision Camera and someone who I’ve featured a couple of times (here and here) on this blog.

Instead of the dim light of the bar, like yesterday’s portrait session with Michelle, I moved to the railing which feature a row of industrial lights. The direct, harder light creates an entirely different kind of effect. Keep in mind that I used the same camera, lens and JPEG setting as yesterday’s post — The Olympus PEN-F with the Panasonic Leica 25mm f1.4.

There in lies the fun and challenge. The built-in Olympus “MonoProfile 2” is a high contrast profile, but you don’t see much of the contrast in dim, even lighting. It a really neat effect though, and something that I’m learning how to use in portraiture. This profile is unique to the Olympus PEN-F camera.

I shot multiple angles of Celissa. Some showcasing a single light. Others, like this one, showing them in a leading line.

Like yesterday, I set a show shutter speed to maximize image quality, ranging from 1/13 to 1/20 of a second. The industrial lights are more directional but the area was not much brighter than the light by the bar. 1/13 of a second caused more motion blur than I liked and raising to 1/20 helped noticeably. In the future, I should ideally aim for 1/25 or 1/30 to get a higher keeper rate.

Finally, this is my favorite portrait of the night. The high contrast image, the ample blacks and Celissa’s hat gives a classic film noir aesthetic, I think. Even with the abundance of shadows, the light adequately illuminates up her face, complete with catch lights in her eyes.

All of the photos are in-camera JPEGs with no additional post processing.