Portraits

I love portraits that tell a story. Here, the story is the intense concentration of the young musician. The bow coming across the face, the eyes, and the deep shadow area between the neck of the instrument and the player all help keep the focus on the intensity of his concentration. The lighting setup was straightforward, and actually more simple than a lot of other portrait shoots. A single, point source was used, set a few feet higher and to the left, where the music stand would act as a scrim and keep the light from falling on most of the top surface of the violin. This draws the eye to the strings, which now stand out from the dark background.

This is one of those shots where a large pair of softboxes, which typically are used to give nice catchlights to the eyes, would have made the shot ordinary. The lack of catchlights in the eyes and the darkness of the instrument itself is what makes this shot work.

A small aperture was used to provide the needed depth of field to keep both the subject and the instrument in focus, but also to let the blackground fade quickly to black. Once the image was capured, there was very little post production, just a little tweaking the levels and some dodging of the background and the rail of the bentwood chair.