Portraits, personality, and punch

Stefan Högberg

A few days ago I photographed Stefan Högberg and Lennart Guldbrandsson. Stefan and Lennart wanted pictures for advertising a presentation on copyright.

Lennart is a writer, his speciality is ghostwriting. Stefan works at the Region Archive in Gothenburg. We shot at the Region Archive, because the environment there relates to the subject matter of the presentation, and to Stefan's and Lennart's jobs.

Lennart Guldbrandsson

To capture a person's personality, you need to get to know them. Lennart and I know each other from before, but I had not met Stefan previously.

Before the shoot, we had a cup of coffee and talked about what we were going to do. We decided to try  a couple of different locations. We ended up shooting at three. It is important to get a variety of photos, so that the client has material to choose from.

For the portraits above I used a fairly wide aperture, f5.6, to blur the background a bit. I used three flashes: Two were set to the left and right, at an angle of about 30-40 degrees. The third flash was put behind the subjects, and used to light the background a bit.

The catchlights in the eyes are important. They make the faces look alive and friendly.

No books were harmed while creating this picture!

We had a fun session, and could not resist getting a bit whimsical. We had not planned to make a levitation photo, but suddenly, it seemed a good idea, and we did.