It's A Wonderful Life Coach
August 15, 2022
Dave Cesana is a life coach from Portland, OR, and he recently contacted me because he needed both a custom website and personal-branding photography for his business. In the past, I would have been able to just take care of the photography part, but it just so happens that over the last two years I’ve quietly been learning web development too. So this was a project where I was able to combine my skill set and be a one-stop-web-presense-shop. It can be difficult to find the right person for freelance work, but it’s even more difficult to pull together a team of freelancers to work on one project. Fiverr nightmare!
We started out this project by talking over Zoom a couple times so I could get a sense of his brand and what he was going for. And we both decided it would be best to get the website as close to done as possible before scheduling the photo shoot. It’s much easier to change a font or a background color than it is to re-shoot a photo.
Green Theme
Being the site colors were already finalized before the shoot, we had the opportunity to pull in some of these colors into the photos themselves to keep things cohesive. This was another benefit to doing the whole project myself. Sometimes I’ve created photos where I didn’t fully know the context or the intended layout of the photos. In this case, I knew exactly where the photos were going on the page. Knowing this, during the session I just kept repeating to myself, “Green. Shoot landscape! Earth tones. Leave room for cropping!”
The photo above was the most technically challenging photo of the session. It required a balancing act between ambient light and flash. I was going for something pretty natural so it would blend stylistically with the other natural-light photos.
As you can see (below, left), the first photo is the ambient light only after I had adjusted my camera so the windows looked how I wanted them (mostly blown out, because I didn’t want hardly any detail of the neighbor’s house). I wanted the mood/environment to feel bright and welcoming.
However, bright and welcoming could not be achieved with ambient light alone. Enter flash to the rescue.
The second photo (above, right) shows the actual lighting setup mixed with ambient. My main light was a shoot-through umbrella positioned camera-right. This light was looking good, but because it was fairly directional it created some dark shadows on Dave. In other words, it was a little too moody for life coach personal branding photos, lol. Being it was a wide angle photo, I couldn’t place a bounce card camera left to lift those shadows. I opted for an on-axis fill flash instead. I pointed the fill flash to hit the wall behind me, thus becoming a super-soft fill light that wouldn’t create it's own shadow. (Thanks David Hobby - I learned that from your excellent lighting 102 online tutorial!)
Weather Report
With a few minutes left in our session, we made our way to Dave’s front porch. It was one of those Portland days where one minute it’s pouring, and the next minute it’s acceptably grey.
Plants were just starting to bloom, and that provided a nice natural feel to this portrait (below). And more green accents too! After an hour or so of shooting, Dave was a lot more used to the camera, so these photos outside had a very relaxed quality to them. In fact, he chose this photo below for his hero image on his site.
Conclusion
This was a really fun project because I got to create the visuals and an entire website from concept to deployment. It’s a project I’m quite proud of. I’d invite you to check out Dave’s site and contact him if you’re in need of a life coach!
-Chris