Our role as photographers is to capture a world that others can't see, and in this process, we leave a little bit of us in every photo that we take. In a way, every single one of our photographs is also a portrait of ourselves. In this series, A World That Others Can't See, I ask fellow photographers to talk about an image from their portfolios in order to discover the stories behind their work and to learn about the person behind the lens.
For the second post of the series, I spoke with Ivan Weiss, a London-based headshot and portraits photographer with a particular focus on the performing arts. Ivan walks us through the challenges he encountered while shooting this beautiful portrait.
Ivan says: "I was asked to do some promo images for a barbershop that's just opened up in East London. The shop is inside a shipping container in Containerville E2. So I knew I'd be dealing with very limited space, but it also gave me a cue to play on the long, narrow shape in my composition. Luckily I've been working a lot with wider focal lengths recently and I felt confident this would work. I took my 24-70mm just in case I was forced to change plans.
‘Troise & Sons’ © Ivan Weiss
I had to work quickly as I only had 10 minutes with Davide in between clients. I had taken a compact version of my current favourite studio light set up. I rigged my key light as high as the ceiling would allow (i.e not very) and gaffer-taped a black cloth to the wall opposite to provide negative fill and prevent any bounce back. I was ready to roll as soon as he was. I took a few frames to get my levels right and immediately began regretting my decision not to bring a third light with me. The background was just too dark. Not bad for a moody portrait, but I needed something a bit lighter for this commercial image. Luckily, I was on a tripod. So I dropped the shutter speed down to 1/10 second and let the natural ambient light soak in to light my background.
I’ve chosen to share this image because it represents for me a fusion of my studio style with the environmental portraiture work that I’d like to be doing more of.”
For this shot, Ivan used:
Body: Canon 5DsR
Lens: Canon EF 24-70mm ƒ/2.8L II @35mm
Settings: ƒ/9, 1/10, ISO100
Key light: Godox AD200 in a 70cm SMDV Dodeca Speedbox pushed as far as possible into the corner of the ceiling and wall on camera right.
Fill light: Godox AD200 in a RayFlash ringflash adapter on camera.
Thank you so much, Ivan, for kindly taking part in my series and for showing us your amazing work! You can see more of Ivan's photography on http://www.ivanweiss.london.
If you haven't read the previous posts of this series, you can check the whole series here. I hope you liked this new post and stay tuned for a different photographer each month!
Photo credit: portrait of Ivan Weiss © 2018 JC Candanedo
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