Birthday Portrait - 11/30/21

To me the point of photography is to freeze time. You can try and recreate moments but it will never be quite the same. That’s one of my favorite aspects of photography.

Portraits on my sons’ birthdays are something I look forward to. I get to freeze time of how they were at that exact moment. They only give me a couple of minutes before getting bored. This time I wanted to do something a little bit more cinematic for my son Elijah’s 14th birthday. I decided to play around with shooting through glass.

As you see of the setup, it was done in a little room with a small lighting setup. The key light strobe is in a small fabric beauty dish with a CTO gel lighting his face. Next, the background light is gelled red with a grid. The rim light is gelled blue with a grid lighting him & the water drops on the plexiglass. I purposely left in both the light flares to add some character. Afterwards I did some tweaks in Lightroom & Photoshop to achieve final image.

I liked how it came out and it gave me some other ideas to try. More importantly, I captured that exact moment of him.

Gear Used

-Plexiglass - 36” x 48” ($50)

-Background - concrete image I took

-3 Godox Strobes (AD200 / TT350 / TT350)

-Gels - Red & Blue

-Water bottle - mixture of glycerin & water

-Clamp for plexiglass

-Polarizer Filter - to cut down reflections

-Fuji GFX 50R - F/7.1 / 1/60 sec / ISO 100

-Fuji 110mm