This post will discuss in some good detail how important location is to your senior's portrait.
In an earlier post, in this same series, I mentioned the scenario where you have a portrait of a senior leaning against a tree. Boring. Right? Yeah, it’s boring and it’s been done too many times. In this post, I will mainly discuss location portraiture. The topic is a nice scene. The location you pick for your senior should be interesting, dynamic and beautiful. It should be colorful or drab, both could work for your subject, but more often than not a colorful scene is better. The scene should really enhance your subject and bring them out. The scene should make you look at the picture and be blown away. It should be that great! The interesting thing about what I am saying, is that you don’t have to have the most beautiful location in the world. You can use many locations, as long as you know how to use them and use them to the best of your ability to bring out the best of that location which in turn brings out the best in your subjects.
The first thing I would like to discuss is location scouting. This topic could easily in itself be a blog post itself or even a series. There is so much to know and think about when picking locations and how you go about scouting locations. The truth is you could probably even write a book about the subject matter. But here we will discuss it briefly and bring out some good points.
My first suggestion is to keep a log of great locations. Don’t just drive by a cool location and say, hey that’s neat, I’ll have to remember that. Record it. Write it down. My suggestion, is take a picture of it. Put it on your laptop in a location folder, give good details about it and your own ideas for what it could be used for. Take several shots of the location and if possible at different times of the day. Then record in your folder, what time of day each shot was taken. Heck, even different times of the year might work well for some locations. This will give you a great catalog of places to go to when thinking of places to take your seniors. I would even suggest to go location scouting. Make a point to take trips solely for that purpose. Go down back roads, alleyways, country roads, etc. That way you won’t waste time when photographing your subjects. The other day, we were photographing a wedding and I had a great place in mind. Fortunately, I knew exactly where it was and was able to go straight there and get shots of the bride and groom without having to waste time trying to be clever and come up with a spot. I was prepared. And being prepared, is what you have to be if you are going to be a professional. Think about how much more prepared you’ll be to do a great job with locations and places to photograph if you already have places in mind to photograph.
Another great thing is whenever a client asks you to photograph at a new location that you’ve never photographed before. This happened to me recently when an engaged couple requested we photograph in a bell tower on the KU campus. (GO HAWKS!!!) They booked it for the fall and they said it’s absolutely beautiful that time of the year from that vantage point. They did the leg work for me, but trust me, I’m making note of it! It was gorgeous and the scene was incredible.
Some places are really cool, but you can’t just use these locations because they are on private property. You can’t just go onto their land and use their barn, for example. Actually, a while back, I did that and the owner drove by and asked me what the heck I was doing?! I was quite embarrassed and my client looked at me strangely as they assumed that I had gotten permission to use this beautiful location. Nope. I was kind of dumb, but I did get the shot.
As I learned the hard way, while this is a beautiful location, make sure you get permission first from owners to use their property!
If I ever want to go back there, I will definitely ask permission however. I think if the session is profitable, it wouldn’t even hurt to offer monetary compensation for using the location either. Though, I’ve never had to do that yet. I am sure that it will happen eventually however. So basically, when it comes to scouting location, go out and do it. Record what you find. Record details of the location, not just pictures. Get permission where necessary. Take suggestions from your customers.
One last thing. Make sure you get all types of locations. I have locations that range from rural barns and beautiful hillsides and luscious parks to urban scenes such as back alleys, church architecture and even run down buildings. Rusty warehouses work wonderful as well. You’d be surprised at what you’ll find, if you just look for it.
The second subject I would like to discuss about locations is safety. This may not seem obvious at first or occur to you, but if you find a really interesting location that you feel you just have to shoot at, consider the safety of your customer and yourself. Think ahead and be honest with yourself if a certain location will be safe for you after the sun goes down. Sometimes the coolest locations can be the most unsafe. There is some truth to the idea that certain areas of town are not necessarily the safest. Sometimes, even in the middle of the day, some parts of town may not be safe. The truth is, no matter how cool a location is, there is never an excuse for putting your subjects in danger.
Also consider a location like a open field. Caution should be exercised there as well. I once photographed in a field and the grass was very high and there were weeds everywhere. I didn’t consider it at the time, but there could easily have been a snake in the grass. It was a very wild area and I probably should have considered that before taking my clients out into the middle of it. Reasonable security should be taken when taking your client anywhere.
Also I would not suggest asking them to pose on things or near things where they may get hurt with the subject matter in the scene. I know this really cool old set of metal drums and ladders all on top of each other and it would make a great setting, but it is so rusty that it would probably be unsafe to pose anyone on it. I think that’s the way you get hepatitis C, right?! Okay, I just made that up, but be careful whatever you do and try using some common sense.
The next thing to consider is color. Make sure that your location, as cool as it is, matches your subject’s color. Meaning, make sure that it matches what he or she is wearing. You can color match or you can color complimenting. I’ll give you two examples.
The first was how I used color to color match. I was photographing Kendra for her senior portraits. One of her outfits, she was wearing a green sweater. I had an idea to go into the woods where she could match her surroundings. I used the green canopy of trees as well as the tall wild grass that was beneath her. The grass stood about knee length and vignetted her perfectly. It matched the St. Patrick’s Day standard green sweater that she was wearing. This was perfect color matching and if she had green eyes, I believe this would have been the only thing that could have improved this shot, color wise. So look for opportunities to match the color of your subjects with that of the scene. It’s a great way to improve any shot!
You can see how matching color, can make a dynamic affect on the portrait.
The next example is color complimenting. This means using colors that are opposite yet compliment each other. For example, red and green are complimentary colors. So an example of this would be to put Kendra who is wearing the green sweater and stick her in front of a red brick building. Or perhaps putting her in front of the green scene we just discussed if she were wearing a red sweater and a red hat. This would color compliment. It’s different from the color coordinating but can be just as powerful and interesting, if not more interesting. Below is a list of complimentary colors. Think of all the ways in which you could compliment your subjects wardrobe choice with a background of complimenting colors.
Red compliments Green
Orange compliments Blue
Yellow compliments Purple
Yellow Green compliments Red Purple
Blue Green compliments Orange Red
Blue Purple compliments Yellow Orange
Below is a helpful chart to help you get the idea.
The interesting thing about color is that it really doesn’t even have to be either of these, matching or complimenting but it can even be other colors as long as they match a theme. For example, if you had red, orange red, yellow, orange and pink shirts in a family, this could be considered to be a matching theme. While the colors themselves don’t match identically, they do match a theme. If you had all these colors and threw in a hunter green shirt into the group, this would not match. It would stand out like a sore thumb. The same can be said with colors in a senior portrait. You don’t have to color match or compliment, but you should strive to keep colors within a color scheme.
I’ll give you an example. A couple years ago on a senior shoot. Allison was wearing a darker blue blouse, blue jeans and she looked nice but casual. So my idea was to take her somewhere where I could match her color scheme. She had brown hair, so I thought, blue clothes, brown hair, so I’ll match her to a brown, rusty, red and black background. The scene was a back alley and not very appealing in itself, but in the senior portrait it was amazing. And color wise, it was perfect!
Subdued colors like blues and browns go great together and this was the perfect location for Allison's blouse!
So you have three options, color matching, color complimenting and color scheme matching. These are your three best options for getting beautiful photos that will really have something beautiful about them. If you try something not in these directions, you will most likely not get as powerful an image as you’d like. You do have an option to convert to black and white, but if you go that route, you still need to consider your tonal values your clothing has. I would still however try my hardest to use color intentionally and strongly for the senior’s portraits.
Believe it or not, as long as this post has been, I am only half way done. I am going to stop here and continue this post next Wednesday as I do not want to overwhelm you in one post. The next post will continue to be part of the series on “Fifteen things you need for a great senior portrait.” So, be back next week for Color, part 2. If you are enjoying this series, please comment in the comments section and let us know! We took a break for a couple weeks to give you a short recess from the series but now we’re back and the plan is to cover the next five aspects before we take another short break and then return to finish it up.
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