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I just finished a set of headshots for some folks applying to ERAS this year, the national residency application. Since I'm (finally) graduating, I would imagine this is the last set of ERAS photos I take of my awesome colleagues. In light of that, I went back and dug up all the ERAS portraits I've taken over the years, and posted them in reverse order (most recent first).
It's interesting how things have evolved, both in processing technique and in lighting. When I took the earliest photos, I was using full-spectrum CFLs, and I guess I wasn't all that careful about color management. The early ones look really strange to my eye now, with weird color casts.
Sometime around the middle of the series, I settled on using clamshell lighting with a two-light scheme. The main light would be a flash on an umbrella, with a fill reflector underneath, and a second flash lighting a plain wall, all controlled either by cable, or (as I upgraded) by remote slaving. I think it's pretty easy to tell when that transition happened.
The most recent iteration (the first three photos) saw two changes. First, the umbrella was swapped for a softbox. I made a mistake here: if you look closely at the eyes, the glints are in slightly different places in the two eyes, because the softbox is pretty close to the subject. Should have been further off. I had placed the stands where I normally did, but the reflector umbrella is further away than the softbox (reflection vs. transmission), and I forgot to account for that.
The second change is more interesting. This guy figured out how to use a cheap portable router and an android app called DSLR Controller to connect a tablet to the camera wirelessly! It works both ways - you can use the tablet to control the camera, or have the images pop up on the tablet as you shoot. I implemented this for a tidy $40, and it worked super-well - as the shoot goes on, the output is shown to the model, so they can adapt. It got to be so convenient we even used it as a live mirror.
Here's how the setup looks:
The router (white box in front) is hooked up to the camera by USB cable (the cable is long enough to slip into my pocket, so the whole array just moves around with me), and transmits data to the tablet; the tablet sees what the camera sees, and has access to all the images on the CF card.
