I am planning to take headshots of colleagues from the Mathematics department for their website. My wife, who works there, and I met for lunch and explored possible locations and settings for the photo shoot.
The math building has huge windows that spans the entire wall facing the courtyard. Since the shoot will happen during daytime, I want to use this window as the main light source for the photos. Since the window is very large compared to the subject (a statistically-average math professor), the lighting that the window casts on the subject is very “soft”, i.e. the transitions between the light and the shadows are very gradual, which is typically flattering to the above-mentioned math prof (or any typical human being, for that matter.) I will use a white plastic card sticking out from an on-camera flash to create a catchlight in the subject’s eyes. This also has an added benefit of slightly filling in the shadows on the side of the face opposite from the window. Combining flash with window light is not an issue from colour-matching standpoint, since the flash is daylight-balanced.
I plan to shoot wide open, at f/2.8, or maybe slightly stopped down in order to blur the background, which will be just the interior of the mathematics building. I do not want to set up a paper or fabric background, since there are several alternatives offered by the interior itself: an abstract, brightly-colored mural (the window would provide a frontal light in this case – the easiest setup), a grey-coloured staircase receding into the distance (subject facing sideways from the window – the best background colour and most artistic lighting) or the exterior courtyard (subject facing mostly away from the window – nice edge light in this case, but a lot of fill-in flash required, which is not ideal.) I am curious to find out which background/lighting combination would be most popular among the math professors.
