This first photo of Jared is probably my favorite of all of them. He is rather serious in the photo; he is showing a different side of him that we don’t normally see.

Above: Sadii Link, Brandon DeSimone, Stephen Sturges, Chris Shoup.

In the above photos, I feel that I captured a different side of the subjects, with the exception of Brandon: he is acting crazy as usual. The photos seem more serious that normal, but I think that these turned out way better than my first attempt at the Avedon style photos.

Over the week, I shot hundreds of photos, and ended up editing many of them. As a result, I spend many many hours on this project, probably the most of any other project in the past. Below are some the rest of the photos.

There were a few photos of Michael Camarino in the mix above, he came into the class to deliver something, so I grabbed him and show a few photos. They would most likely be considered posed, so I didn’t feel that they were the best.

All of the photos above seem to be more fun, but there were a few serious ones mixed in. I feel it provides for a good balance between seriousness and humor.

Finally, I felt that this project wouldn’t be complete without some self portraiture. So I went home and shot a few of myself with my borrowed lights. The setup was simple- but effective. Basically I set up a white sheet over my closet door, and set a strobe on full power behind it. Then I set up two more strobes on quarter and half power (respectively left to right). Finally, I set my camera on self timer for 10 seconds and waited. I actually (to my surprise) got some good shots. I posted them below.

Technical details:

Although the camera settings varied by a lot, there were a few common attributes: 100 ISO, f/8.0 Aperture, and a shutter speed ranging from 100^th sec. to 160^th sec. All photos were shot with my Canon 50D. The lens was mostly my Canon 50mm f/1.8, but the photos of Jared were with my Canon 28-135mm f/3.5-4.5 as my prime was not available at the time of shooting.

The lighting setup was pretty much the same for all of the portraits though: I had two strobes in front of the subject, with a 1:2 ratio of power, and a nearly full power strobe set up behind a white backdrop so that it would be totally white and washed out.

Finally, in editing, I opened the RAW file, bumped up the black slider, contrast, exposure, and recovery. Then I ran my “Avedon” action which consisted of a desaturate, levels, unsharp mask, and a mild high-pass filter on softlight. Then I added the Hasselblad border, resized to 700px, and saved.

Yes I know that this was posted a little late… but I spent nearly my whole weekend processing the photos (all of my free time friday, saturday, and part of sunday – I had to split it with my senior paper). There were many photos that I processed that I didn’t post. My computer was running nearly all day running photoshop actions, etc. Apparently it takes a lot of computing power to do this Avedon style. Please forgive me for the tardiness, but it was seemingly unavoidable as I couldn’t make my computer run any faster.

Other images from the project (contact sheet), and a sample of the unedited images (before and after):