Monomad: The Writer

This is my entry for the #monomad challenge

Today I had the privilege of photographing my friend, Robert Dean.

Robert Dean is a writer and TV personality currently residing in Austin, Texas. I've known Roberta little under a year now, and he's one of the stand up guys around town.

I met Robert on the set of, actually I don't remember where I met Robert. I don't know if it was at a bar or if it was on the set of his reality show that was shot back in the summer of 2020. But it doesn't matter because we are here today. I also had the pleasure of meeting one of Robert's sons who is a cool little dude.

Anyway, in regards to the story behind the photo shoot, I saw Robert had accepted a position with Hussy Magazine. And as I was going through Robert's profile on Instagram, I noticed he didn't have any headshots and so beinga good friend, I reached out to him. A simple "hey, would you want to come to the studio and get some headshots taken of you?" And he immediately replied, Yes. Usually replies can take a couple of hours, even a day plus for someone to respond to me offering a free service to them. Robert got back to me instantly, which is really nice.

So we planned for a quick shoot a couple of days from the intial contact, and we and we were able to get a nice photo session in for this one.

I used a strobe light with a six foot silver reflective umbrella as the key light on camera right and then I added a backlight for Robert. For the backlight I used a speed light with a soft box modifier. I also used a reflector at certain points positioned either underneath or on the side of Robert to help with contrast control.

For those shots that you see with a lot more light on Robert's face, I used the silver side of the reflector. And for the shots with starkly more contrast I used the black side of the reflector. My f-stop was at f5.6 and my ISO 100 with a shutter speed of 1/250. I used three different lenses for this shoot. I use the 28 millimeter and the 40 millimeter Konica Hexanon lenses without the black pro-mist filter. I say without because I almost always use the black pro-mist filter. And I also tried shooting some shots with my Jupiter 85 millimeter lens just for fun and giggles.