Artist, musician, singer, songwriter Jukka Takalo, who hails from Martinniemi. Jukka is lit with one strobe in a Westcott Apollo Medium gridded softbox, boomed over the camera.
Man of the arts Jukka Takalo accepted my invitation to sit for a portrait most graciously. Jukka is a staple of the Oulu art/culture/music/cool things scene and is well-known (inter)nationally for many things. I give you two: the Finnish (now defunct) rock group Aknestik and the song Jokainen on vähän homo ('Everyone is slightly gay').
Jukka has many things cooking at once and we decided to make portraits of him in his kuplettimies get-up. Kupletti (couplet) being an old-timey song with comic, irreverent and satirical lyrics. There's all this history to the FInnish kupletti, which is better described elsewhere.
On with the show.
I planned a few different lighting scenarios for Jukka. I wanted to incorporate an idea of being on stage for him and figured I'd have a gridded key light for him to that effect. Not from camera axis, which is where the audience would see spotlights on stage, but from the side because we were not on stage, we just had a seamless. And I would light him from the front later, so why not go for something else for now?
Key is a gridded speedlight from camera left. Also camera left and on a boom arm is another gridded speedlight for rim/hair light. Why left and not right for classic crosslighting? His signature coiffure is on camera left. The hair light is pretty subtle here, but I'd miss it if it wasn't there.
A tighter shot in the same set-up.
I then set up a gridded softbox for a softer key light and turned the hair light into a background light, still a gridded speedlight. Jukka is pretty animated as it is and in a photo shoot he turns it up a few notches. I didn't give him too much space, lighting wise, as he would easily step out of the key light and into the shadows and he also had to stay kind of put in terms of the background light. But animated he would be.
He threw his hat in the air, Buster Keaton style, and caught it on his head. Instant gold.
A word on color grading: I added some color grading to these images in Photoshop. I desaturated the color subtly, then pushed the hues slightly to blue for cooling effect and added a little more contrast. It gave these some extra snap.
This time hatless. See what I mean about the signature coiffure? It's been always like this.
Next, I lit him from above the camera with just a gridded softbox. This gave him plenty of light in front of the seamless and he could get some moves happening. People seem to be dancing in my sittings, even when I don't specifically ask them to. Image at the top of the post is from this set-up.
I got in a little closer as well:
I wanted to get an image of Jukka that would somehow incorporate that instantly recognizable hairdo, something that could be the only element in the image you'd see and still know it's him. Early on in our session I tried a straight silhouette shot of him, with just a gridded light on the background and him positioned smack dab in the middle of the circle of light and in profile. They worked in the sense that it did the thing I wanted, but it didn't really look that special.
As I was building my light for the final set-up of the day, I put him up against a black collapsible backdrop and gave him first a kicker and then a background light. I noticed in the test shot that this was actually looking pretty cool, so I came away with this:
Much stronger than what I first tried, which was a black&white silhouette in a bright circle, kind of comic-booky.
For all his high energy and fun times on set I still wanted to make a quiet portrait of him as well, which was what I was going for as I was building this last lighting scenario. After the kicker and the background light I put up the gridded softbox as his key light, camera right.
For this I ended up ditching the background light because it was too much like a school portrait. We also did away with the hat.
And there you have it. Two hours in the studio and we were good to go!