Last week I volunteered to help out the gym at work and take some headshots for the intranet. They wanted something a bit better than you’d get with a point-and-shoot, and I wanted some practice taking pictures of people other than myself and Tessa.

Since the shots may need to be used in a variety of situations, including small thumbnails on the website, I opted for low-contrast lighting, using a ring flash to kill the shadows and side-lights to add highlights. I had the ABR800 ring-flash on camera without a tripod, so after the hour-and-a-half session my right-arm was pretty tired.

In the end 22 people flowed through, which only gave me a few minutes per person. Some of them were only on a quick break in between training sessions, others uncomfortable and not wanting to be there.

Overall, I think the results came out pretty well, considering. Hopefully they like them.