I’m a volunteer art teacher at my children’s elementary school. The school participates in a program called Art In Schools (AIS), which is run by the Greater Reston Art Center (GRACE). There are over 60 schools in the Northern Virginia region participating in the program. Each month the schools receive a famous artist’s portfolio to present. An army of parent volunteers heads out into the classrooms to present the materials and complete art projects in the classroom.

GRACE recently hired me to photograph 4,242 art prints that they use for the Art in Schools program. The images will then be projected in place of the printed portfolios.  The projected images are a better way to present the materials in every way!  Many of the prints we photographed at our Herndon Studio were behind shinny wrinkled lamination. This created a technical problem because of glare from the studio lighting.  We solved this by polarizing our light sources and polarizing the lens.  This is a very effective way of removing unwanted reflections.

The 4,242 resulting images were cropped and prepared in an Adobe Lightroom Catalog (Database). This 120GB database of DNG-RAW files is now a very valuable resource for the GRACE AIS program as the images can be output for utilized in Print, Web and PowerPoint.

GRACE has a gallery located at Reston Town Center with one of my prints hanging. It’s a pigment Ink on metal print. This is a cool new kind of print I’m making.  You don’t need to frame them and the metal really shines.  You can check out the print at the gallery Aug 31-Sept 18. Please contact us for pricing on pigment metal prints.

We are offering two packages for modeling and acting head shot photography:

HEADSHOT: A headshot is $400 for the portrait session in our Herndon Virginia Studio.  This includes changes of wardrobe as necessary to get one spectacular portrait, but it’s head and shoulders only.

COMPOSITE CARD: This $685 package includes three looks that are radically different from each other. The package is designed to be laid out as a group of photographs for a modeling comp card. We also offer layout of the modeling comp cards for an additional $160 and can submit the  final product to Washington DC’s top modeling agencies for $80.

These prices are for Personal Promotion only. Head shots for commercial advertising purposes may be priced according to usage.

We also do free model testing on occasion, so send us a JPEG image and we will keep you on file. Model testing is our way of trying out new photography techniques and equipment before we bring them out on assignment. Model testing is play time and sometimes yields the very best photography.

When the image will be displayed on white, I sometimes like there to be a slight bit of tone in the background. For you Photoshop people,  248 is usually dimmed down enough. This slightly dimmed down white creates a background for the image. Framing the image with a thin black or gray line is another option for keeping it from floating away.

The same principle of adding a little tone to the background applies to Product photography as well. In addition, drop shadow are often added. The shadow grounds the product, making it look as though it’s actually sitting on something. Creating realistic drop shadows is a snap, once you’ve done it a couple of hundred times.

Keep these choices in mind when you need photography on white backgrounds. The best solution is always the one that looks best in the final design.

When we shoot corporate headshots for website bio pages; we’ve been including enough background space on a few frames to run text. I like the look of an integrated head shot and bio as one image.
This image was made for a client in Gaithersburg, MD. We also shoot a more traditional headshot for them on a blue gray background during the same studio photography session.

This portrait of Alicia Thurston was made to advertise her morning talk show.  It’s a show for lawyers which airs in spanish.  Alicia is fun, fresh  and entertaining, so the directors wanted to use bright colors to portray her in this way.  It’s not your average legal talk show.