A few days ago I photographed Alex Martin of MH Associates for my Haiti project. Alex is a good guy and I wanted to create an image that conveyed the things that struck me about him while we were talking: intelligence, approachability and strength of character (if you’re reading this, Alex, I hope your head hasn’t got too big!)
In this post I’m going to walk you through the thinking process to get the shot.
Contrary to popular belief, the best light in which to take portraits isn’t bright sunlight. It’s much better when it’s cloudy, or early/late in the day when the sun is low.
The reason for this is the difference between so-called hard and soft light.
We call light ”hard” when the source is small compared to the subject. The shadows tend to be deep, angular, and are not very flattering for portraits (usually).
The sun may be very big in reality but its apparent size is very small. So in bright sunlight, you will tend to get very hard light.
When it’s cloudy, the sun’s light is scattered (diffused) through the clouds, and the shadows produced are much gentler.
However, on a nice cloudy day you might need MORE light, in which case flash can come in handy. You might need more light simply because it’s too dark, or if you want to use a higher f/stop on your lens (higher f/stop = more depth of field in your image).
You can see the setup in the photo below (click to enlarge):

I put the umbrella in the line of the sun because I wanted the shadows to fall in the same place and not be scattered around. I also wanted only one pair of reflections in the eyes. A general rule when using flash is this:
It shouldn’t LOOK like there is more than one light source, even if there is.
The reason for this is that we only have one sun, so if there are multiple shadows coming from different angles, it looks unnatural. (Of course there might be exceptions to this rule sometimes, but it’s a good one to try and follow). A lot of photographers totally mess up the lighting for their portraits because they are sloppy in setting up the lighting.
Personally I like to keep things simple if I can, so I worked with a single strobe and umbrella. Umbrellas provide flattering, soft light and also produce nice round ”catchlights” in the eyes.
The light reading for the subject without flash (at ISO 200) was about f/2.8 at 1/125 sec. I wanted around f/9, which is about 16 times more illumination on the subject (f/4 is 2x, f/5.6 is 4x, f8 is 16x) than what Mother Nature was giving me. So I switched on the flash and adjusted it until I got good exposure for f/9 at 1/125.
If this is confusing, just experiment and you will get the hang of it- intuition is better than maths in photography! or e-mail me and I will try to help!
Here is one of the results:

Notes:
You can see there is just one pair of catchlights in the eyes- in your own shots, watch out for multiple reflections in the eyes!
I positioned the umbrella slightly to Alex’s right. As you can see, this had the effect of putting a bit of shadow on one side of the face, which gives it more definition and depth
About my subject:
Alex Martin is a founder and owner of Martin Howard Associates, which provides accounting and consulting services in Barcelona. He’s helped me out a lot with running a business in Spain, and I can definitely recommend his services.