Live Portrait: Kristina

Live Portrait: Kristina from Shoot Luke on Vimeo.

Kristina had seen my prior two live portraits and said if I was interested, she'd be interested in doing one as well. For this one, I wanted to do something different; changing up the scenery from my usual magic-hour golden field was one thing, but I moreso wanted to experiment with pacing.

One could argue this latest video departs from the idea/definition of a "portrait" and transcends into just a montage/sizzle reel, maybe even a music video... but I will lobby that it is still a visual likeness study of a person. I don't want to get into semantics, nor really do I care, so in the end, call it what you will, but I'm sure you can't contest the spirit of my intention.

Anyway, in film school I was an editing "major", as did I work as an assistant editor directly out of college, so it was fun getting back to my cutting roots, as this obviously has a tone and pace to it different from my slower, more lingering videos of prior. I had about 25 minutes of raw footage; using Final Cut Pro HD Express, it took me about 2 days to form a rough cut, then another day to really tighten it up. I could've spent another whole week on this and made it uber-tight, maybe even tried some funky match-cutting to different motions, cut against certain beats of the song... but I've been stretched so thin with shooting and post-processing in normal photography.... and am also fastly developing a form of insomnia, to where I'm all but a zombie. Coffee helps.

I shot this entire video using only my Canon 24-70mm; when shooting 30fps, you should only ever be on 1/60 for your shutter-speed, but my DOF ranged between 5.6-8.0. I elected to use manual focus, so I could get a cool rack-focusing effect at certain points, and also purposely being out of focus for others-- an aesthetic choice.

On to Kristina... what a trooper. It was gloomy and overcast that day, which makes the beach a very cold place, despite it being summer, not to mention the Pacific is absolutely frigid, no matter what time of year it is. In other words: she was freezing her ass off.

...yet, she managed to look amazing and smiled all the way through it. Actually, that's a lie-- I have lots of B-roll footage of her writhing around, frantically screaming into the waves, "IT'S SO G-D COLD!!!". I actually put a quick shot of it within the video-- see if you can spot it!

I gotta say, I'm really liking doing these little experimental portrait-videos; having great lenses allows you make some very cinematic, professional looking shots, that not so long ago was really only an option for professional film shoots and/or would cost you $1000's to rent.

A DSLR body with video and a good piece of glass ain't no cheap buy, neither... but definitely more in the realm of affordability than a RED camera or likened.

Anyway, I had a blast shooting this and putting it together; you can expect more live portraits in the future... or whatever you wanna call them ;-)

And if you want to view in larger, prettier HD, click here!