How To Achieve Consistency In Your Images

How To Achieve Consistency In Your Images

by William Lulow

Over my long career in the photography business, I have found that one of the best ways to ensure a high level of quality in my images was to be consistent with the way I setup my lighting and how I conduct a portrait session in general. It initially took me a while to settle on the kind of images I wanted to make because, in the beginning, I was experimenting with light and its various applications. I wanted to try out all the possible setups just to see what the results were. More and more, I have been called on to make the kinds of commercial portraits and headshots that really have a certain “zing” or “pizzazz” to them. They needed to be clear, sharp and well-lit and at the same time, show each person at their best. Here is an example of the kind of image I’m talking about:

Most head shots differ from portraits in that they must show the person for who they actually are, but at their best. This is not my interpretation of how I see them, but a basic, objective view of who they are at a particular point in time. When people come to my studio, this is the setup I use most often for this type of shot. The lighting configuration is designed to show off the person under mostly bright or “high key” light with the purpose of making the face look natural. I try to give the background a gradient treatment just to get away from solid white or gray:

Here is an example of the kind of shot I normally produce with this studio setup:

Usually with commercial headshots, I’m not really interested in portraying the person’s interests, or what they do. I am just looking for an image that makes them really shine. 

More and more, these days, I am called upon to set up shop on location in a company’s offices and then shoot as steady parade of employees as the session goes along. Each person is different, has different facial and body types as well as personalities, quirks and feelings about being photographed. My job is to make each and every one of them look as good as they possibly can in a very short amount of time.

Here are a couple of setups I have done on location, where I have tried, as much as possible to duplicate what I do in the studio. It is really setting up my studio at the companies themselves. This is really the main part of my business these days. It is also why I was able to give up my Manhattan studio because I just wasn’t using it as much as I had in the past.

And the latest setup:

So at each of these various companies I set up pretty much the same lighting arrangement that I use in the studio. That creates consistency. Once you do that, you can rely on this to produce similar looking images pretty much 100% of the time. This creates remarkably professional-looking photographs each time. 

The one danger about doing this kind of thing repeatedly is that it can breed a kind of complacency along with all the consistency! So, I often try to shoot a few frames just for myself whenever I have a subject willing to engage my ideas. Here’s one such – we had some time so I changed the lighting to create a persona that I had in my mind:

Or, if I was really interested in making a portrait instead of just a plain headshot, I might try something like this:

The portrait will allow the photographer much more leeway in determining what he or she wanted to show about a person and how they wanted to portray him. A headshot simply serves a purpose. That’s the main difference. Portraits are as much about the photographer as they are about the subjects. Headshots are all about showing the subject at his or her best. That’s what dictates the approach to either.

Photographs for commercial clients often need to be more toward the portrait “look” than the headshot. If you are shooting for a publisher, magazine or an advertisement, the lighting can be much more subjective. These images would not have been as impactful if they were lit like headshots:

Here, a shadowy lighting was necessary to convey the notion of an upset child.

Here, the pose and the kind of Rembrandt lighting served to highlight author Ira Levin’s kind of macabre nature.

This recent magazine cover relied on just two lights and a long lens to make it’s point about a labor researcher’s impact on large companies’ views toward its labor organizations.

This image of three teenagers was shot in a large studio with the background hung above them and lit from the floor to give the illusion of a bright, sunny day with the camera on the ground. It was actually raining the day we shot this.

So, many commercial images are often shot with various different lighting setups in order to make whatever point the illustration is designed to make. They are not always like headshots, well-lit to show the subject.