Evan Baines
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I'm going to take the liberty of reposting Bryan's PM'd suggestion in the thread, and then responding.
bryanlindsey wrote:
An observation: You told me that you make meticulous lighting and posing decisions based on the personality of your subject. Your website prologue alludes to this, but I think it might be worth describing a little less abstractly. Readers may get the feeling that you chat with the subject for a minute, make some tweaks, and then roll with an otherwise standard setup.
This is a description of my process on these shoots, with a focus on this shot in particular.
The first step in this series is subject selection. First and foremost, I will only invite subjects to sit for me that I respect. I don't ever want to do a hatchet job on people, and I'm not particularly interested in producing portraits that are bland in their description of the subjects. While I respect the work of many of the genius portrait artists who were/are caustic or unrelenting in their depiction of subjects, I want to start all of these sessions on the basis of respect. I try to choose subjects about whom I have well-developed perspectives, and in general this series is about service-members, a group about which I have strong feelings in general for obvious reasons.
Once I have selected a subject, I start making adjective lists. I attempt to describe the subject with a prioritized list of words, and imagine a means of conveying those adjectives in a shot. This particular subject is a leader that I describe as being a bit "mama bear." She is solicitous of those under her command and protective of them. She can be tough as needed, but is not typically "gruff." She maintains an appropriate degree of distance from us in that she is not "buddy-buddy" with her subordinates, and therefore the portrait should not be inappropriately intimate. She can be very funny under the right circumstances, and is plain-spoken.
A particular challenge in the portraits of female officers in this series is that much of the visual language of power, leadership, and strength is antithetical to the visual language of femininity. We shoot up at heroes, but we shoot down at women we want to look pretty. We want the head and shoulders on the same axis for leaders, but on opposing axis for beauties. We often want bright, shiny, and shadowless for "pretty" lighting while a strong shadow conveys gravitas. I've spent many hours studying portraits of female leaders in politics and business, and I feel that in general photography usually struggles to describe leaders as being simultaneously strong and feminine. For this subject in particular I wanted VERY much to show her as a strong and effective leader, but also allow her to look feminine and pleasant, so this was a carefully thought-out balancing act.
While this study was going on, I emailed her to ask which uniform she wanted to be photographed in. She preferred the dark uniform, which meant that I wanted to shoot her on a dark background due to contrasting center of interest. The goal of this series is the person and not the uniform, so my goal is to draw you to the subject's face. On a dark background with a dark uniform, the face is among the most different things in the frame. Were she on a light or white background, the eye would be more drawn to the higher contrast with the uniform. However, my immediate concern upon shooting her with dark-on-dark was that such low key shots often necessitate a higher ratio lighting style. High ratio lighting is dramatic, but it can also be very hard upon skin that is not perfect, youthful, and well made-up (heavy makeup is frowned upon in uniform). Thus, I decided that I needed to rent a background light (I only currently own one light as I'm no longer doing this for a living) to bring up the background into a gradient that kept a mid-dark feel, but lightened in the middle and enabled me to run a more moderate light ratio without it looking odd. The addition of an accent light also helped me run a more moderate ratio, as it imparts a more 3d quality that counter-acts the dangers of flatter lighting on a dark BG. The accent light should be subtle enough that one wouldn't notice it unless pointed out. I did feel that the lower key shot gave her an appropriate gravity as well.
Another thing I do with all of my subjects is I try to track down any images of them that I can find... if they are FB friends with me I FB stalk their profile photos to identify what THEY like about how they look. In this case, I couldn't do that, but I did examine other images of her that she had approved to get a sense of how she saw herself.
Come the day of the shoot, I had a friend come in an hour before the subject to model lighting so that I would not be screwing around with the lights more than necessary during the shoot. I already had the general lighting scheme in my mind (basically cross lighting with a gradient background providing separation from the dark uniform, and a fairly modest 3:1ish ratio key/fill). Once the subject arrived, I turned out all of the house lights and spent about 15 minutes with just the key and the modeling light observing how different angles made her face look. I was looking for what I considered the best compromise of light that made her look like herself, but was also flattering. Once I had my key location, I adjusted the reflector fill and accent light to accommodate. All the while, I'm trying to maintain a conversation upon subjects that I have pre-determined will get the subject in the right mind-set... in this case talking a little bit about her job from the perspective of it being her last day. I also spend a great time explaining to my subjects what I'm doing and teaching a bit about why I'm screwing with the lights, because I find that subjects who understand what I'm doing are more patient with me doing it.
With the lights set, now I turned my attention to posing. As I've noted before, I'm trying to balance different qualities here. Her head and shoulders are SLIGHTLY off axis, conveying some femininity without being overboard about it. Her chin is up to bring back in leadership/visionary. Cradling the cover both bends the arm, which is appealing visually, but it also (maybe) hints at that mama-bear thing with a vague cradling reference. I wanted to shoot her 3/4ish in part because the Navy uniform has the rank as stripes on the sleeves, so those are also visible. The weight on back foot is feminine, but shooting up at her conveys heroism/leadership. To compensate for shooting up at her, I used a slightly longer focal length to avoid distorting her, with the added bonus that it conveyed some of the respectful distance I wanted. Shooting up at ladies is always a tightrope, but I felt that respect and leadership were conveyed here without making her look bad.
OH! I almost forgot a very important part. She is rotating her shoulders back and forth as I shoot, so that she is actually in motion. The lights easily freeze this, but it makes her look less stiff. In general, I often try to get the subject moving in some small way even if only tapping a toe. It breathes life into static poses.
So now, we've got everything but the expression. My ace in the hole question was to ask her about the craziest thing a student had ever been brought into her office for. I felt this question would keep her in the mindset of her position of authority, but introduce a bit of humor and warmth into the discussion. We stopped almost immediately after getting this shot, and the session took maybe 60-90min.
Overall, my goal for these shots is an invisibility of style and technique. If the first thing you see when you look at my portrait is the lighting, lens work, composition, or what have you, then I have failed (at least for you). I want to turn every single feature of the portrait back toward those adjectives and the picture I have in my mind of the subject. You should see the subject first, second, and third. The shot should appear to be a simple, even boring, portrait that happens to convey some aspect of the subject particularly well.
I hope that does a better job of explaining! 
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