Barbershop Portrait

Last week we had the opportunity to shoot at the new Pristine shop location on Prince Edward Street in Saint John. Pristine is a skateboard, accessory and urban lifestyle fashion boutique. Harrison the owner of the shop is a good friend of ours and we always love stopping by. If you venture upstairs you will find Charlie Grimes. He runs a barbershop there called King Cuts. He offers an awesome barbershop experience and really tight cuts. We decided to get some shots of Charlie’s scene at the same time for his new website.

Charlie’s space is pretty cool and unique. We wanted to try and show his space while capturing his personality. This is usually the way we prefer to shoot environmental portraits. Its important to show both.

Where I was not planning on taking a portrait of Charlie I did not bring any lighting gear with me. I only had my camera. I scoured around the room to see what type of lighting I was dealing with. The room is basically flooded with light from a lamp that was camera right. The lamp was the type that had three flexible heads attached to it. I positioned one lamp head to point against the wall so that it would fill in some of the background and Charlies face. Then I pointed one head directly towards Charlie as a key light. Then the third head I pointed directly into the ceiling to fill in more of the room shadows. With a tighter shot at 50mm It worked out fine.

Because the lamp bulbs were quite warm it cast an orange hue towards Charlie’s face. I was easily able to fix this in post and recover some of the highlights.