Techniques : Shooting a portrait from above

A lil technique u guys . Another great piece by Neil .....Below is just a piece from the whole article at www.dg28.com .

One of the simplest techniques that I use is to shoot a portrait from above. The temptation with this kind of shot is to use a very wide angle lens and a small step ladder, but the combined risks of your own feet straying into the composition and achieving ugly distortion mean that I prefer to save the technique for times when I can get a lot higher up. Environmental portraiture does exactly what it says - it portrays people in their environment and uses the clues from the surroundings to say something about the subject.

I was using a new Lumedyne "Signature" series flash unit for this job and I set up the flash at the maximum height that the stand would allow which is about 2.4 metres (8 feet) from the ground. The flash pack was attached to the base of the stand to help with making the set up stable with a 1 metre (40") white umbrella softening the light. The available light reading on the floor was a respectable 1/60th at f4 on 200 ISO, but the light was mainly coming from behind the subject and the reading on his face was just over two stops darker. That meant that I had the relatively simple task of balancing the flash light on his face with the ambient reading on his back and on the flooring.

I placed the flash at an angle of just over thirty degrees from the axis of the lens to my right hand side and took a flash reading. On 200 ISO the flash was putting out f4.5 on 200 joules (200 w/s) from a range of about three metres so I decided to go with that. I had a Pocket Wizard Plus receiver on the flash and I ran back upstairs where I had a 70-200 f2.8L lens on my camera as well as a Pocket Wizard transmitter. Sometimes working alone is bliss, at other times it's a pain. I shot a few test frames and realest that I needed to move the flash further around to my right to an angle of around forty-five degrees from the axis of the lens, so I had to run down the stairs and move it myself and then back up to the walkway to carry on shooting.

Rest of the article at http://www.dg28.com/technique/view_from_above.htm

Photos and articles By Neil from www.dg28.com