IRONKIDS

The Extreme family portrait series picks up back in Burlington Ontario, another family run business called that makes gummy vitamins, IRONKIDS & Adult Essentials. These things are delicious a great way to get your kids to take their vitamins, since they’re a candy that’s good for you; the only problem I’ve had with the boys is that they want MORE vitamins than I should give them. Read: not candy.

The family practices what they preach: a balance of nutrition and a healthy active lifestyle. Everyone takes part in some sport, activity, and they do it every day… sometimes the most sport I get up to in a day is moving from the couch to bed, so it can get pretty intimidating.

As usual we had a rough idea of what we were going to shoot before we got there, as you can see, this image has a bit more post-processing in it than what I’m used to. We ran into a few snags with our background so started to experiment a bit with the “race” theme that dominates the image (the ridiculous nature of a skiier on concrete in a warehouse that opens up to a marathon in the background is not lost on me – but hopefully you can suspend your disbelief for their sake). We also had to add more branding, as this image is as much a company driven product as it is a portrait of the family itself – this image will see commercial use for them – so there was certainly more creative input from both sides to accomplish the final.

In most family portraits, I take time to light the room and then add exposure by way of flash, per subject, where needed. In the warehouse there was no way I was going to be able to overpower the ambient in a meaningful way – those photons would have gone up to the ceiling and dissapeard before they came back down – so we shot the background separate from the individual familiy members, then brought it all together in post.
I prefer to shoot people in place on location, it helps give them the proper perspective so I don’t have as much warping and sizing to do in Photoshop, though by request, a foreground element was shrunk, which stands out to me, but it’s a matter of taste.

You can see I used my new toy light modifier, the Photek Softlighter, a lot in the above images. It’s currently my largest modifer, and allowed the subjects to actually move around a bit in their session to give it a more natural look. I’ll have to be careful with this thing, though, since it’s so enveloping it’s easy for me to overlight a scene.

Special thanks to Lee Mousseau for the assist on the shoot, hell, he facilitated it by driving down to Burlington with me; the Toronto Marriott Hotel for a place we could stay & keep loads of gear at night; and Julie Cole for being the first mom to bring me out to Burlington, then pimping my work hard – I truly appreciate it.

You should probably head over to flickr and click through to see the “original” size on this three image pano to see the details.

Posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2011 at 6:00 am. Filed under: Portraits Tags: Composite, Extreme_Family, Family, portrait RSS 2.0 feed.