Fairport HS Senior - Shawn

  This year I am working with three juniors at Fairport High School as ambassadors that will help spread the good word according to Luke Photography.  One of the ambassadors is Shawn who, as a junior, is a starter on three varsity sports in a school that graduates close to 500 students every year.  Let’s suffice it to say she is a good athlete.  Not only that, but she’s taking three AP classes.  It all adds up to one hell of a jock who is whip smart.

Here at Luke Photography, I take pride in the fact that I photograph each person to bring out their personality.  A lot of photographers claim to do that, but placing their subject in natural daylight up against a brick wall and taking their photograph says nothing about a person. At this studio, I actually interview the students before their session, so I can get an insight into what makes them tick.  During Shawn’s interview, it was obvious that sports have been a big part of their life, and they have been for a long time.

Shawn has this amazing red hair, and one of the best portraits from her session shows her in a bluish cardigan in front of a background that has streaks of cool blues, green and purples.  Warm and cool colors are complementary to each other, which means they are opposite each other on the color wheel.  When you place complementary colors (for example, red and green) next to each other in a painting or a photograph, they make each other seem brighter, more vibrant, and more intense.  This is the reason her hair and the background both “pop” in this image.

In addition to playing with the vibrant colors, I took advantage of her athletic nature for some great themed sports portraits in her soccer, basketball and lacrosse uniforms.  In the locker room image, I placed real metal locker doors into a hand-made frame and placed them on the right side of the background.  I placed a red gel over my background light, which is pointed at the left side of the background.  Then Shawn took her place on a makeshift locker room bench and played out a scenario that was meant to draw out a certain look.  An overhead light on Shawn and a little smoke from a smoke machine added a little drama to the image.

In the gymnasium image, Shawn was photographed against a white paper background, and a digital image of the old school gymnasium was added in post-production.  The warm, vibrant colors of her skin and her uniform stood out like a sore thumb against the muted colors of the background, so her color had to be adjusted to match that of the background in order to make it a believable image.  You don’t need to have taken AP courses to have seen that.  But Shawn would have picked it out in an instant.