I’ve always wanted to shoot a series of Pop Up Studio Portraits but never really got around to doing anything about it. Then. Ping ! An email from Frui dropped into my email box offering some one day courses, and one immediately struck my fancy, Simon’s Street Portrait Studio. 

We will create a pop up studio in the street and persuade passers by to pose for their portraits. It promises that I will come away with “some truly characterful portraits that stand out from the crowd. And the course was pretty local to me, just a few minutes down the road. 

How could I resist? 

I have to confess a degree of apprehension as I set off to our café rendezvous. I feel much more confident in asking people to take their portrait than in  taking them surreptiously. What if they refused? So what. Move on. Next please. What if you are challenged taking someone’s picture without asking them. Awkward! But I  still felt nervous about it.

We met up and to my surprise there was only one other participant apart from the course tutor Simon Tupper. We started by looking at some of the work of Richard Avedon, and specifically his  pictures of ordinary people on a white background including the picture of 12 year old Sandra Bennett and the Ronald Fischer, the bee keeper. These pictures strip away the context of the photo, no background, so you just focus on the people.  

https://www.avedonfoundation.org/the-work

He then showed us some of his own work, some Mexican music players, taken against a black background, and some Fishermen. What we would be looking to do would be to create a set of photos, with a common theme, exposed identically. 

White Background

We were shooting in Broadway Market (Hackney) on a busy market day. The first task was to find a spot to set up, essentially a wall just off the market, without obstructions, and with a reasonably good light. We started off with a white background, a piece of white cloth taped to the wall with that essential photographer’s tool, some gaffer tape. 

Simon went off and got our first victim. As we are shooting on a plain background, it is important that the sitter should have something distinctive about them. 

This was my first effort. I wasn’t that satisfied with my effort, haven’t quite got the focus and exposure right. I’ve slightly over exposed. If I had under exposed I would have been able to brighten it up a little, but it is harder to pull back detail when over-exposed. It is a shame as she was a brilliant model.

I shot with my 85 mm 1.8 lens.

Time to move on.

Black Background

We meet up in a slightly different location with a more even lighting and with a black velvet background. Velvet is the best material when shooting on a black background as the texture absorbs the light well and gives a full black. If it is a thinner material such as linen it can reflect the light back in to the camera, giving a grey colour.

First up was this guy wearing pink glasses. Perfect. I switched lens to my 105mm, which I had not used for some time, other than for macro shots.

Next up were an amazing Japanese couple who were in the UK to promote their range of spectacles.

Then a couple passed, and I shot them. They were both wearing white T Shirts, so this became a bit of a theme, white T shirts on a black background. They were an obvious choice because of their, and particularly her, hair colours. What amazed me about this project is how virtually no one refused to have their portraits shot. I am not sure that I would have agreed to readily had a stranger approached me in the street. I think having the background taped to the wall helped lend a bit of authenticity to the request.

I was really pleased with the next couple

She was less keen to participate but he fully embraced the idea and we shot a good number of frames in the pop up studio. Shooting with the 105mm made framing couples slightly more difficult, and I did initially think that I might put on my 50mm, but decided in the end to stay consistent.

To throw a bit of variety into the set, I chose a guy wearing a black T shirt but with a strong white logo, as shown in the featured image to this blog. I would like to have spent more time with this girl, but it was time to move on, and I had lost the settings on which I had been shooting, as you can see from the slight over-exposure.

Flowery Background

We moved onto under a bridge by Neil House. The purpose of this exercise was to see how the light fell away from the opening of the bridge. We taped up our background and waited for our first customer. The spot was less busy but what it lacked in quantity it certainly made up in quality.

Then it was time to find a cafe and review some of the images I had taken through out the day in our pop up studio. After a minimal amount of adjustment in Capture 1, on Simon’s laptop ( I use Lightroom), Simon quickly knocked up the composite above and in the featured image as a demonstration of why it was important to shoot with the same settings in order to keep consistency across the set.

Conclusion

This was one of the most enjoyable photography courses I have undertaken. A Pop Up Studio is easy to set up, simply tape up a sheet of material (which will only cost a few pounds) onto a well, and off you go. I had thought that we might be using speed lights, but it would be difficult to leave the lights set up while you wander off into the crowd to find the next person to photograph. It’s so easy to set up, light to carry, and can be very effective. I certainly will be setting up again a pop up studio to shoot street portraits