48/52 David Latimer

Normally I ask my subjects for a bit of biographical info, then I string it together into something that's usually borderline incomprehensible. My subject for this week, David Latimer, gave me a quick typed statement that does an excellent job of describing him. Anything I would ad or modify would simply get in the way.

 David describes presented me with the following:

"Born and raised in Nashville, TN.

Played football at Furman University.  Graduated with a double major in Philosophy and English Literature.

After school I traveled through Europe for better part of a year.  Germany, Switz, Austria, Spain, Italy (lived in Florence for the longest spell), Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, England, Scotland, etc.

Moved to New York upon returning home.  lived there for 1.5 yrs.
From there lived in Africa.  Traveled through Tanzania for 1 month. Worked in an orphanage in Uganda for 9.

Moved to Chicago.  Been here 4 yrs in January.

Design buff.  Design n make furniture. rambler, writer, photographer, painter, libertine, an all around professional amateur. timeless like a broken watch. snake oil customer. talisman to the annals of foolery. An expert on the dialectics of nincompoopery."

In his time on this earth David has already been places and done things that many people will never get to experience. His travels and life experience have imparted on him character and experience that make him as well cultured as he is well rounded.

I had the chance to catch up with David and hang out for a bite to eat before doing the shoot. We hung at his hand crafted and very well appointed home. Everywhere you look are things that he's created and built. We decided to do the shoot in a room that is basically his workshop. I'm not sure how much of what is in the room is actually functional and what is for show, but I know for sure that it's a mix of both. On another occasion I had the opportunity to take some photos of just the room itself. Here are some details from that shoot:

The lighting setup for the portrait shoot was pretty simple. I lit David from high camera left with my silver-over-white umbrella. I used 3/4 CTO gel to warm up the scene, yet to allow the candles in the background to still read more orange than the key. The candles were placed on the wall behind the subject, and he exposure and location of the candles ended up meaning that they didn't play a significant role in the final frame. Rounding out the lighting, I used my rayflash ring adapter as an on-axis fill. I gelled this 1/2 CTO to let the key be just slightly warmer, yet not too much so. Here's an additional frame from the shoot that I really liked:

Strobist Info:
SB-800 high camera left through silver-over-white umbrella with 3/4 CTO gel
SB-800 on camera in rayflash ring adapter with 1/2 CTO gel

Camera Settings:
1/40 f/5.6 at ISO 640
Nikon 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm