January 9, 2012 – A year of portraits – Greg Collins

Today I decided I wanted to capture an environmental portrait of Greg Collins, the Director and Head Coach of Big Dogs Gym and Fitness in Providence, Ky. I was there today to capture a picture of his Gymnastics Team, that has been doing very well in competition, for Tuesday’s The Messenger Sports front, the newspaper I work for.

Wikipedia describes a environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual  environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. The term is most frequently used of a genre of photography.

Where it is common in studio portraiture and even in location candid photography to shoot using a shallow depth of field, thereby throwing the background out of focus, the background in environmental portraiture is an integral part of the image. Indeed, small apertures and great depth of field are commonly used in this type of photography.

I used my Nikon D700 for this shot and the exposure information is: 1/320 sec at f/2.8 with an ISO of 4,000. The lens was an 80-200 mm f/2.8 Nikor at 112mm and of course it was by available light.

Post processing work was done in Photoshop CS5 where I did some dodging and burning along with cropping before applying a Topaz B&W Adjust warm tone filter with a little tweaking on the adjustments. I like the look and feel of this photo better in the warm B&W tones.