Mo.Pho.Jou

I shot this portrait for a story on how students should keep their social networking pages clean because potential employers might see them when the time comes to get a job (y'all know this story, it's been around for a while). When I arrived at the college advisor's office, where supposedly a student would be getting hands on help with cleaning up her page, I discovered (not to my surprise) that it was one of those set-up "so, we're here, what do you want us to do?" sort of situations. So, I said, "Judging by what you just said we are going to be doing a portrait. Let me go grab my light kit from the car." I then proceeded to photograph this young lady, who was suckered into this gig at the last minute on a friday afternoon. She had set up her laptop (the kind with a nice, glossy, reflective screen - ugh) open to her facebook page in a tiny white office littered with random notebooks, papers, old computer monitors, random extension chords and power strips, etc. After a trying to make use of the environment I decided to get rid of the environment instead by using one of my strobes to just completely blow out everything in the room except for the laptop screen and the girl. I put one strobe behind the computer with the output pumped way up and then popped a little light in with a second strobe on an umbrella to light the girl's face and the front of the computer. I think I shot this at a 1/4 of a second (hand held, one should always have a tripod, but alas) to let the screen burn in. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.