MOBILE PORTRAIT STUDIO

Lance Rosenfield Creates "Studio" Portraits in the Field

Background:

For two years now, Lance has been traveling to a small delta town to photograph their Mardi Gras celebration. The main objective of the celebration seems to be for men to don costumes, travel on flat bed trucks or horses to local farms, drink lots of beer, try to capture chickens released by farmers, drink lots of beer, and get very muddy while chasing chickens. Then once the chickens are caught, they make a big gumbo for the town to celebrate together. Last year, Lance worked in the field running and riding with the chicken-chasers. This year, he took a different approach. Inspired by Avedon's "In the American West", Lance set-up a mobile portrait studio.

The Mobile Portrait Studio Set-up:

Above is a picture of the set-up... For the solid background, Lance built a frame to hold a roll of white paper. The frame, made of steel pipe purchased at Home Depot, fits onto the roof racks of the van. For traveling, the frame comes off the roof racks and folds up nicely to fit under the backseat of the van. The paper hangs from about 7-1/2 ft. tall or so from the top of the frame. One of the tricks was keeping the paper flat in the wind -- He mostly did this by taping the edges of the paper to the van and using clamps as weights on the bottom edge of the paper.

It was important to set up in the shade for the affect he was going for; otherwise, shadows would cut across the subject and background. Also, he hung towels behind the paper because the paper wasn’t totally opaque and showed some background shapes.

The light bounce was just two pieces of white foam core hinged together with gaffer tape.

Sample Portraits:

All images in this posting are Copyright 2006 Lance Rosenfield.