Let’s face it: often times as a photographer, you’re pressed for time. Hopefully you’re never late for a shoot, but when we start working with light and other people, we’re involved with highly dynamic variables. On a clear day, light is pretty predictable, but sometimes that sneaky set of clouds will set in right before sunset, and you’ve lost the shot you were looking for, only to find another (again, hopefully). And people, well…will always be people, you included! The point of all this is that sometimes, you only have a small window of opportunity to get the shot you need!

Ever since I made this portrait, I keep going back to it, remembering how much pressure there was to get the shot under the particular environmental conditions. Randall Jeter, Ph.D., is a bacterial geneticist at Texas Tech University, and I was photographing him for a university research publication a couple of years back. Instead of photographing him in his lab with the prototypical white lab coat on and a microscope nearby, I decided to put him in a field of spring wheat. I couldn’t begin to intelligently explain what Dr. Jeter researches (if you want to find out, click here), but after we spoke on the phone the day before, I had an idea that part of his agenda was analyzing the water on the Southern High Plains. So, where else but an irrigated field would work the best!

OK, talk about working fast (this is why I love reflectors). It was windy. Real windy! Speedlites and umbrellas/softboxes are out of the question in West Texas when the wind is blowing over 20 mph, I don’t care how much weight you have on the stands. Luckily, I had two assistants in tow for this shoot, and each of them grabbed a reflector. I don’t go anywhere without a Westcott 6-in-1 reflector set (I like the 42″ version), and in quick situations like this, it comes in super handy!

So, how was this shot put together? The subject was standing with his back to the sun, which was coming in from extreme back and right. It was coming in at so much of a direct angle, that I was a bit afraid of overexposing the sky, but it held. Next, one assistant standing in line with the sun on camera left, bounced light into Dr. Jeter with the daylight reflector. The other assistant (standing  barely to camera right) used one of the diffuser panels included with the reflector kit to bounce much, much softer light back in to the dark shadows the initial reflector created. The key here was not to bounce to much fill light in, taking away the drama in the light. I used a telephoto lens to draw that background in a bit, making sure the background served a compositional and storytelling purpose for the shot, and that’s it!

We were done with this location in less than five minutes. Thank goodness for reflectors!