Day 87

87/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

This is my friend Miko.

I don't actually remember when I met Miko. It could have been in middle school, it might have been in high school, I feel like we just kind of came together at some point. He's one of those friends where you can go months without talking and as soon as you see each other it's right back to where you left off, we've never really had a start or a stop. He was also one of the first people to tell me that he was diggin' this project and said he couldn't wait to get his picture taken. I couldn't let him down, so I started thinking about what we could do. His main hobbies are sleeping and xbox, and neither of those would make very good pictures. 


If you know Miko, you know that he's always smiling. The kid will laugh at just about anything, it's almost impossible to catch him in a down moment. For his portrait, I thought it'd be cool to do something serious and formal, a side of Miko that is rarely seen. Almost immediately Dan Winters came to mind. Miko loved the pictures, and we had our idea. 


He came over and we talked as I set things up. For this picture, I used a SB-24 with a 1/8" grid on the camera left side, lighting Miko's face. Then I used another SB-24 with an umbrella above the camera to fill in the shadows with some soft light. Finally, I used an SB-25 with a gel (peacock blue, because Miko is that kind of guy) to light the background. Miko surprisingly held it together, and it was over pretty quickly. He had a change of clothes with him, and the lights were there, so we figured we'd shoot one more look for fun. 





For this one, we used the same gridded SB-24 on the right side this time, and I used a bare SB-24 behind Miko and to the left to give him a kick. It's kind of like the school picture he never took, considering our colors were navy and gold. It was funny to see Miko serious, he's now ready for his career as a model. I'm stoked with the pictures, it was nice to do some portraits again, and it was really cool that I could set up a makeshift studio in my garage and it actually worked.