Wrinkles and Lighting

A common banter among headshot clients is that they ask me to photoshop away their wrinkles. My normal response is no, but I would say that there's a way of making it unnoticeable naturally. Yes, wrinkles are a natural feature of people's faces and there is no reason to totally remove them. Lighting, however, plays a key role on this common concern for clients. On this specific session, I photographed Janis using two different lighting setups.

The first shot is my upgraded headshot setup. I normally use a single umbrella with a flash. Nowadays, I use three strip lights which lighten up the wrinkles the natural way. This time I used a black background instead of my usual white for headshots for a change. 

Here's our ultralight headshot setup before we disassembled it to do the portrait setup.

On the second photo, I used one of my portrait lighting set ups. I love creating dramatic shadows through this set up. Though the lighting effect may pronounce the wrinkles more, I love the way it creates depth and character to the photo.  But I would not use this setup for headshots as the purpose of headshots is not for dramatic images. 

Note: Identity Headshots was formerly called Fotojorno.