A Deschutes River Portrait Photography Session

A Family of Four Pose for Their Portraits on the Deschutes River

A couple weeks ago I got an inquiry for portraits. It’s always really exciting to get an inquiry. Reminds me of seeing a big present under the tree at Christmas and then getting to open it to see what’s inside. Since COVID I’m super thankful for anyone wanting me to be their photographer.

So Lauren contacted me and asked if I could do portraits of her and her husband, Steve, AND their two dogs Luna and Summit. Since pet portraits are one of my specialties and the direction I’m hoping to go in, it was a no brainer to jump at the opportunity. Plus not one but two pets outdoors created a really good challenge to overcome.

She works in sales for the North Face and he works in sales for Outdoor Research. They met in Colorado at a sales event.

The Deschutes River is my go-to place for portraits and the section just upstream from Big Eddy presents some good opportunities for portraits at the picnic spot a half mile up and the stand of pine trees the trail weaves through. My daughter, Eimear (rhymes with femur) has posed for many an experimental portrait in those trees, but I had never done paying customers there before.

When I first moved to Bend in the spring of 2000 with an ex-girlfriend and my beloved German shepherd, Kate, the Deschutes was a fun place to explore and watch kayakers. Kate and I walked up and down that trail almost every day for her entire life. We saw some cool stuff, like the time a herd of elk crossed the river just down from Dillon Falls. A plethora of kayakers playing in Saus Hole just downstream from Big Eddy when the water is high. Owls, coyotes howling, eagles flying - we saw a many inspiring sights on the river during her twelve years with me. Without knowing it, different sections of the river, the light, reflections, and seasonal changes sank into my mind for future portrait photography reference.

A couple days before the portraits I went down to the river with my Fuji XT-5 and 14mm lens to get a couple ideas for compositions. The trees make nice framing elements and repeated shapes for backgrounds. A person just needs to use the right lens with the right light to get some nice ideas going.

For this session I brought and used my Fuji XT-5 with the 14mm lens for the first time as a money-making rig. The lens is easily as sharp as any lens a person can use. It’s the lens I used for the lead picture in this post. The one small issue I was having was the camera was turning off too fast and took too long to reboot. Plus it’s not quite as fast as the Canon cameras. But that’s just when using it right next to the Canons. If it were by itself, using it under the guns of time and patience it would work perfectly fine.

The Profoto with the pop-up three foot octa box was of course put to use. That’s my go-to setup these days. For many years it was the beauty dish with the grid. The beauty dish really makes some nice light. But then a year ago I saw a webinar comparing it to an octa and learned some valuable information: most importantly the beauty dish sucks light while the octa pushes the light out. When shooting outdoors a person needs to maximize the light to overpower the sun. Plus the octa doesn’t make the hard shadows of the beauty dish.

The light in the top photo doesn’t look like I was using a light on the cold, cloudy morning last Saturday. Lauren, Steve, and the two dogs stand out without drawing attention to the light. Just the way I like portraits to look.

This second photo puts them more into the look of the trees. I of course had to see what it looked like in a slightly toned and burned edge black and white. But again, the light looks mostly natural unless you really think about it. The trees really work nicely in this one for me. We were all just standing on the trail getting the shot.

The dogs posed the usual dog challenge. These samoyeds are real characters. Their facial expressions change every ten seconds. The bigger one, Summit, is addicted to water and wanting to jump into the water. My first idea was to get them all at the picnic site upstream from the pine tree stand, and I gave it the old college try. Summit had the idea he should be given the chance to jump into the water. So we didn’t really get anything in the 25F morning. I was imagining Lauren and Steve thinking to themselves: “Who is this guy? Why did we hire him?” Quickly adapting and changing ideas is something I’ve learned to do since working 15 years as a newspaper photographer, so we changed first to a walking towards me on the trail picture and then to the trees.

I was able to get them the pictures the next day on Sunday. That’s another lesson from newspaper work: fast turnaround on deadline. In the modern world nobody wants to wait around for their pictures.

Lauren sent the always fun-to-see inquiry on a Sunday and got her pictures the next Sunday.