If you were to live on a desert island….

I love the old desert island questions – such as – if you were going to live on a desert island and could only listen to the music of one composer to while away to hours, who would it be? The correct answer is – Mozart – at least for me.

I shoot a variety of images – landscapes, product shots, abstracts, family images for holiday cards, fashion pictures, etc. But I have to say, if I were to live on a desert island and could only shoot one type of photograph, it would be portraits.

In some ways, headshots are the hardest images to shoot. The photographer has to gain the trust of the subject – at least to get a good image. To capture a picture that is going to get noticed, you have to try something different – in lighting, in the pose, the line of sight, or perhaps the colors. And yet, the trick is to do this without having the image look gimmicky.

My goal is to capture something of the client’s personality and spirit.

In this post, I’m showing seven portraits of women – some fairly recent, others going back a year or two.  In every person I photograph, the aim is do something unique that I’ve never done before.

We were trying different concepts in each of these images. There’s an old saying in photography: a good photograph is like a good joke – it doesn’t need explaining. I’m not going to explain these images – just let you look at them and react to them on your own.

Which images appeal to you? If you were to ask me to take a portrait of you, how would you imagine it?  How might we reveal your personality? Let’s talk – it would be a privilege for me to photograph you. And thankfully, I’m not on that island yet – my studio is close by and there’s plenty of shade and water there!

Working both in the studio and on location, photographer Blake Robinson serves the Connecticut communities of Darien, New Canaan, Stamford, Norwalk, Westport and Greenwich.