A Dramatic Christmas Card Photo Shoot

Photography Tips

Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre is the scene of this Christmas-styled photo shoot by photographer Klara G. The 100-year-old theater is hallowed ground for performing artists. Designed in white marble and detailed in pure gold, it can give you goosebumps. Klara G’s subjects are the nine actors playing the Ekdahl family in Fanny and Alexander, a Swedish play based on a film by the same name by legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman:

Klara got only about an hour to set up and make the portraits. For the shoot, she used two Profoto D1 monolights and two Profoto Umbrella Deep White, one of them with a diffuser. Several test shots were fired with the stand-ins to test the lights and the exposure while the main protagonists got ready.

The Profoto Umbrella Deep White with a Diffuser

Once everything was ready, the actors arrived on the stage. There was a brief prep talk after which she got to work.

Christmas Portrait

For a second look, everything was rearranged. This time the camera was to face the direction in which the audience would be sitting. For this part of the shoot, the photographer mixed the monolights with the ambient light, which incidentally was not that powerful and overwhelmingly yellow. The large Profoto Umbrella Deep White with the diffuser helped create a powerful and overbearing light source that took care of the problem. It helped her to concentrate on the human element of the images rather than worry about the lights.

Let it snow!

The quick set up made for some dramatic holiday-themed promotional materials.