I'm not sure where there idea hit me but I've been glad that I went with it. Since I love to photograph things in a layered manner it often bothers me that I have to deal with things that are very 2 dimensional looking. I often think that it would be cool to be able to peer through something to get to the subject. But in studio-esque situations which are actually on location that often is either in abundance or non existent. Even if you have things to shoot through it may not give any context to the photo. Rather it may be cool but what else? Well how about maybe giving some context or a particular feel to the image?
About 4 years ago the idea hit me to go to the hardware store an buy a sheet of plexiglass for this shoot I was going to do about a guy who runs a company that does new ideas in marketing. After talking to him on the phone it was apparent that his office is a boring set of cubes and that turning it into something interesting would be a challenge. The surrounding area, like taking him to the park et al, didn't make much sense and certainly wouldn't explain anything about him or the story which was about the idea of narrow casting your marketing message. I show to his office and it was, well, a plain office space with a lot of bicycles in it. So I whip out my sheet of plexi and have him diagram out a most basic idea of what the whole thing is about while I start setting up my stuff. I mount the plexi on two stands with clamps and have him get behind it with his pen to go "John Madden" as if he's drawing out the thing in real time. It finally looked like this:
One soft box to camera left and one at right dialed back as fill with a third bearing a blue gel to turn the boring white wall something more interesting. The trick was that plexi is very reflective and it showed everything behind me. I had to do a lot of gyrations of angling the plexi, the camera and blocking highlights to make it look clean. But for my first time doing this it worked out pretty well and I learned how to do it better for the next time. The diagram was like this.
I've kept that sheet of plexi and have only pulled it out a few times because there just isn't that great a need for it. But when I can I do. I was commissioned to shoot a portrait of a woman, ok it was actually my wife no joke, who wrote an article about a particularly difficult time in her life and how she got through it. I wanted something moody but wasn't depressing looking. I wanted her to be strong while obviously in a difficult situation. Or something like that. I know that her wearing a silly hat was out of the question.
Since I don't have a studio I put this together in my office.
I made a 1/2 mix of water and glycerin in a spray bottle to make rain drops that would stay put. It a rainy evening ya know! I used a black muslin for the background and draped that over two saw horses with a half sheet of plywood to make a table where I put the lit candles on. There is an extra small softbox acting as a hair light that is gelled full CTO to make it match with the light from the candles behind her. I used one of my 11" sports reflectors with a 1/4CTO gel just out of frame because I wanted it to be very close to her and have no spill onto the shiny plexi. At camera right is a medium softbox with a 1/2 CTB to act as cool evening light. That but to control reflections I had a black card keeping most of the blue off of her as well as keeping a few reflections under control. The other trick was to keep the camera out of the shot as the plexi easily made a distinct reflection of it so I draped it in black muslin and triggered the camera remotely. Diagram is like this:
Then shortly after doing that I had to shoot a local famed chocolatier. The making of chocolates is messy but most of the work is done in stainless steel machines. The hand work is well hand work and isn't very interesting looking plus you have the issue of scale where a person and a one inch truffle doesn't show well. So out came the plexi. The fun/hard/insane part was adhering her sweets to the front of the plexi to have them suspended in air so to speak. They didn't hold for very long but we got the shot.
For this I side lit the chocolates to get the most texture and shine from them. I knew that soft lighting them would make them look flat and uninteresting. But side lighting her would be unflattering so I put grid spots on the side lights to keep them from spilling. Then I put a small softbox on a boom to be right over the plexi to give her soft light. Then a touch of hair/separation light over the black portable backdrop. Again the camera was draped in black and I used the Live View on my Nikon D700 triggered via my laptop to direct her and make the final exposure. Diagram below:
Well after that my $20 sheet of plexi is pretty beaten up but it's served me well.
When shooting color film you had to learn that and had no help previsualizing your shot. Photogs would often find a film that they liked and basically only use that one. Otherwise you might not realize how this scene or skin tone would be either made lifeless or garish by the way that your film saw things.
Digital has changed that as you can to a large degree when shooting RAW render the scene anyway you want it. For quite a while I wanted to see my flat and boring looking RAW files to look like themselves when I was doing an image review on my cameras LCD screen. But then I realized that once I found a look in Photoshop that made me happy 95% of the time I could simulate that by changing the color curve and saturation of the jpg processing my cameras do. The deal is that even if you are shooting RAW the camera makes an imbedded jpg into the RAW file for the preview. Thus the file isn’t processed but the preview is so I can get the feel of how the image will most likely look like when it comes out of Photoshop.
But when I started the Avery Brewing project I had in my head the idea of doing it in B&W for three reasons. 1) it makes things more timeless looking, 2) most of the brewing process takes place in white-ish rooms with big stainless steel containers and tubes so there isn’t much color content to begin with and 3) it puts the emphasis on form and lighting which I really dig.
So I decided to use a warm tone B&W mode for the shoots so that when I’m checking on my shots the tones “feel” right. I still will do the toning in P-Shop but after taking a few shots with my normal straight color preview preset and the warm tone, the B&W made me more inspired by a mile. And isn’t that what we want – to be inspired to make photos?
Here’s another from the Avery barrel room. They use a stainless steel nail as a simple plug for taking samples without introducing air into the barrel. For some reason the silhouetted pliers reminds me of that famously manipulated image by Gene Smith of Albert Schweitzer where he used like 5 negatives with the handles of tools in the foreground. Hmmm?
Technicals: Nikon D700 and Nikon AF-D 35mm f/2.0. ISO 400, f/2.0 @ 1/30th.
This is from a shoot I did that was made possible by few things.
1) A great subject. Vivian is a great gal with a stunning look. She was superb to work with and was perfect for the modern urban look we were going for.
2) PocketWizards. This was done with two strobes but one was very much behind me and there was no easy way to trigger them with my beloved Nikon CLS system. The Wizards make the "you gotta be kidding me!" totally possible.
3) Willingness to risk. While I was setting this up, in an alley just steps away from a very busy street where lots of evening revelers going to and from clubs I heard one person with a camera say something like "that won't work. It's too dark" Ha! I used the darkness as a low fill light and let my two strobes do all the work.
The setup is pretty simple: I had an SB-800 up about 10 feet on a stand to my left and behind me about ten feet using a Zoot Snoot to create the spot of light on her. I had another SB-800 low and parallel to the wall giving separation to her legs. That was handled by my Voice Activate Light stand named Kim. I used my workhorse Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 @ f/5.6 on my Nikon D700 set to ISO 200 for 1/8th of a sec. Like this:
I triggered the strobes with my PocketWizards. Once we wound Vivian up good and tight the rest was a total snap. I really think that it's so much easier to light things when you don't have to crazily overpower the ambient. These strobe in the dark situations are to me far more interesting than just finding a way to overpower the sun. Besides, without a day lit scene to work with you can do more with lights and make the photo look "natural" because in dark situations we are use to seeing dim light being reflected by all kinds of surfaces and light sources. In this case I made the light on the stand similar to a street light and the low light the reflection of something else.
When people ask me how to make their photographs better I often tell them to simplify their images. I tell them to clearly show their subjects and get distracting elements out of the frame. This is mostly because beginners compositions tend to be too loose and have lots of stuff in the frame that has nothing to do with the subject. This is what I call the "brown dot" photo. You know what I mean. You friend/family member comes back from vacation and excitedly shows you this awesome photo of a wild critter that they got. But what is in the picture is a bunch of trees, rocks, sky and a little brown speck that you are told is a bear, moose, wildebeest, bigfoot, whatever.
Get close. Get tight. Show me the subject and get the junk out of the way! This advice usually improves their photography greatly if they take it to heart. But frankly a complex composition is a very advanced technique. When you have lots of layers in your shot you have a much greater amount of images that simply don't work. However sometimes sticking things in your frame supports the subject or in other ways helps the shot. In other ways they save the shot.
Case study #1: Kate
Kate is a consultant and works out of an office only slightly larger than your coat closet. Really. I was assigned to do a portrait but her office wasn't going to cut it. The entry way of the building had this wall of frosted glass and some comfy chairs so I had her back lit by the windows. I put my small Chimera soft box slightly to camera right and a 10degree spot grid behind her at camera right. There was a flower arrangement nearby so I took it and with my 28-70 set to 70mm and wide open at f/2.8 I moved the flowers around right on the lens hood until I got an interesting color pattern to frame her with. The dark stuff at the top of the frame and the tan-ish blob is the flowers.
Case study #2: Lee
Much like the situation with Kate i.e. nothing to work with for context, Lee is an administrator of an outreach program for immigrants. He's not a teacher but a desk dude. I met him at a school where they do english instruction. After some shots of him in a classroom situation I noticed that at the front doors the school had a display of soda bottles for a project on plastic recycling. They were mostly clear but I knew that if I had Lee stand under one of the ceiling lights as a "spot light" and color corrected for the tungsten bulb the bottles would go blue. So I positioned him and went outside. Again that's my 28-70 at 70mm and f/2.8.
Case study #3 messy eats:
There is a gyros cart that shows up only late on weekends in downtown Boulder to cater to the party/drinking crowd. I was doing a story on places like this one and while hanging with some gyros fans I got this shot. The looming and out of focus dude on the right makes for a very layered frame and makes you feel like you are right in the thick of things. I tend to find that frames like this work better of the big blob is on the right as we tend to read images from left to right. This was my 28mm f/1.4 @ f/2.8.
Case study #4 Pari:
Was doing a profile piece on Pari, who is a chef from India, and it talked about how family centered the cusine is. I was spending some time with her family and while she was playing with her daughter at the kitchen sink I made this. I saw the cut lemons and glass on the counter so I put my lens up against them for color and texture. You can't tell what the objects are but they create a more 3 dimentional composition than if I didn't have something in there to frame the moment with.
These shots are almost always much harder to make successful than a clean frame. If there isn't something immediately noticable to layer in the frame I tend to get cleaner "straight" shots first. But after that is done I try to find a way to get something with more depth. Usually the answer is to let things get wierd. They don't often work but when they do it's pretty neat-o.
Some may have heard about a certain news photographer from Denmark whos photos from Haiti were disqualified from the final round of a major photo competition because he worked the be-jebus out of his entries in Photoshop. He didn't add/remove stuff like some other guys lately who have come under the watchful eye of journalistic ethics. Nope. Here he took rather boring images and cranked the color, contrast and burn/dodge tools into the relm of "that's nothing like what the scene looked like at all".
This got me thinking about how for ever I have been, on non-news "its the truth yer Honor" photos, actually been doing essentially straight prints. By that I mean if I was to be shooting film and after processing it, if it's a negitive, I would pop it into the enlarger and make a color correct print with adequate contrast and minimal cropping. No burning, dodging or selective anything. Basically taking the image out of the camera and adjusting it to print well without doing anything to be creative to it after the fact. Now when I was making gallery prints I'd do all kinds of stuff to bring out my vision. As Ansel Adams said "The negitive is the score but the print is the performance" and I wanted great performances. I was/am am pretty darned good print maker but in the news world that's a bad thing so I have left that stuff at the door, so to type.
However for some things where it's not reality to begin with, like portraits, the act of making one is from the get-go a manipulated situation. So if you are going to have your subject sit here, wear this outfit, turn your head this way, hold the chicken like this and put a few lights around to set the mood, why can't you make a few adjustments to the image to bring out what you want to show? With in reason of course.
I have a few actions set up in Photoshop so that they take the RAW image that I shoot, always RAW muh-friend!, and create adjustment layers for all the things that I may need. These are: a sharpening layer, a color boost, levels adjustment, curve adjustment preset, a selective color layer, a burn/dodge layer and a layer with a whole lot of mid boost that I call a "fill light". Once I open up the RAW file it takes Photoshop about 3 seconds to make all these layers. With the preset color and curves I have in my main action I usually just flatten the image and start shipping it to the client. But with other things I'll get a bit funky with the tools at hand. Take this shot which is the straight RAW file: BTW, everyone say "HI!" to Leah.
It's really flat but that's the way that a RAW file looks. I wanted to bring out her eyes and add some depth to the image but not make it look "worked". So here is the image with the layers and masks I created:
It's pretty simple really. I masked out the color saturation to her skin but not her lips and eyes. I applied the sharpening only to her eyes, eyebrows and lips. I did a slight edge burn and boosted the white point on her face for more contrast. Using the "fill light" mid tone boost I increased mid tone separation in her eyes and hair. Total time to produce: maybe 4 minutes.
Final result:
I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be kicked out of any competitions for my toning - ever. With Leah I didn't use the clone or healing tools. I didn't add or remove any "content" but instead just tried to bring more focus on her. The "straight print" didn't work that well. The saturation on her skin was wrong and the contrast was weak. With some minor adjustments I think that she looks "right" to me. At least that is how I felt about her when I was making the photos. Having the emotional content as well as the informational content be true is, to me, rather important.
Technicals: Nikon D700 daylight WB, 1/60th sec ISO320. Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8 SB-800 into 43" shoot through umbrella at camera left and and SB-800 at camera right set to -1.7 controlled via CLS.
Photographer Dave Black has been a huge inspiration to me from the moment that I met him. I was at a photo conference and had some time to kill and saw that this guy who works for Sports Illustrated and Newsweek was going to talk about freelancing. About 35 of us showed up to the hour long talk and in walks this tall thin dude who walks up the the podium and promptly does a hand stand. "Now that I have your attention - let's talk about photography!" That was my introduction to Dave. His energy is amazing and he has always pushed his artistic boundaries. He's visually fearless. I picked up a lot of things from him and one was "Don't assume that you have to photograph anything in a particular way. If you are used to using a 400mm lens to shoot baseball, try using an 85mm instead. You will be forced to find different images than the ones that you expect to see. It will be hard at first but they are there."
So even though we all have a comfortable zone of approaching subject visually sometimes it's good to force yourself into something that is going to throw a variable into the mix. If you tend to use your 70-200 lens most of the time, shoot some with a fixed 35mm. If you typically bring out 4 lights to do a portrait, do some with just ambient and a reflector. Sometimes the "wrong" tool for the job is better.
For my news/documentary work I tend to stay in the 28-85mm range for a number of reasons. Mostly because it allows me to be physically close to my subjects and show an intimacy both personally and visually. Also at the 3-5 foot "conversation" range any lens longer than an 85 is very tight and won't focus close enough. Anything wider than a 24mm gets quite distorted when hands or feet get so close to the lens. So for those kind of shoots I tend to either have two bodies (one with a 24/28mm fixed and another body with my 85mm f/1.4) or one body with my 28-70mm f/2.8.
I was assigned to make images for a story about an aerial dance studio and decided to bring with me the wrong lens for the job: my 14mm. I initially got that lens when I was shooting my Nikon D200's with their 1.5x crop so that I would have a very wide 21mm equivalent for things like architectural shots. Since I've been using the full frame D700's though the 14mm has become the "insanely wide lens" that hasn't really been used because it's soooo wide. But I thought "What the heck!"
After getting what I knew would satisfy the client I put on the 14mm and started doing what you are not supposed to do: stick it very close to people. Why? The foreshortening becomes extreme and very distorted/odd looking. So what?! It could be cool. Also rather than framing things through the viewfinder I blind shot nearly everything. I did use Live View for some initial rough lining up of shots but since they were moving about I couldn't really "compose" in a normal sense. End result? I loved the 14mm shots more than the other ones done with less lens induced weirdness.
Now this approach doesn't work very often, or it becomes boring, but here it was a load of fun. Sometimes talking the wrong approach is just the thing to do.
I was walking back from doing a shoot with my friend Aimee when we walked past this alley. It was a cool and lightly overcast day but I saw something other than the boring scene before me. I saw something rather film noir-ish. I didn't have any lightstands with be but hey - that doesn't stop us now does it? There was a light near the doorway that I spotted that was hanging flopily by a wire and found that I could wedge the strobe under it and positioned it so as to essentially emulate the light from the light it was attached to. I then found a plastic chair behind the dumpster down the way and took one of the large rubber bands that I keep on each of my SB-800's to keep gels attached and rubber banded the strobe to the chair. I positioned it low and to camera right to act as a fill light and cast the tall shadows that so often appear in noir films. I wanted the high light on Aimee to be a bit hot and since she was wearing black and her hair is very dark that wouldn't blow her totally out as the dark coat and hair would keep her face framed and bring out her eyes. I saw the scene in B&W so I wasn't worried about the colors, just the tones. I had her set into the doorway and clutch her coat and look over her shoulder as if in fear of who was coming down the alley. I dialed the low strobe back 2 stops, under exposed the ambient by 3 stops and did the whole thing in about 7 frames.
Technicals: Nikon D700 ISO 200 daylight WB. Nikon AF-D 50mm f/1.4 @ f/5.6, 1/250th. Two Nikon SB-800's controled by D700's built in flash as a commander.
