Drabbles Show Wrap-Up
Self-portraits, sometimes not a good idea
I’m a bit of a strange person. Sometimes get this urge to “DO SOMETHING!” that is very difficult to ignore. And being a portrait photographer, my work requires at least one other person. And since I currently live alone, that only leaves one person to shoot. Self portrait time.
Impact of Focal Length on Portraits
A lot has been written about the ‘right’ focal length lenses to use when taking portraits. Mainly, most such writers claim that a longer lens is a so-called portrait lens. I have written a number of times that I generally disagree. Any lens can be a portrait lens. In fact, I almost always use a wide-angle lens in my work. The longest I own is the Canon 85mm/1.2L which I find myself moving against (though lately I’ve been forcing myself to use it more)
Planning an Exhibition part 2
Planning an Exhibition
I have the opportunity to show some of my work at a gallery in Sept. This is exciting stuff, and so I thought I’d write a bit about the process so that it may be used as a primer of sorts for those of you who find yourself in a similar situation.
A drabble is precise work of fiction of exactly 100 words. These photographs are intended to be the same: a short story, a moment which needs to be imagined and expanded in the mind of the viewer. It’s a voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s world, sometimes fantastic or silly; other times scary or even sad.
Michelangelo Eat Your Heart Out
Stealing from the Masters
Most people are surprised when they hear that I have no education in photography. I went to college for music and then somehow ended up here. In the modern age of digital cameras, you learn by shooting. Take some pictures, look at them, repeat. There’s also plenty of reading to do on the net and in books, but experimentation (just a fancy word for messing around) is the key.
Personally I get fascinated by other people’s pictures. I don’t actually spend too much time looking at other people’s work, mostly because it makes me frustrated and cranky. But often I get this urge to figure out how they did it. For me, this is the best way to learn about light. Find photographers you admire and try to emulate their work. Not so that you can mimic them perfectly, but so you can take their tricks and add them to your arsenal and make them your own. As the famous quote from Picasso said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
This might be a good time to mention that while in this essay I’m talking about other photographers, it’s also a time honored tradition to steal from painters as well. The only problem I’ve found with this is that painters often take liberties with the direction, quality, and quantity of light. They’re using their eyes and imaginations to see, you’ve got to use a camera which isn’t quite as good at it. Ok, back to the show already in progress.
There are two big giveaways for light. Eyes and shadows. If you can see the eyes of the subject, often you can tell exactly what kind of light setup the photographer was using. Pick up one of the magazines when you’re in line at the grocery store and get real close and look at the covergirl’s eyes. Most of the time you can see a light or two or three in the reflection. And moreover, you can see the relative size of them and often you get enough information to tell exactly what they used. Ribs on an umbrella, or tell-tale signature of a ringlight; which brings me to shadows. Always look at the shadows in an image because they can tell you the direction that the light came from and whether the source was hard or soft.
Put this all together with some experimenting and a good friend who is willing to sit and be shot while you kerfutz stuff and you’ll be learning right and left in no time flat.
I do all of this all the time, ask anyone who ever spends any time with me, and you can see the results in my work. The object here isn’t to do exactly what they do, but rather figure out HOW they do what they do so you know how to get that look when you want it. Here are a few examples to get you going…
Harder spot with ringlight fill like Dan Winters:
One big light and simple background à la Greenfield-Sanders:
Two light pin-up like Seliger did for the Vanity Fair series:
You get the point…
DIY Canvas Background Instructions
I wanted a small canvas background to use for portraits, but I didn’t want to spend a fortune for a pre-made one. Plus DYI experiments are always fun. So I called my trusty photographer friend Meg Watcher and we dove in with both feet.
Ingredients:
– 50″ wide, primed canvas from the local art store. We went with 2 yards each, but next time I’m going to go a bit longer by a foot or so.
– 2 Quarts of flat latex paint. The trick here is to go for one lighter and one darker to give your canvas some contrast other than the white and one paint color. Obviously gray or near gray is the way most people go, but there’s nothing to say against pushing it cooler or warmer.
– Paint rollers/pan/plastic to keep stuff clean.
– Sandpaper
– Time.
———————————
Step One
Use the roller to paint the canvas with color #1. I went with the lighter color first, but I think either would do. Don’t do a good job and cover the canvas well. The point is to make a distressed, old looking, random background. Then go do something else for a few hours while that dries.
Step Two
Next paint over with the second paint. Obviously with a different pattern of coverage. You should se some of the first color, as well as a little of the blank canvas coming through from underneath. When you’re through let this dry overnight. It’s got to be really dry for the next step.
Step Three
Take some sandpaper, I went with a 150 grade, and lightly sand over the now dried paint to ‘wear’ the surface a bit. You’re trying to make it grittier and to remove some of the shine that even flat pain will have. This stage, like the others really, is to taste. Everyone will be looking for a different effect here.
I stopped here, but it was only my first try. We’ve got plenty of paint, so I think I’m going to get some more canvas and try again. Part of me wants to put more paint on this one. Basically use it as my starting point and go back to step 1. I’m not entirely sure it would work and I kinda like the way it ended up, so I think I’ll just try on a new one and leave this one alone.
Oh and Step Four
But a 4′ long 1″ dowel and staple it to one end of the canvas. This keeps it hanging flat and well as giving you something to wrap it up around without bending and messing it up.
The results can be seen in some of the portraits I’ve been doing lately. I think this one of George is pretty indicative. All in we spent about $50. Could be less if you’ve got paint lying around. Again, this is experiment #1, but might be a fun project for some of you.
Highlights, Skintones, and Newly Minted Doctors
An old friend came over this afternoon for some portraits. She just yesterday successfully defended her dissertation, so now I have to call her Dr Pillsbury. It’s all very intimidating, but huge congratulations go her way and I’ve very proud of my friend.
Anyway, while kerfutzing with the results, I thought it was about time to talk about some of my problems. Or rather, bring up some of the walls I find myself pushing against in my work and to start a discussion of how to overcome or at the very least difuse them.
My main problem lately is that I don’t like how digital renders highlights, and this is especially true when I’m shooting simple single light portraits like the one below. The image on the left is the mostly untouched RAW file, and on the right, my finished image. So now, let’s walk through this step by step as I did.
First I say, the original shot is overexposed, or at least it looks like it on her forehead. However using the eyedropper you can check and see that it’s no blown-out. In fact none of the channels are above 80% or so (I’ll use lightroom percentages instead of exact photoshop numbers just for simplicity). One could argue that the problem is my light, or more specifially that I need a fill on the other side so that the range isn’t as wide for the sensor. But that’s not really the problem. I’ve got plenty of detail in the shadows for my liking and again, the highlights aren’t blown. But somehow they look like crap.
The one thing that I constantly miss about film is the fact that it fights back. The same thing was true of analog tape in my recording days, try to push too much level onto it and it pushed back, effectively compressing the signal. Film does the same thing in highlights, regular negative film is pretty hard to get to blow-out. What you get is a compression of the highlights that leads to a much more pleasing, much more smooth transition. In digital, even when not blown, I find myself adding in a curves layer with a mask to try to give skin some contrast instead of it not being just a big block of almost solid color as it is on her forehead in the first image.
What I want is something like the image on the right. The kind of light you see people like Annie Leibovitz getting in her Vanity Fair portraits. It’s smooth and contrasty, but not harsh. I think that this would be much easier to obtain in the film days, but I know Annie shoots digital now, so it must be possible. So far what I’ve come up with and need to experiment more with, is the idea of underexposing and bring it up. Now I know that it’s counter to every rule about exposing to the right and then pulling back that you’ve ever read, but somehow my skintones don’t look as much like shit when I under and pull up. Essentially this is what that Highlight Tone Priority stuff does on these new Canon cameras. Lately I’ve been shooting with that on for just that reason, but shut it off today because the shadow noise was bothering me and to me the images look more crunchy and ‘digital’ with it on. Loosing a lot of that Canon CMOS smoothness. I’ve got to do more experimenting to really bear this out.
Today however, I had the raw files I had and you’ve got to work with what you got. So I started by using an adjustment brush in Lightroom with an exposure -1 stop or so. I used this to paint in the blown-out looking (but not really blown out) sections on her face, in an attempt to bring them back in line with the rest. I then added another adjustment brush with a +.25 exposure to add a little light to her eyes. Even still, the whole thing had that flat look, so I pulled up the ‘fill light’ slider a bit and the main exposure down a half stop or so and moved the contrast up a tad. What I ended up with it is basically what’s on the right. There was some hair and minor curves work in Photoshop, but the heavy lifting was in Lightroom, which I’ve been doing more with lately in an attempt to tie my hands a little bit and not do as much post. I find that the adjustment brushes are sometimes hard to control and not nearly as responsive as brushes in photoshop, and I’m on a really fast machine.
Any thoughts or experience that should come to bear would be appreciated.
And here’s the final image bigger.
Speedlights Impressed
Earlier this week I had a couple of days of shoots for a magazine article. 3 people over two days in three very different settings. Day one was two people in midtown Manhattan, and then a third on day two in White Plains. Due to the time between the shoots on Monday and the travel on Tuesday, I wanted to travel as light as possible. So in the end, Meg and I went on these shoots with just a couple of speedlights for lighting. Those, plus a travel stand, 32″ softlighter, 36″ reflector/diffuser, and the IR controller, all fit very nicely into the backpack Meg carried. Much smaller and lighter than the AcuteB setup would have been. Maybe McNally’s book from last week also fed into my decision, but I wanted to see what I could do with the little guys. To be honest, I’m pretty impressed.
First shoot was outside in a shaded courtyard. Cool skylight was coming down from between the tall buildings so fill wasn’t too much of an issue. So I had Meg shoot the 580EX through the diffuser to the subjects right hand side to give the shots a little drama. Now, I know this is no big deal, but for a guy like me who usually uses available light or a single big source to mimic sunlight, I was ‘getting fancy’. This worked well, though we did have to fiddle a bit with the FEC to get the output of the flash at the right level, a stop or so above the ambient.
Later that afternoon we shot subject number two in his office. I was told that the office was nice. It really wasn’t. Not terrible, but certainly not interesting from a photo perspective, and quite dark with a very warm wood tone to everything. So we did setup the 580EX on the stand inside the softlighter as a key, with Meg off to the side again with the 550EX shooting through the diffuser as a kicker. I was pleasantly surprised to have the 580 talk to the camera from even inside the softlighter (it was the only way we could get it to setup) I guess the fabric was thin enough to let the IR beam in. Getting the ratio between the two lights too some more fiddling. On the Canon system, you can control the ratio between the two lights on different channels from 8:1 all the way to 1:8. In the end though, I found it much easier to just have Meg manually bump the light up or down from the flash itself using exposure compensation.
The third shoot was in a very modern office with some bright orange textured walls and frosted glass. Using a similar setup to the last, we used one light on the stand with Meg coming in from the side or back. This setting however, was more conducive to photos, so I was probably most happy with this third set of pictures. The orange wall made a nice backdrop, and the indirect window light in his office made for some nice classic shots.
All in all, I think I’m sold on the speedlights. There are limits of course. If you need a lot of light or a bigger source, then you’re talking the big guns. If I were outside and want to shoot into a 60″ softlighter for example, then I’ll bring the AcuteB. But for this kind on thing inside where you can control the ambient, and shoot at iso 400 or 800 so that you don’t need too much power from the flashes, it’s ideal. Color temp is an issue. So I think I’m going to look into buying a set of gels like they use on strobist all the time. I’m not totally psyched by how they attach, the whole thing sounds a bit kludgy and messy to me, but I’ll learn to deal. I was also impressed with the STE2 Speedlight controller. We didn’t have too much trouble with the flashes not firing. It’s not ideal outside in wide-open spaces in direct sunlight, but if you’re in shadow with line-of-sight or inside where the beam can bounce around a bit, it’s pretty perfect. I was looking at those new pocket wizards (on backorder at B&H) which do TTL. Basically, the same thing we did, except via radio instead of IR. But I’m not sure I need them right now. On the rare occasion that I’m out in sun with speedlights, I can just use my current wizards and manually set the flash power.
Also of interest is the fact that when I came home and started messing with the files, I found myself doing less processing. Or more precisely, I did my normal stuff and then backed off a lot on the opacity. Not sure if it was because of the more dramatic lighting on-site or what, but it’s an interesting development for me. We’ll see where it leads.
Subscribe on iTunes
Podcast RSS Feed