It’s been a while since I’ve put up a Field Lighting post, and Junction kept me from posting anything too extensive, so I have a little catching up to do. In regards to the last Field Lighting post, nick b pretty much nailed it beyond naming the exact light source behind the model to camera right. Click here for the full explanation and an image of the setup.

If you’ve been around this site enough, you’ll know that I don’t necessarily market myself as a wedding photographer, or a photographer for anything near-related to that industry. There are several well-established image makers in my area that do a superb job of fulfilling that role, such as Kristin Bednarz, Lissa Anglin, Cris Duncan, Brittany Strebeck, and a host of other great shooters, some of which have been through my classes (they all grow up so fast, ha)! However, every now and then, I get a call for a wedding or engagement/couples shoot (I didn’t say I didn’t like it, I just focus mostly elsewhere), and I couldn’t pass up on the most recent opportunity.

One of my good friends called me a few months back talking about some shots he saw of mine in Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, and wanted to know if I wouldn’t mind shooting he and his fiance. Bryan knew I don’t do much of this type of work, but after hearing how and where he proposed, I instantly had a shot in my mind that I wanted to get. So, we booked a date, and it just so happened to be a day that my wife, Amanda, was free to assist (free?), and we booked it three hours to the shoot!

Bryan proposed at a hitching post he built on top of a hill on a ranch near Seymour, Texas, which is justifiably named cowboy country. After a leisurely ride one day with his then girlfriend, Sarah, he proposed to her on top of the hill after they tied up their horses. He described how the setting looked to me, and when we were there, the weather held out over the month between engagement and shoot enough to pretty much replicate what I had in mind: green cacti, small yellow and white flowers, green, Spring grass (pretty much the Garden of Eden environmental circumstances for said country).

Now on to the lighting. By the time we got to the post, the sun was on the horizon, and the light was diffuse enough to delineate some of the contrast on the land, but not so much that it was flat. Tying a horse up at the post, I had Bryan and Sarah stand about 25 feet away, and using a focal length of 47mm, framed the shot up like you see it. What we needed was a little more light to pop the couple off the background. This is a great place to have the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra lights around, and one simple light with the 39″ Rotalux softbox, powered down all the way on the B-channel (the lowest it will go). One little pop, that’s it. Nothing over the top compared to the ambient. No 2-stop difference between artificial and natural light sources (not that I’m opposed to that, just not in this case). Just enough light to make it work. This is exactly what I had in mind for this shot, and the meaning in their faces and their posture could not have been better. Ultimately, the cherry on top of this layered image is Bryan’s hat. The little things make me happy in the image: light, hat, expressions, small flowers…

Again, a quick post, but to be totally honest, when you conceptualize the image beforehand, particularly one that you know you want to get, then it’s not necessarily a drawn out process! Thanks to Bryan and Sarah for a great shoot, and good luck in the future!

Each Spring, I spend two weeks photographing in the Hill Country non-stop, and quite a bit of that is taken up with flowers, lush vegetation, rivers, and…er, flowers. Last year, I decided to do something different (in my book at least). You could say my inspiration came from Joel Sartore’s images of rare animals on black backgrounds, only I didn’t have a black background for the flowers I was photographing. All I had on me was a few Canon Speedlites and some Pocket Wizards. That’s all you need to knock those backgrounds to black, or at least close to it!

If you turn your flashes (I’m being brand-generic here, you’ll have to find your flash operator’s manual to decipher for your own gear) on high-speed sync, you can use insanely fast shutter speeds to kick the ambient light out of the frame whilst popping your subject with an ultra-fast dump of light! Most of the images in this post were actually shot at 1/8000 at f/2.8 with the ISO set to 50 (approximate, there are a few variations).

You can reverse engineer most of these light setups. I used two lights at back 45s on the Mexican Hats, and for the others, I just handled one flash to pull all the weight. TIP: use a sturdy tripod and a shutter release! A macro-lens or extension tubes don’t hurt as well!

Here’s a before and after look at how powered-up your flash will actually go (depending on when it  was made…I’ll let you figure that out).

Before:                                                                                       After:

Also, shooting with high-speed sync activated will drain your battery faster than normal, so it wouldn’t hurt packing extra batteries.

This is a fun technique, and it complements the repertoire of tools you keep in your flower shooting bag! Try it out next time you’re around a field of bluebonnets or pinwheels!

It’s been a little while for a Field Lighting post, but I have a few in the bag. Assignment work and research has been keeping me away, and it looks like it’s just going to get heavier in the near future, but hopefully I can squeeze in a few remnants of my existence on the World Wide Web during all the work!

I don’t know if I’ve ever written about on-camera flash, and Lord knows I don’t advocate it much, but every once in a while, it comes in handy (besides the occasional wedding)! The above photograph was taken on a Lesser Prairie Chicken lek where Blake Grisham and Nick Pirius were conducting research on this seemingly dwindling and fragile species. We sat in the pickup some 75 yards or more away from the lek until we were sure all the birds had flown off. We then drove up slowly, trying hard not to disturb any birds that may have been caught for analysis. If a bird is located, then it’s out of the pickup and quickly to the bird, back to the truck for measuring, banding, radio-collaring, etc., and then released. This literally does not take more than five minutes sometimes. The point is to not traumatize the bird or negate it’s surroundings in any obtrusive way while still ensuring proper research is conducted to help the species later down the road (the bird has a sock over its head to keep it calm).

OK, you can imagine this happens in a short amount of time, and by all means, less time than it would take to set up lighting for all the images taken from piling out of the pickup to scurrying back and through analysis. Enter the on-camera flash. Mobility is definitely the name of the game when you employ this stick of dynamite on TOP of your camera (whether it be an internal flash or attachable speedlite). My entire mentality of handling on-camera flash is the same as it were off. Constantly check your ambient, and work with it judiciously! Luckily, this bird was taken in right after the sun had set, so the sky was a nice blue, low in value, making my flash (a 580EX gelled amber) easily controlled at low settings, saving both battery and everyone’s eyes! Controlling the power on the on-camera flash can be handled in a variety of ways, just as if it were off-camera. I tend to work in AV mode with exposure compensation dialed down a bit in order to save the ambient.

The flash does have a diffuser placed over its bulb. On-camera flash is not nearly as pleasing without this affordable device. Shadows are hard enough with it on. In my opinion, hard shadows coming from the camera axis doesn’t say much in my own photography (there are others that would undoubtedly disagree, and for good reason).

This final shot is the release of the prairie chicken. Stayton Bonner, the writer for the story we were working on, was in for a very fast treat!

Dr. Robert Paine, a forensic anthropologist at the university, amazed me when we got to talking about the skull he is holding in the above image. To be brief, he described it as a multiple gunshot incident, and he explained to me that inferring from the hairline crack in the skull from the first shot, that it was definitely a homicide. I couldn’t do his explanation justice here, and in light of being accurate, I’ll leave it at that.

What I can explain, however, is the lighting! The idea for the story was to create edgy images, but not necessarily in the same light that you would see those characters on a CSI television show. That being said, it was important to interestingly tell the visual story of a science dealing with a certain unique character about it. The shot above is a composite of two images that I used to show the editor what was being shot, but both images were shot with exactly the same setup. The main light was a 39-inch Elinchrom Rotalux Octa placed behind, above, and to camera left of the subject. This kept the spill from invading the black background, which is essentially the black reflector up against a chalkboard. The second, “kicker” light on camera right was created by a Canon 580EX speedlite, gelled blue for the skull shot alone. It was powered less than the main light, used only as a tool to create an edge against the background and throw a little different color in to the mix.

I can’t ever leave the scene without a close-up, and it’s always good to take the subject’s facial characteristics in to consideration. Dr. Paine has a fairly unique face, and one rad beard. Same lighting, just a play on composition in the shoulders, and you have a quick and easy (and different) headshot.

Here’s a diagram photo (sorry for quality, iPhone pic):

As well as a backed out setup shot:

I have some more from this story, but I thought this would be a nice introduction to the lighting that went on. Simple, yet effective and dramatic!

Thanks to Dr. Robert Paine for allowing me to make a few portraits of him. It was incredibly interesting to hear him speak about what he does and how he does it!

This is the type of shoot I like to be a part of! I photographed a book last year that allowed me to meet several prominent individuals in the food industry, and Paul Heinrich was one of them. This shoot came together fairly quickly, having only a week to book a flight to Houston (not that hard to do) and coordinate with his busy schedule for an hour of his time (challenging given the week’s notice). Heinrich is a senior director at Sysco, one of the world’s largest food distributors, and he definitely is a busy man. We ran the shoot all the way up to his next meeting, members of which he met in the lobby right after we took the above shot.

Due to the limited amount of time I had with him, and given that I had to fly down to Houston (at the crack of dawn, mind you), I had to think and pack light. I usually like to do executive shots with a little more setup than what I carried, but then again, I had to fit everything I needed in to two carry-ons (one a laptop bag). At that time, I was shooting pretty heavy with large shoot-through umbrellas. This was out of the question. Solution: take a 6-in-1 reflector kit with diffuser panels. What about the stands? Solution: Manfrotto’s Justin Spring Clamp (while shooting in one of the test kitchen’s at Sysco, I actually clamped this to a sink water hose, and shot a speedlight through the diffuser panel).

If you ever find yourself in this type of situation, don’t forget to pack the small plastic stands that come with your flashes as well. That’s what I used in this shot, placing a bare flash dialed seven feet away, down low for just an accent fill on camera left (no need for a diagram here). The main light source was a huge row of full-length windows open to a cloudy day outside. When you travel without a slew of light modifiers, you start looking for natural ones. This big bank of windows acts just like a large softbox, and the white walls don’t hurt either (yes, those are white sheep-skin leather chairs). The first shot of the post was taken with Mr. Heinrich standing about eight feet away from a wall of windows that were easily 20-feet tall (maybe taller)!

In the hour I was at Sysco’s headquarters, we moved all over the campus, but I kept us pretty close to fairly large windows, working efficiently, getting enough looks for the book, and not wasting Mr. Heinrich’s time. No fill here, just a window and some flags. Executive shots suggest a sense of responsibility and leadership. Working with the natural contrast of the room and large window source provides that personality. The flags help out as well, providing a nice background for what would have been a very bland wall otherwise.

After the hour-long shoot, I thanked Mr. Heinrich (who could not have been any more accommodating during the shoot), loaded up the rental with the one bag I brought in, grabbed a bite to eat at a great Greek place, and headed back to the airport, putting me home right before sundown. The great thing about day trips is that you have a bit of time to do some editing on the plane.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t flown with gear before, be prepared to get searched by TSA. I get checked every time, and frankly, I believe they are always a bit startled by the Justin clamp.

I could be writing today about a certain announcement that a certain computer manufacturing company made yesterday about a certain device that will relatively change your life. But I’m not. Actually, there are so many blogs and news articles out there about Apple’s new iPad, that it would be pointless to the “I-wish-it-had-this-and-that” discussion that for one, I couldn’t get in to for lack of knowledge about the different kinds of processors they could put in the darn thing! Seriously though, if you are wanting to read information about the iPad and determine for YOURSELF if you need it or not, just go to the manufacturer’s Web site (you know you’re going to do it anyways).

So, for today: In LIGHT (ha) of several e-mails and comments about such imagery, I want to share a few paintings. Light paintings, that is. This is a fairly worn out subject online as well, but each quality light painting you see is something special. Glowingly, these types of images provide a unique aesthetic quality to a subject that is yes, unnatural, but also surprisingly appropriate. Remember, the name of the game is storytelling, and painting affords a photographer the ability to tell that story in a new way. Aaaand, the fun thing about painting is that the act of doing such exists outside the realm of Photoshop (not that there’s anything wrong with Photoshop, but this technique definitely pre-dates digital technology).

I learned how to paint from Wyman Meinzer, a good friend and mentor, who through his career as a photographer has managed to document the State of Texas to an extent and with such quality that is evident of his passion for telling the state’s story through images. As a matter of fact, Wyman supplied the paint job for two of these images (top image, and the boulders above)!

Painting is actually a fairly simple process, but the technique can be problematic depending on what you are painting. I have included images of structures (generally what you see painted), and if you are just getting in to painting, I would suggest starting with something large, like this set of silos I shot in West Texas. All you need is a tripod and a source of light. In the case of all of the images above, the painting was created using a normal spotlight with an incandescent light bulb. Using a long shutter speed, upwards of several minutes for each of these (notice the “star trails”), the light is applied much like paint is applied to a wall (just make sure the light source doesn’t creep in to the frame). Think how light naturally appears, and experiment, that’s the advice I was given!

Painting is just as easily achieved with the use of flash technology as well, whether it be studio-grade strobes or speedlights. Light, and how it functions, is what’s important here. The two images above and below this paragraph were taken with the use of one or two speedlights, gelled for color effect. I like shooting this way because the ambient is much more controllable, allowing for that sky to really saturate! I still use a tripod in this case, as well as a cable release (use this all the time when painting).

It’s really nice to be able to envision what you want the painting to look like before you get on location, but as we all know as photographers, this doesn’t always work out, nor would you want to limit any serendipitous ideas to be acted on once you are in “shooting mode.” This particular one came out of looking at the faint light my car lights cast on this abandoned house as I pulled up to it. Those lights were powerful enough for the time I wanted to spend with the ambient, so one speedlight gelled amber did the job.

Until next time, experiment! Learn a new way to tell a story!

Like a lot of photographers out there, I’m addicted to big light! For most of the portrait work I do, the sun is just not big enough, relatively speaking. I like explaining this to students. The sun is a huge star, not the largest in the solar system, but no lightweight either. However, since it is over 90 million miles from Earth at any given time our orbit, it’s safe to say that the sun acts like a bare strobe combined with a small reflector, which doesn’t throw off the most flattering light in many cases.

Enter the softbox. Ah, yes, that wonderful enclosure of diffusion, that for many photographers starting out is the end-all-be-all of light modifiers. Most softboxes force light to pass through a number of diffuse materials that essentially take a good deal of the initial kick out of the light, and just like clouds do for sunlight, spread the light out. In essence, this creates a larger light source, characterized by softer shadows and more wrapping transitions in to those shadows. Of course, the softbox allows the photographer to more accurately “place” the light in a more focused direction than a shoot-through umbrella (not that there’s anything wrong with this modifier. My go to for a long time was a 50-inch shoot-through).

I mentioned in a post a while back that I would offer some how-to on the above author shot of Stayton Bonner, a colleague and one heckuva writer! This is another benefit of big light: just move that source in close and expose for it. The larger the light source, the more wrapping the light, and moving it in closer or further away dictates its size relative to your subject. This particular shot was made with a 48-inch rectangle softbox placed just outside the frame, camera right. Notice that nice wrap of light around Stayton’s face.

The same feel can be found in this particular photograph of a wedding couple I photographed recently. Big light is a quick, and often easy, source of illumination to go to, and in this case, it was such a source while still providing that quality look to the portrait. This was shot with an Elinchrom 39-inch Rotalux Octa softbox, a modifier that I’ve been shooting with more lately. Of course, that super modernistic, ultra trendy, silver chair they’re sitting on adds to the aesthetic as well!

If you’re looking to getting in to artificial lighting, or looking to diversify your lighting with natural light, look for those cases where a big light source can be used. I’ll post more on natural sources of big light later. However, if you are getting in to the game of strobe lighting, a softbox or large shoot-through umbrella should be something you consider having in your toolbox!

Other than marking Xs on tests and providing notes about students’ compositional structures, the photography front has been pretty busy, and varietal. I read in a magazine…Texas Highways…November 2008 issue…where a photographer, to paraphrase the author, said one of the great things about his job is that he gets to learn, or get insight, into many different things. I would have to agree! Over the past two weeks, I have shot portraits, both formal and environmental, photographed a retrofitted video sales bus, photographed the fall colors, and just two days ago I was photographing an 18-inch Santa doll (more to come on that). I have spent several years as a freelance photographer, but not near as many as some of my influences, and judging by stories told by those I look up and listen to, the variety never ends. To me, this is very welcoming! To future photographers, I hope this encourages you as well. It’s something I continually tell my students, especially the older, ready-to-graduate-and-let-the-”real world”-see-what-I-have students, that the more open you are and varietal your photography is at first, the more business you can make and the more direction you will give yourself in your future career.

Well, take it for what it is worth, but that’s my current piece of advice. It may come from having a freelance perspective on the photography industry. It may come from growing up wanting to pursue several different career paths, or the education that I received in college. No matter what though, in today’s photography industry, versatility is a must!

Anyways, the photograph up top is another one of Joe, but since the last one of him wasn’t very flattering, I thought I would post this one. His brother was in town, and being a photo hobbyist, we took him out to shoot, and at the end of the evening, all I wanted to do was shoot a couple brothers, who in my opinion, know what life is all about.

The shot of Joe above was taken with one flash through an umbrella at camera right, and Joe’s brother was holding a gold reflector opposite of the flash to fill in just the tiniest bit on Joe’s neck. The second shot (right above this paragraph) was taken with the one flash sans the umbrella. Real simple, but interesting. Are there a few things I would fix? Yes. Were the mosquitos eating us up? Yes. Did we all want to stick around for West Nile Virus epidemic #2? No.

I owned these flashes for at least a year before I actually knew how to use them. Thanks to more demanding assignments and photographers such as Joe McNally and David Hobby, my small flash lighting has come a long way. That’s another beauty about photography. I teach it, but that doesn’t mean I know it all. In fact, anyone that says they know everything about photography (or anything for that matter), needs to have a swift reality check. Learning is the second greatest thing about photography…the first…visualization!