Lighting
Field Lighting #19: James C. Watkins
You can almost consider this the second season of Field Lighting, especially since I haven’t posted one since November of last year! Think of this as a reemergence, then, and since I don’t have to keep some larger portrait projects under wraps anymore, you’ll hopefully see more of these in the near future!
The last Field Lighting post focused on photographing a local artist, and what better way to reintroduce the series than with another. James Watkins is a world-class ceramicist (you may have dug up a couple posts about him from earlier here and here), and I’ve been fortunate to photograph and visit with him several times over my career. The most recent shoot took place last July, and it produced some of my favorite portraits in my portfolio. I believe one of the reasons for this is because I sat down and visited with him for close to three hours a week earlier and interviewed him for the story I wrote to accompany the images. During this time, I was able to learn more about Mr. Watkins than I usually do in conversation with many folks I’m photographing. Conversation is key for creating storytelling images, and when the opportunity comes along to have more one-on-one time with your subject, take advantage of it! It just so happened that I pitched the story about Mr. Watkins, and the magazine wanted me to write and shoot it. I think it worked out for everyone involved!
We’ll come back to the image above later. To show this shoot chronologically, we’ll start in Mr. Watkin’s living room. This is where we spent our time talking weeks before, and during that visit, I began to see how representative this room was of the artist. I saw him sitting in the exact same location that you see him in the photograph (I was sitting directly across from him), loved the colors, the design, the art, and the large window to his right.
When I came back for the shoot, I knew we would start in the living room. The large, north-facing window poured attractive light in between the blinds, but to my dismay, it wasn’t quite as shaping as I wanted. For consistency purposes, though, I sought to replicate the same light. I placed an ever-trusty Elinchrom Rotalux 39″ softbox off to camera left, and feathered it past his face, making sure Mr. Watkins’s left side fell into a contrasty dark, yet still maintain a bit of detail. The height of the light was just above his head (the center of the light, that is), and the shadows fell attractively downward, imitating the light from the large window. Pointing the light down and feathering it past his face just a small bit helps create a natural vignette, as you can see in the shadows creeping in at the top and bottom left of the frame. We like that area, but it’s not what we’re here for. It’s there to complement the subject, help say something about him–not necessarily to override his identity. The exposure was made in consideration for the lamps framing the artist, balancing just enough so the wall (not the inside of the lampshade) would not overexpose.
I never leave a shoot without making a headshot, and on our walk through his backyard to his studio, I placed him in front of a dark green tree. The same 39″ Rotalux was placed high and to camera right. This time, the light was not as feathered, and you can see a bit of the artificial light filling in the shadow side of his face. The sky was fairly cloudy at this moment, so the more blue-toned shadow came as a result. The power from the Elinchrom was relatively low in order to avoid overpowering the ambient light much. The low power also allowed me to shoot with a very open aperture (f/3.2) at 200mm, a tight focal length for filling the frame up comfortably.
The first image in this post, as well as the second image in the diptych, were made inside Mr. Watkins’s studio. I’ve photographed him throwing clay several times in a teaching environment, but this time, the one-on-one experience was much more accommodating of the camera. The studio, adorned with wooden shelves holding supplies, several tables with pieces waiting to be fired, and photographs of his travels lining the walls, was very much where his art came alive.
The ceiling in the studio was very high, and it reminded me of what we know of Rembrandt’s studio, where light poured in through cheese cloths placed in windows high above the floor. When Mr. Watkins sat down at the wheel, clay plastered towel over his pants, all I could think of was replicating this same light. Instead of using the Quadra+Rotalux combination, I opted to use a much lower-powered Canon 580EX+Pocket Wizard through a 30″ shoot-through umbrella. I placed it high and to camera left. Balanced with the room’s ambient light values, the idea for this shot was not to create what looked like an obviously lit shot, but rather one that imitated the light Rembrandt once used to light his portraits: directionally-diffused and at a high angle. After getting what I felt was the appropriate balance between ambient and artificial, I was free to move around the artist and the wheel as if that was the general light source for the room. The first image in the post actually ran as the opening spread to the story, and while I like it, I’m actually a much bigger fan of the vertical shot you see in the diptych. Compositionally, those lines and the very high, wide angle shows an artist among his environment in a way that speaks to me more so than the top image. Design-wise, the top one made the cut, though!
The last set of images I made of Mr. Watkins were simple yet telling environmental portraits with his soon-to-be-fired work. Like I mentioned earlier, he had several pieces setting on a nearby table in the studio, and I simply used them as foreground content to frame him up against the wall of images in the background. The lighting is much the same as the others shot in the studio (so, I won’t leave you with another diagram; you can reverse-engineer this one by looking at the reflection in his glasses and by following the direction of the shadows). Here’s a tip, though: when shooting in the same environment as other setups, it’s wise to try to recreate the same light.
The key to this shot was composition. The framing achieved with the pots work, but it’s actually the lines of frames on either side of the wall that further lead the viewer’s eyes to Mr. Watkins. All of the framing mechanisms seem to be saying, “Look at this man!”
It was certainly a pleasure getting to photograph and visit with James Watkins more, and I’m glad to see the story turned out so well in the magazine. Speaking of which, you probably noticed that in terms of composition and the Rule of Thirds, Mr. Watkins is placed in the right of the horizontal frames. I noticed this more when editing the images after the shoot, and one can always say: shoot for design. An art director or designer is always looking for images that both tell story and work within their vision as well. The choice to place Mr. Watkins in the right of the frames just seemed to be the natural fit for each location. However, I did have to go back through and make sure there were plenty of images with varying composition, ha!
Thanks for sticking with the Field Lighting series, and look forward to more additions coming soon! Thanks again to James Watkins, and if you ever get a chance to visit his studio or spend time with his art, you’re better for it!
Field Lighting #17: The Down n’ Dirty on Lightning
On a trip back to west Texas from the Dallas/Fort Worth area, my wife and I ran through a fairly substantial thunderstorm. We were met with a glowing sunset and immediately swallowed up by a wave of rain. We made our way down the highway, and just after dark set in, we were clear of most of the storm, just south of where lightning was pounding the ground. I mentioned I wanted to stop and take a few shots, and Amanda asked how to shoot lighting. What a great Field Lighting topic!
I know this isn’t going to be the typical light description, Elinchrom-what-have-you, speedliting a portrait discussion that usually goes on here, but if you’ve read enough of these posts, you’ll know that not all of them are focused on using artificial light. In either case, there’s something to be learned from photographing lightning that might just apply to lighting a portrait (I’ll give you a hint: it all has to do with the shutter speed and aperture).
The standard lightning shot is fairly tight on the bolts, whether through cropping or telephoto lens (or being entirely too close to the action, been there, done that, still have my eyebrow hair, thankfully). So you can imagine that lightning photography can get pretty mundane. This is why you see many landscape photographers going for daytime lightning, or lightning combined with structure (non-cloud that is). Nevertheless, shooting lightning is eventful, and the circumstances above made for an even better twist on the environment.
The storm was not very tall in the way of many Texas-sized thunderheads that roll through this part of the country. So, being out in ranch country, where very little to no city lights interfere with the view of the sky, I was able to see the stars in all their glory above the clouds. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been presented with this look in the sky, and I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.
A few tips to keep in mind at the beginning of nailing this shot:
1. You typically want cloud to ground lightning. Sure, the lighting could be very intense in the clouds, but unless you can actually see the bolts outside the clouds, spidering their way across the storm, then what you’ll end up with in the end is a lit cloud structure (that may take longer than you expect to get).
2. In good practice, lightning photography is done with a pretty hot storm, with relatively high frequency of bolt to ground action. Check. Each bolt was hitting about every 3 to 5 seconds.
3. You’ll need a tripod (and preferably a shutter release cable). Don’t argue, even if you do have an awesome image of a tack-sharp, hand-held capture of a bolt hanging over your mantle (you know luck was working with you on that one anyways).
4. Time is a necessity in this case, since tackling the ropes of lightning photography takes a bit of experimentation with your knowledge about how aperture and shutter and ISO work to create an exposure.
Alright, simple enough, right? It honestly doesn’t take a whole lot of gear to get this job done, but it does take the right conditions. If you have a hot storm, you can typically set your aperture to f/5.6 and depending on how many bolts you want in your shot and how frequently they are hitting, you can vary your shutter between 5 seconds to 30 seconds. Don’t worry about overexposure due to long shutters (if you’re shooting at night), because the sensor or film you are recording the image on is not sensitive enough to overexpose at those short of times. Once that sun goes down and it’s dark, it takes much longer to expose the sky than normal…much longer. You can, however, overexpose the portion of the clouds nearest the bolt if you leave the shutter open too long, or if your aperture is too far open.
Think about it in terms of how your speedlite works. The shutter controls the ambient, right? So the longer you leave your shutter open and the more light that actually does hit the clouds due to continuous bolts of lightning, the more likely you will overexpose those portions which upon light is falling. In terms of the aperture, which with speedlites we use to control the actual intensity of the flash, it works in the exact same manner. You can actually cool the intensity down of each bolt by stopping down the aperture. If you notice on your LCD that the bolts are pretty hot and are not exactly sharp (due to overexposure, not due to focus issues), then stop your aperture down and see what happens. This is the experimental part of the lightning shoot. Like I said earlier, a strong recommendation is to start out shooting lightning with an aperture of f/5.6 and work from there to control the intensity of the bolts.
OK, so that’s the skinny on starting out on lightning. Remember, it’s not about fast shutter speeds, it’s about long exposure to obtain as many bolts as you want in the shot. Sometimes, I like to use Bulb mode on the camera, in conjunction with the shutter release cable, to actually count how many bolts I want in the shot.
But what about those stars? Here’s where listening in to seasoned photographers can help you out. Years ago, I remember a photographer showing an image to a group with stars scattered across the sky in an image that also contained a nightlight on an electric pole. All I could think about was why didn’t the nightlight overexpose more, because the shot must have taken a long time to achieve for those stars to show up like that, right? Wrong. He used a higher ISO, essentially increasing the sensitivity of the sensor to light artifacts, such as the stars. Sure, this seems a little jicky, but that’s how he did it, and I remembered his words during this lightning storm.
I bumped up my ISO to 800 (I remember the photographer using this ISO), set my aperture to f/4 (since I visually confirmed this to be appropriate in terms of exposure) and set my shutter speed to 30.0 seconds. The result was what you see above: a few bolts of lightning that do not override the exposure, while a blanket of stars rests over the storm! I was fairly pleased to say the least. At 100 ISO, you wouldn’t even begin to see the stars at this combination of aperture and shutter speed. The bolts you would, but even the clouds would not be as lit up. You’d have to go for much longer, but then risk over-doing it. The way camera technology is now with noise-reduction, I’m willing to bump up the ISO if the chance to gather some stars in the shot comes along. Think about it: how often do you see shots with the open sky AND a lit up thunderstorm?
If you have any questions about shooting lightning, or just want to tell me I’m wrong in writing this, please leave a comment below! I promise not to be too snarky, ha! Enjoy your day!
Wait, one moment, here’s an extra tip. Some people like to switch their white balance over to Tungsten (either in-camera or in post) to get a blue, ethereal feel to their lightning shots, such as this one above. It’s a totally subjective call, as all the others were recorded at about 4,850K. Just FYI!
Field Lighting #11: Use Backlight
Here’s one for the folks that appreciate a small dose of plant photography! Photographers often make little to do about photographing the smaller aspects in light of discussing the larger landscapes, and most of the time (online) you usually see, “photograph flowers in the shade or after a rainstorm,” like I did with my last post. To justify: overcast, diffused light is fantastic for plant photography, and you can’t do without it if you are going to spend any extended amount of time doing this kind of work. However, we can’t overlook the stronger light in this area as well, especially backlight!
If we think backlight is great on human subjects (just go check out any glamour photograph shot back in the nineties), why would we not think it looks awesome on anything else! Keeping an eye out for naturally occurring backlight is a must when shooting landscapes and natural history images! Backlighting provides a certain type of tangibility that is hard to get otherwise, and it offers the smaller elements of a story a unique look and context. Remember, the little things count! Some plants are fairly translucent and offer a great, glowing field of green veins to put a macro lens up next to, while other have a layer of stringy fuzz (no, I’m not a horticulturalist, I do not know what they are called) that blaze when the light hits them just right!
So what do you do to get this type of light? Simple: wake up early! Alright, or inversely, seek that naturally warm light in the evening. Because of atmospheric debris and distance of the Earth to the sun, and because photographers pray every night for great light, early morning and late evening light is just that: awesome light! There’s no exception to backlighting, plants or mammals. You could even create your own backlight, much like I’ve talked about in my posts on high-speed sync flash flower photography.
You’re probably not that far from photographing backlight either! All of the shots in this post (excluding the video) were made within 300 feet from my home. The shot at the beginning of the post (a translucent canon) was taken right off my porch, and the thistles above were just down the fence line in another pasture. Look outside your window, and you probably have something there that glows during the golden hours!
Field Lighting Tip: Backlight. www.jerodfoster.com from Jerod Foster on Vimeo.
Just to drive this concept home, I put together a few clips that emphasize the significance backlighting plays in this type of photography, especially compared to side and front lighting.
I know you’re thinking, “Where’s the people shots?” I like to spread the Field Lighting series over a few areas, but we’ll get back to them soon enough! I’ve been on quite a few shoots lately, and when I get some images ready (and when I’m allowed), I’ll have some people to introduce to you and some stories to tell!
Enjoy!
Field Lighting #10: Horsin’ Around with Engagements
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!
Field Lighting #9 – Field? Not really…Take a guess!
I’m delinquent again on Field Lighting posts, and I’m unabashedly going to be lazy about this one and let you tell me how I shot it. These two shots were taken from a recent cover shoot for Lubbock Magazine highlighting the colors and tastes of summer. After a few wardrobe changes and a few slices of watermelon, we were set.
So, how was the shot lit? Here’s the deal, if you guess correctly, there might just be a little prize at the end of say, a week from now. So, by next Friday, if someone guesses how the shot was lit (as close to spec as you can get it, if you’ve read the Field Lighting series up until now, you’ll have an idea of how I work), you win something. That’s how Web contests go, right? Why would you even have to know what the prize is, it’s a free guess! (***If there is more than one person, there will be a random drawing for the prize.)
Wait, so where do you put your answers? Just drop them in the comments section (make sure you link to a site or e-mail so I know how to get in touch with the winner).
Simple. Easy (well…). Go now!
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Alright, first things first: Sorry it’s taken so long to get this updated. I’ve officially violated one of the golden rules of blogging…sorta…
In any case, congratulations to nick b, whose comment below came the closest to the lighting setup, which is pictured below. Reverse engineering is one of the greatest ways to learn different lighting techniques, and indeed, it’s a practice I put in place in my lighting and studio courses. Sometimes, I’ll just bring in Joe McNally’s The Moment It Clicks, and we’ll rock and roll for three hours, re-creating the same lighting he uses in many of the images in the book.
For the shots above, I used a 39″ Elinchrom Rotalux octagonal softbox as the key light (you can see it’s an octa-shaped box by looking at the reflection in her sunglasses). An additional light (a 580Ex slaved strobe was placed camera right, behind the model for the more intense kicker on her left, and a larger 24″ rectangle softbox behind her, camera left, for the more subtle rim light on her right. A soft reflector was used to camera left to fill in what the key wasn’t getting on her face, and an even softer reflector was placed below the model, to further alleviate some shadows. A quick pop from a bare flash on the background, and it’s complete!
A reference shot to further illustrate the setup (notice, the 580EX didn’t fire in this shot).
Thanks to everyone that helped out on the shoot, and thanks to everyone that gave the reverse engineering a shot! We all better pitch in and buy good friend, Jeff Lynch some glasses. He couldn’t quite make out the lighting (I kid, Jeff knows a thing or two about lighting).
nick b, since you came the closest, I’m going to send you a signed 12X18 print of the image used for the May desktop calendar. Please use the Contact Me form on the site to send me your information, and I’ll have it to you in no time!
Field Lighting #8: High-speed lighting…flowers!
Yes, flowers. I’ve been holding this one nearly a year, and it’s the right time to talk about photographing flowers in Texas! The rain has been coming steady throughout West Texas and the Hill Country, and from what I’ve heard on the phone and via the Web, the Spring flowers are coming on in full force!
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!
Field Lighting #7: Whatever happened to naturally occurring, directionally diffused light?
When I posted last about James Watkins’s hands, it struck me that most of the posts regarding lighting and photoshoots (in my world at least) revolve around using some sort of artificial lighting technology. I love using lights, and if you’ve read this blog enough, you’ll know that I’m a diligent user of several gonzo-sized sticks of dynamite-like photons, er, I mean studio and flash strobe systems.
What doesn’t get paid its due in this world of gear, gear, and more gear, are those times when “lights” aren’t needed. Take for example the photograph in the previous post. Uninhibited by gear, I was left able to just simply find the light. Although it doesn’t present itself to be as simple as we all would really want, when you do find it, you’re more likely to find it later! I was shooting an assignment for a magazine on the art classes held every summer in Junction, and I spent a great deal of time working in the pottery class, taking advantage of the beautiful, directionally diffused light coming in through the screen windows (below is a shot of the interior of the studio where the class was working). The shot in the previous posts, as well as the one above and one below were taken of Mr. Watkins in the right-hand corner of the building you see here. Non-directional light flowing in from everywhere, and the highlight kicker touching his hands came from the window to which he was sitting closest.
Directionally diffused lighting that occurs naturally offers soft, wrapping light that is more subdued in intensity, giving your camera (and you) a break in dynamic range limitations. The values in the shadows and highlights come a bit closer, and you’re able to capture detail in both areas more easily as opposed to shooting outside in direct sunlight at high noon (blech). In essence, it’s a naturally occurring softbox or scrim.
And this light rocks! It can be soft and subdued, or even more dramatic, particularly when it is more directional, such as the shot below taken in the evening. Notice that nice highlight on the artist’s hands.
Basically, this light is coming from behind and nearly level (in terms of the sun) with the window it is passing through. That nice, warm evening light makes everything dramatically tangible, and it’s something that many folks using artificial lights strive to recreate! Hats off to those who do!
So there, it’s always a good practice to review the light given to you naturally, particularly if you’re on assignment and needing to move faster than your assistant (or yourself). In this case, I don’t think artificial lighting would have done this work any justice, especially given the subject and his artwork!
Field Lighting #6: On-camera flash utility
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!
Field Lighting #5 – Forensic Anthropologist, Robert Paine, Ph.D.
A few weeks ago, I posted a “guess-how-I-lit-this” shot, and a few of you responded, both on the blog and on Facebook. The shot, as well as those included in this post, were created for a story on real forensic science work at Texas Tech University, for their alumni association’s publication, The Techsan. I have been waiting for this issue to come out, so I can post a few images from it (others will result in subsequent posts). Lately, I have been putting the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit through its paces, and I’ve just been waiting to release some of these images!
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!
Field Lighting #4 – Reflectors Only
Let’s face it: often times as a photographer, you’re pressed for time. Hopefully you’re never late for a shoot, but when we start working with light and other people, we’re involved with highly dynamic variables. On a clear day, light is pretty predictable, but sometimes that sneaky set of clouds will set in right before sunset, and you’ve lost the shot you were looking for, only to find another (again, hopefully). And people, well…will always be people, you included! The point of all this is that sometimes, you only have a small window of opportunity to get the shot you need!
Ever since I made this portrait, I keep going back to it, remembering how much pressure there was to get the shot under the particular environmental conditions. Randall Jeter, Ph.D., is a bacterial geneticist at Texas Tech University, and I was photographing him for a university research publication a couple of years back. Instead of photographing him in his lab with the prototypical white lab coat on and a microscope nearby, I decided to put him in a field of spring wheat. I couldn’t begin to intelligently explain what Dr. Jeter researches (if you want to find out, click here), but after we spoke on the phone the day before, I had an idea that part of his agenda was analyzing the water on the Southern High Plains. So, where else but an irrigated field would work the best!
OK, talk about working fast (this is why I love reflectors). It was windy. Real windy! Speedlites and umbrellas/softboxes are out of the question in West Texas when the wind is blowing over 20 mph, I don’t care how much weight you have on the stands. Luckily, I had two assistants in tow for this shoot, and each of them grabbed a reflector. I don’t go anywhere without a Westcott 6-in-1 reflector set (I like the 42″ version), and in quick situations like this, it comes in super handy!
So, how was this shot put together? The subject was standing with his back to the sun, which was coming in from extreme back and right. It was coming in at so much of a direct angle, that I was a bit afraid of overexposing the sky, but it held. Next, one assistant standing in line with the sun on camera left, bounced light into Dr. Jeter with the daylight reflector. The other assistant (standing barely to camera right) used one of the diffuser panels included with the reflector kit to bounce much, much softer light back in to the dark shadows the initial reflector created. The key here was not to bounce to much fill light in, taking away the drama in the light. I used a telephoto lens to draw that background in a bit, making sure the background served a compositional and storytelling purpose for the shot, and that’s it!
We were done with this location in less than five minutes. Thank goodness for reflectors!
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About Jerod Foster
I'm an editorial and natural history photographer based out of Lubbock, Texas, as well as a photography instructor at Texas Tech University. My work primarily focuses on features and environmental portraits for magazines, books, and commercial purposes, and I'm available for both domestic and international travel.
I'm a regular contributor to the Manfrotto School of Xcellence, an educational resource for amateurs and professionals alike. I'm also a partner and editor for Badlands Design and Production, a publishing house that focuses on high-end coffee table photography books.
- jerod.foster@gmail.com
- (806) 789-6850
