I live in West Texas. It’s flat. So flat that we don’t use parking brakes, which I’ve come to find out is somewhat of a necessity here in Scotland (no, I have not hit anything or anyone with the car except for the curb, ONCE, on my first day of driving on the other side of the road). It’s also so flat that we have ample amounts of sky, and if you’re a natural light photographer, you quickly learn how valuable the edges of the day can be during a shoot. We also have more than 250 days of sunshine in West Texas, which is another rather large distinction from where I’m based at the moment. I have read reports that Scotland sees rain upwards of 250 days a year, and of the past eight days in Perthshire, four have been wet ones.

What do these contrasting differences between geographies and meteorology have to do with Field Lighting? Photographically speaking, they are often issues that are one in the same. Both differences heavily influence the way you see and shoot the light provided.

When I’m shooting stock agricultural images in West Texas, I’m not very interested in photographing during the middle of the day. The light is stark, very edgy (not in an attractive way), and fairly bland. Even on overcast days, unless I’m shooting extremely tight, there’s simply too much sky to combat light values, and given the forecast of the area, the next day will see sunshine. The first hour of the morning and the last hour and a half in the evening are exquisite, though, and some have even stated that it’s the best light in the world.

Scotland, on the other hand, is nearly a polar opposite. Cloudy to overcast days are quite common (above image), and the large rolling hills are, well, hilly. You’re bound to find yourself photographing on a cloudy day at the top or the bottom of a glen, and if you were to wait on the sunny days only, you’d starve as a working photographer I’m sure.

Needless to say, graduated neutral density filters were made for places like Scotland, much more so than for West Texas. In fact, I don’t ever use ND filters in West Texas. This is probably much more of a stylistic and personal preference issue than anything, but when you’re working at the right times of the day in a flat desert, you just don’t need them as often. However, I made sure to pack a few graduated filters before trekking to Europe. Sure, they’re a pain to work with, and finding wide angle adapters for filter holders is a hassle these days, forcing you to hold them in front of your lens more than place them in the holder (don’t lie, you know you do it as well), but when working in a light environment that easily eclipses six or seven stops of light from the bottom of a glen to the clouds above, you won’t kick yourself later for throwing them in the bag and using them on location. Sure, there are issues we can explicate regarding these types of filters, but they’re extremely useful in these situations!

This isn’t a post about neutral density filters, however. It’s more along the lines of seeing ambient light values and determining what is necessary to work with them in the field. In West Texas, my students have a great environment to learn the nuances of light that are exhibited throughout the day. The differences between light in the middle of day and that present 15 minutes before sunset are obvious. LEARNING light and dynamic range (or latitude for you film lovers out there) in such an environment is fantastic for educators and students alike. Those of you living in less flat areas of the world can pipe in here as well, although I’m willing to bet you’ll note the speed at which you learned about dynamic range is a bit faster since you are more routinely dealing with the issue.

The camera can only handle so many values of light in a given scene before underexposing or completely overexposing areas. Some folks say the dynamic range of a dSLR camera reaches up to 12 stops of light (between complete black and complete white), but I’m not convinced. I treat the dSLR the same as I would exposing for negative or positive color film, with leeway for five to seven stops of light. This is Photography 101, but it’s certainly an issue we all contend with at any level. Deceivingly, overcast skies are relatively bright compared to, say, a landscape splayed out underneath, and as a photographer, you’re at the mercy of the light values in the scene. Auto exposure becomes a rocky mechanism in situations like those highlighted in the images above (unless you’re comfortable with exposure compensation), and the introduction of tools such as graduated neutral density filters are often the only ways around overexposing a sky and maintaining values below.

The point of this post is to encourage you to remain diligent of the light values you frame up when pointing a camera anywhere. There are many instances and several techniques of dealing with excessive light values, not the least of which includes time in front of a computer. However, if you’re not first assessing the light values before you even trip the shutter, you’re not taking in to account the subtleties of your frame. Obviously, the more you practice assessing light values, the more efficient you become at doing so, and it becomes second nature. This second nature will allow you to make decisions based on the type of exposure you are looking to achieve, and you’ll ultimately be more satisfied with your images…whether or not that means taking the time to screw on a ND filter holder and bringing the sky values down two stops to balance with the rolling farmland below.

NOTE: Shooting HDR images doesn’t allow you to ignore the values of ambient light. Theoretically, they become even more important. The same principal applies. Period.

One quick tip from Sevilla for the Field Lighting series: know what time to shoot! I invited the students a few days ago to meet around the Geralda Tower that is part of the Catedral de Sevilla (yes, that’s spelled correctly). During this time, we photographed the comings and goings of the area, largely populated by tourists and out-of-towners. The light was fairly muted when we arrived, so we focused much on detail work, and around 9:00 p.m., the sky cleared up, and we were able to focus on the smoothly warm light hitting the spires of the cathedral. This is such an impressive building, I wish I could have seen it hundreds of years ago absent of the surrounding construction!

One of the more typical (yet beautiful) shots of the building is the one above on the left, with the Geralda Tower lit at dusk. The Geralda is a beautiful, soaring tower, constructed generations before the cathedral during Moorish rule, and you can definitely see the artistic influence in the symmetric preciseness of its construction. The key to this shot is to be within relatively close proximity to the tower when the lights turn on in the evening. As soon as this happens, whether by design or not, the fleeting light in the Western sky is relatively close in value as the artificial light hitting the tower. The result is a nice blue hue in the sky juxtaposed with the orange-ish tint to the structure’s lights. When confronted with this situation, simply meter in the area where the light is hitting the subject, much like you would at any time, and as long as you are shooting within 10 or 15 minutes of sunset, sometimes longer, you will be able to balance out both exposures.

Just a quick tip from Sevilla! I hope all is well, and I should be checking in a couple more times before I head to Scotland!

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!

If you go back to the very first Field Lighting post, you’ll know that I try to introduce lighting concepts used pragmatically in the field, on assignment. I haven’t strayed too far, and I don’t intend to. Sometimes, it’s nice to revisit some of the more basic lighting concepts, mainly because these “basic” ideas is what can make or break a shoot. Such was the case for this mid-morning shoot with metal artist, Charise Adams.

I enjoy working with and photographing artists, and Charise was certainly a joy to watch work! Charise owns EdibleMetal, a unique decor and art company where she creates original pieces from metal work for local, national, and international clients. Charise’s husband, Ted, incorporates his clay work with some of the metal art, and her colleague and studio neighbor, Kate Williams, supplies custom glass work for others. All in all, it’s a pretty familial force that produces the art and runs the business. I’m always appreciative of assignments to photograph artists, because you always know you’ll be documenting creative passion! It also doesn’t hurt when the light works for you!

Maybe it’s my background in the agricultural industry, maybe it’s just the smell of burnt metal, but I feel oddly home inside a metal shop. I’ve been known to spend upwards of three hours photographing inside tool sheds and large ranch shops. One of the reasons I enjoy shooting these environments is the source of the light, which is usually created by large sliding or overhead doors. Sometimes, there’s even a skylight, and those can be great sources of fill light. Charise’s metal shop was roughly the size of a large room in a storage building. Large enough for an eight to ten foot overhead door and a normal shop door, this shop was a prime location for photographing her work. Why?

My goal in photographing people doing their thing is to be the least intrusive possible, particularly when that particular person moves around quite a bit. I also try to work efficiently, because I have to move around a lot as a result! If I’m not, I’m not doing my job. I’m not saying that I won’t throw some light around in the process (usually in this type of situation, I’ll resort to one speedlite in a shoot-thru or small softbox), but when I saw that huge overhead door roll up, I was a happy man! The door to Charise’s shop faces due West, and it was mid-morning. All of that indirect light pouring in to the room was worth its weight in gold and a lot more valuable than any large octabox you could have put in that room!

Large light is good light when you are trying to work in an active environment. Large light wraps around and creates beautiful shadows on what you are photographing, it’s just a matter of shooting from the angle that shows off this graduated transition between light and shadow. When I teach this concept to my students, I mention two things worth noting in regards to light: 1) the direction of the light, and 2) your angle in respect to the light source. Knowing how to operate around these two pieces of advice can help problem-solve a precarious light situation.

The image at the very beginning of this post is a good example of this concept. Her work at this table was performed almost perpendicular to the light. Then she turned into the light, just enough to create the evident transition between light and shadow. Perfect! The light from the door was hitting her in a way that gave her more contrast-based dimension than what she had when she was directly facing me in her work. You can spend thousands on studio lighting equipment to get this type of light (believe me), or if given the opportunity, you can find it naturally as what is often referred to as directionally-diffused light. Directionally-diffused light is simply substantial light that does not include direct sunlight, yet is not so diffused like an overcast sky would give you. The sun was overhead by this time of day, and it did not threaten to drop down into the door, so we could have worked in the shop all day with relatively similar light the entire time! Essentially, this IS the light studio modifier manufacturers are trying to recreate when they build large softboxes and similar tools for shaping photons.

Wait, we’re not done yet. When the light is large enough, it pours over everything in the environment. This being the case, balancing the exposure of the walls with Charise was simple. Using the dark was behind her as the backdrop, she easily stood out due to the reflection off her shirt and skin. The difference in these values (background and subject) was enough to pull her off an otherwise busy background, even though it is out of focus due to low depth of field.

What about the sparks? This is an exposure and time call. The sparks themselves are not all that intense in value, so there’s no real issue of them completely blowing out and creating a major distraction (rather, you want a contributory distraction that says it is indeed a part of the environment). Working with the desired exposure I had going, I just adjusted my shutter speed (countering with the aperture for exposure equivalency) until the spark streaks were, in my opinion, just right. This ended up being about 1/100 of a second.

The light values of the environment were even enough to not have to worry about exceeding the camera’s dynamic range where it counted. This is a blessing when you realize you don’t have to set up any lights and can work unencumbered (as seen in the above shot taken by Charise’s daughter, Ivy, an aspiring photographer herself)!

Finally, I can’t leave a shoot without getting a headshot (a ‘mug’ as some of my editors affectionally call it) and an environmental portrait. Again, the size of the light in this area was just too easy to work with. By turning Charise in to the light slightly, I was able to keep the shadows I wanted and show off the work in her face. All the time, the softness of the light providing warmth for skin tones and color.

I could go on and on about big light, but I better stop here. I just wrapped up a book project for a university entity, and I’m excited to be able to share some of the shoots involved soon on Field Lighting. I have been working with a few new light modifiers (new to me at least), and I’ll be posting images and reviews soon!

As always, thanks for reading! Comments and Questions are open! I’d love to hear from you.

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!

I was assigned to photograph Brian Smitherman, an orthopedic surgeon and one heckuva nice guy, for the cover of a recent alumni magazine publication. He and his family live in a neighborhood that is populated by older houses, some renovated to more contemporary styles, some holding on to their inherent architectural uniqities. Nevertheless, in any case, photographing in houses like this always tends to be fun. Mr. Smitherman’s house proved to be just as interesting.

To give you a run-down on how I do a shoot like this: After meeting with the individual I’m photographing (and asking a lot of questions…a lot), I get to know them better during a walk-through of the location that serves as the “field studio” for the morning, afternoon, or sometimes all day. I don’t take a camera during this initial inspection, I just want to be involved in getting to know the subject more, and as we’re looking around, I visualize how images will come to fruition given a particular context. Then we get started!

Mr. Smitherman had a small reading room off to the side of some of the main rooms of his house. It was darker than the others: it had a warm, wooden floor, and many earthen tones colored the walls, carpet/rug, and furniture. This was a comfortable room with elegance, and I especially liked the wall lamp in the corner of the room…wait…a wall lamp? This little treasure plays an important role in creating the ambiance of the room (i.e. a telling sign of personality), and it would work nicely in to the shot above. If the shot envisioned gives itself for the addition of already existing light sources such as lamps, neons, even fluorescents, then compose accordingly. They don’t necessarily belong in every environmental portrait, but they do add a bit of character when they are used.

Two things to keep in mind when photographing with other ambient light sources is the power of your own light and light color. In regards to light color, when you are shooting at a certain white balance, lights that don’t match up in terms of color temperature will stick out. In the case of tungsten light sources (~3200K – 3400K), such as this wall lamp, if you are shooting on a daylight (~5000K – 5200K) or cloudy (~5500K – 6500K) white balance, the lamp will turn out very orange and warm in the shot. If you’ve at all paid attention to any of Joe McNally’s, Jim Richardson’s, or Gregory Heisler’s lighting work, you can see their use of creative and CORRECTIVE gel use for their artificial light sources (strobes, flashes). In the case of Mr. Smitherman’s shot, we could easily set to tungsten white balance (which would otherwise render the flash I was using through a large umbrella blue) and gel the flash with a warm color, such as CTO.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I didn’t do that. I think if you look at the shot, it’s not that big of a secret. If I’d set to true tungsten white balance, then the ambient light outside the windows would have turned out blue. On top of that, I’m just not a huge fan of complete tungsten white balance. I like the warmth in the tungsten light sources in contexts like this. If you look at a tungsten light source with your own eyes, they are more orange in nature than others, so why not let this warmth show through a little bit? Dial the white balance color temperature on your camera (go on, dig your camera manual up and READ it) to say, ~4800K, and gel your flash with a half cut of CTO (because you still want to warm your subject up past the cooling you just applied with a shift in white balance). After exposure, you’ll notice the wall lamp still glows, providing ambiance and character to the shot, and your subject is warmed up a little, returning more natural than blue flesh tones to face and body. You also don’t have to worry so much about the ambient light outside the windows as much either, because you didn’t shift them blue enough to notice (with what little space they show through anyways).

OK, on to the power discussion. If you’ve done any reading in the Field Lighting series, you’ll know I’m a fan of low power lights. It’s just that sometimes, lower power is more appealing. The artificial lighting in this image is pretty evident, just look at how the light sculpts that Rembrandt-like shadow on Mr. Smitherman’s face. However, the power of your light needs to be low enough to balance with the wall lamp. Why? You want that wall lamp to glow (not dominate the image, just glow). This is another good reason to work with your flash/strobe in a manual power selection mode, so you can check the histogram, i.e. digital polaroid, for adjustments. If you power your flash up too much, the light on the wall may not show up at all. Vice versa, you can power it too low, and your subject will look under lit and the wall lamp become more of an eyesore than anything. Balance these two sources out. It’s just like being outside and balancing with the naturally ambient sun, except this time, the light source to balance too is the size of a Pocket Wizard and costs a dollar.

Since I’m the type of photographer that likes to move around a location quite a bit, and I don’t work with assistants as much right now, using these nice additions of light in a shot provide a more contextual feel to the portraits. I would encourage anyone shooting environmental portraits to visually case the location out for these types of lights and realize any potential they may have for your shots!

I just noticed that it’s been nearly a month since my last Field Lighting post! So much for the weekly series, ha! If you read my last post, you’ll know I’ve spent much of the past month inside a vehicle and not at home base. The good thing is that all the time on the road allows me to at least brainstorm some new projects and blog posts, including this one.

I was on assignment to photograph a few satellite campuses for Texas Tech University, and like all photographers that are about to take an extensive road trip to do so, I made sure to search for any existing images of the subjects. One building in particular presented a challenge. It wasn’t incredibly interesting from the outside, but at the same time, it wasn’t bad either. It was previously a temporary location for a church, and like some temporary-turned-permanent structures, it just didn’t have the flair that some buildings have. However, this wasn’t the challenge. What really bothered me was actually the season! The front of the building faced North, which during the winter in this hemisphere would have been fine. However, during the summer, the sun rises and sets more in the South, leaving the front of this building clothed in shadows the entire day. This made attractive exposures (ones without underexposed foregrounds and overexposed skies) during the golden hours impossible with just natural light.

So, what to do, what to do? I knew I didn’t want to photograph it during the day. At the same time, the building was two stories, and fairly large. Too large for me to completely light with what lights I did have efficiently (three Canon speedlites and two Elinchrom Quadra packs). I finally decided to light the building with a single light. Yes, a single light. Like I said, the structure wasn’t the most artistically-attractive, so why try to light all of it? Why not focus on highlighting what is important and using other compositional and lighting features to draw the eye?

I waited until about 20 minutes after sunset, and after setting the camera on a tripod and on a 10-second timer tripped with a shutter release cable, I took my first exposure. I exposed for the sky, knowing that I didn’t want to overexpose any of it, and rather underexpose it by 2/3 to a full stop (finally settled on 2 seconds @ f/10, ISO 400) in order to saturate the colors of the ambient blues. I tripped the shutter, and ran up and hid behind the fountain in front of the building.

During the subsequent exposures (I had to listen carefully for the mirror flap), I would trip the diffused flash (that I was holding in my hands) manually. I did this for a couple shots, changing the output on the flash until I knew my exposure on the front of the building was looking good on the histogram.

After adjusting for the flash exposure on the building, I got to a great baseline for the shot. The only problem was my foreground, which leant a lot to the overall composition and framing of the shot, was not lit very well with the ground decor lamps nearby. So, I did what I could without worrying about tripping two flashes (I was quickly losing my light in the Southwest): I pulled my vehicle up close to the curb at a near-parallel angle, and turned my dims on. I learned to use car lights from Jim Richardson at a lecture I was fortunate enough to attend in Milwaukee years ago.

Even better, the lights from the vehicle are warmer in tone than the light hitting the building (and those lights in the building), providing a contrast of tones and visual draw to the image. In retrospect, the building is kind of small for the overall image, but by framing it with a wider-angle lens in such a way negates keystoning and brings a bit more of the environment to the shot, especially since daytime shots would not look near as interesting!

This shot was basically an in-field examination of what could be done to provide an image to my clients that didn’t seem like I just walked in and shot it. Instead, it allowed me to work with the different light sources (ambient, speedlite, and headlights) in order to create more impact, contrast, and color that would not be available during the day. This technique is basically the same as lighting someone up against the sunset. In this case, it was just a building.

Light is light, it always has been, and it always will be, no matter what source produces illuminance. It’s really just a matter of getting comfortable with how light works that making the decision to use a vehicle’s headlights isn’t totally out of the question! Don’t be limited by what you don’t have. Use what is available in ways that work for you, your images, and more importantly, your subjects…but you might avoid shining that 2-million candle power spotlight into a model’s eyes!

Simplicity is nice. One light is nice. One subject is nice. The entirety of this photograph says look at the subject, study his eyes, facial expression, where his hands are, what he’s wearing, and other things about him. Nothing more needs to be in this shot. Another shot might include quite a bit, but this one doesn’t. We’re relying on emotional interpretation for this image. We’re relying on simplicity. Simple lighting, simple background. Yet, the subject is not all that simple.

Todd Chambers is a professor in the college that I teach. Todd actually gave me my first job after my master’s as a photography instructor, a place I still hold while working toward a Ph.D. in mass communications and media sociology. I’m blessed to know quite a few people I can say are genuinely good people, and Todd is one of them. Todd is an outstanding teacher, researcher, husband, father, and believer (the last three I’m sure he would no doubt note as the most important). Todd is also a cancer survivor, and he is a huge advocate and mission representative of the American Cancer Society and Relay for Life. In 2008, he was selected as an ACS Hero of Hope. His story of survival has been shared numerous times across the region, state and nation. An inspiration to say the least, this year, Todd was given his five years clear – a long ways away from where he was when he was diagnosed.

This was a quick shot. I actually had just finished one shoot and was packing up when I thought I would go ahead a grab this shot. Sometimes, images are envisioned long before they are taken, and this was such a time. Todd always wears the two bracelets you see on his left wrist, and I wanted a shot that featured those as a secondary feature to his facial features. I always imagined a dark environment engulfing him in a shot where he was lit very cleanly, very simply. There was nothing to getting the light right for the shot (by now, you’ve probably recognized that the complication of the light is not key to any of my images, it’s how that light tangibly makes sense of the subject). The Elinchrom Qaudra set at the absolute lowest power it could punch through a Rotalux softbox placed slightly behind the subject’s right side (camera left). This causes the nose shadow to drastically dip into the dark tones, and the camera right shadow side to creep in to the background. The key here is to place the subject far enough away from the black (I’ve used dark browns and blues as well to get this type of shot) that the light does not bleed over on to the background, creating a more grayish environment. Shoot at the fastest shutter speed the sync will allow, and you will knock out the ambient while still exposing for the light.

The light does nothing but provide depth across the face and contrast between light and extreme dark, possibly the two most important features of the shot: light and dark. Put yourself in what is and what may have been his shoes not too long ago. That in itself is the simplistic determination of what the light is like in the shot. This wasn’t a shot deeply involved with developmental thought, it was one that subconsciously arrived, but probably from some sort of influence from his story. Nevertheless, the shot itself can BE deeply involved with interpretive thought with just a few details. I show my students an American Masters documentary on Richard Avedon each year, and during a gallery presentation of his work, voiceovers continually try to interpret the simple images he created mid-career.

The truth and fallacy in which images like this can be interpreted are beautiful components of what we do as image makers.

You can catch up with Todd on Twitter: @tchambersttu

Some great things coming down the pipe here, and I’ll do my best to keep it posted! More to come…

OK, so at the risk of wearing you thin on the subject in the photographs, I’m going to chronologically detail an evening shoot that serves as the epitome of unique natural light conditions where I live (yes, I wrote the EPITOME, I think it’s the Johnny Winter I’m listening to right now that’s riled me up on my description). In a previous post, I wrote that a few weeks ago I finished a huge trip off with an evening run into the farmland of West Texas. I have never seen the light and atmospheric conditions come together for what I saw later that night in a wheat field 20 miles north of Lubbock (which is for those of you not familiar, one of the most agriculturally intensive areas in the world…and the flattest).

What I want to do is display the chosen images in the temporal order they were taken in, just so you can wrap your mind around what I saw as time progressed. At the same time, I want to note a few tips along the way in explaining how these shots (or rather the light) developed:

Tip #1: Some Light Takes Time. Think about the first image in this post. I went out chasing a thunderstorm that night, and what usually happens when you’re in the middle of a storm (I mean, right in the middle)? You see a drastic drop in light intensity. That doesn’t necessarily mean the light is gone, or what the light creates. It just means you don’t necessarily have the type of light that creates dramatic shadows that a ton of landscape photographers talk about (we’re getting there). Sometimes, looking harder and envisioning what the conditions present you lobs a nice image in your archive. In this case, the clouds were bulging downward, and when the sky was given enough time to expose, I noticed the bluish veins of light running around in the sky. There’s your light in this type of situation. A subtle offering, but nonetheless there. When the sun is still above the clouds, the light it throws can oftentimes offer you a ton of color!

Tip #2: Wait the Light Out. After I was done with the first shot, I actually just jumped back in the FJammer (that’s what my wife calls my wheels), and drove a half mile up the road. It started to rain and lightning, and we all know how well the latter mixes with flatland and tripods. I was actually ready to pack it in, convinced that the rain was going to set in for a while. I decided to hang out a little while though, noticing a break between the western clouds and the horizon. If West Texas gives you anything, it’s darn good visibility for such things! After about 20 minutes, the rain was starting to let up, and the horizon looked to stay clear of clouds, with the edge of the storm seemingly just 100 yards off the ground. Waiting to see if the sun peeked below the clouds happened to be the best thing I could have done that evening. As it was drifting down, the light started changing dramatically. I drove back down to the field across the road from the original, grabbed two cameras (one with a 17-35mm f/2.8 L, the other with a 24-105mm f/4L), and got in a location before the light hit. The shot above is the start of the transition. What came next BLEW my mind, and I hope it does yours!

Tip #3: When the Light is Right, Shoot, Shoot, Shoot! The sun made its debut. Enough said. As photographers, “professional” or “amateur,” we’re programmed to recognize good light! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve annoyed people in the car during the morning or evening saying, “That’s nice…look at that light!” This evening didn’t even compare, it was phenomenal! The late evening light combined with the massiveness of the thunderstorm and the golden wheat stopped me in my tracks at first. I was suddenly standing in a field on fire with tangible photons! What do you do when you’re given this gift? SHOOT! I tend to be long-winded, but that’s all I need to write for this tip. You know what to do!

Tip #4: Don’t Forget About Technique and Aesthetics. We’ve all been there, and I see many-a-photography student be overcome by such awe at the light that they forget to move. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “This guy is just showing us shots of wheat, he didn’t move much! Practice what you preach brother!” See the next tip for the answer to this statement. In all seriousness though, don’t get bogged down on just one type of shot. Remember to shift up and down, shoot vertically if it works in the situation, get in close, use shadows to your advantage, pay attention to the sky, the contrast, your EXPOSURE, your DEPTH OF FIELD, and you SHUTTER SPEED (ah, we’ll throw ISO in there too). In a situation like this, make sure everything comes together! Remember how all these things can come together to visually create a story of that moment. Tell it as diversely as you can!

Tip #5: Know How Much Time You Have. When the sun dipped below this huge thunderstorm, I had about 15 minutes worth of great light. This is how much time you have when the sun reaches this point every day, but every day doesn’t look like this! In 15 minutes, I ran from one wheat field to the next (across the road), trying to do as much as I could with the subject I was given during that time period. There was no time to jump in the car and find another spot. This was it, and if you’re aware of the time, then you can get a lot done. My rule of thumb is that if I can hold my hand out horizontally to the horizon, and the sun is above my hand, I have roughly 45 minutes of shooting before sunset. This is kind of hokey, but I also check the weather online to see when the sun actually sets as well. Give yourself the most time possible to shoot.

Tip #6: Reflect a Moment…Then Capture It. Take a little bit of the time you’re given in Tip #5, and squeeze just a bit of appreciation for what’s unfolding before you in there. It doesn’t take much, but it helps. The shot above Tip #5 isn’t necessarily the best shot from the night (who’s kidding, it has a freakin’ shadow in it, mine). However, this was my moment of recognition for what was going on. Besides showing how close the sun was to the horizon (look at the shadow length), it also proved that I was standing in the middle of this. I can’t tell you how excited and and a little spooked at the light and atmospheric conditions I was standing in. To the East, a black wall of thunderstorm, to the North, the same plus nearby lightning, and to the West, a reminder that it will all pass over. If you’re just there to push a button to say you collected the shot and move on, then you’re not doing yourself any good as a photographer. We talk a lot about vision, especially among the photographers I keep up with, and appreciation for what one’s photographing/capturing is one of the keys to embracing your vision. All you need is a moment, then you can get back to the dirty work!

Tip #7: Repeat Tip #4. Once you recollect yourself, take on what you’ve been given. Expose correctly.

Move around. Find something a little different (looking North by the way).

Experiment. How else could I show what was going on with this wheat and still express what conditions it existed? Slow the shutter down, throw some motion in there, look at the movement in the patterns!

Tip #8: Notice the Changes in the Light. Stay keenly aware of how the light changes, and how it in turn changes everything else. Light creates color, and in 15 minutes, the colors in such a scene can change dramatically! Train your eyes to notice subtlety in light shifts, and visualize how those occurrences can help your recreation of the environment. You don’t have much time, but an active eye notices these changes, and adjusts to their happening.

Tip #9: See It All Through. No doubt you saw the pieces of rainbow in the other shots, and you may have seen the above shot in an earlier post. Why no earlier shot of the rainbow? Two reasons: 1. I couldn’t get wide enough where I was to avoid power lines and road. The wheat took precedence at the time. 2. It just wasn’t that intense. Rainbow shots are relatively common (I don’t mean to offend). This one pales even in the face of my friend Wyman Meinzer’s famous shot of the lighting bolt in the middle of the rainbow (he can summon weather, though).

Back to my point. Notice those things going on around you that may produce. You might be focused on shooting the wheat that’s in front of you (metaphorically speaking), but in the back of your mind, you have intentions of shooting that rainbow. So, you keep an eye on it, think about a location that’s a quarter mile up the road that gives you clearance of any uninvited extraneous subject matter, and once the sun sets, and you lose light on the wheat, you make your move. Hopefully the sun does exactly what it should do if there is a clear break under the clouds: light the sky up! You stay at this until it’s all gone. Seriously. Note the changes in light, adjust with them, and see it through to the end.

Alright, if you made it this far, congratulations! You have spent more time reading a blog post than most people do. And not once did you read about camera settings or gear brands (alright, maybe a note of gear used, but just a note). The point of the post, in keeping with the Field Lighting Series mission, is to give you insight on how to SEE light and the changes it produces, as well as the time it takes (or doesn’t take) for those changes to ensue. This is not rocket science, but there is a bit of science to how light naturally works, and knowing how it happens, and what to do when it explodes in your face, naturally or artificially, allows you a more enjoyable, prosperous photographic experience.

If you have any moments like that described in how these images were captured, please link them in the comments below. I would love to see your instances of light awe!

I’ve come to appreciate how little light it actually takes to make some field/environmental portraits work. Take for example the setup above. I shot this for a magazine cover a little over a month ago, and it did not take much light from one Elinchrom Quadra head to punch in just enough light.

I love early morning shoots, even though I’m sure the talent and art directors don’t like them as much as I do. The assignment was for a fitness-themed issue of the magazine, and we found a great little park with a nice running path to do the shoot. Early in the morning in these locations can be hit and miss…that is with the amount of people on the track. We had to move out of the way several times, lest we be run over with drooling muts and their owners. I’m happy to say no drool befell the lighting equipment!

I digress. Anyways, one of the nice things about the Quadra is you can get the power down nearly as well as an off-camera flash. Almost. I was having this discussion with fellow Texas photographer, Jeff Lynch, just the other day, and if you need to get much lower power, you’re still always going to have to go with a smaller flash unit. That or throw on a ND filter, but I was already open enough on my depth of field and I felt good about my shutter for that. Just to be fair to the strobists out there, I would just as happily done this shoot with a Canon 580EX flash and Pocket Wizards if I had one of those nifty Lastolite EzyBoxes.

Morning light, before it pops over the horizon, is particularly subdued, and the ambient light it does create falls on your subject in an almost angelic way. I faced the model away from the rising sun, which although it wasn’t quite up yet, still provided that nice back light (not over-the-top back light, nice, soft, light that is easy to control with exposure). She’s lit using an Elinchrom Rotalux Octa, which helps focus the light more toward the subject than a shoot-through umbrella, decreasing the amount of spill on the ground around the model. This helps simply blend her in with her surroundings without looking too “extreme football light-o-mania!” This is a casual runner. No need to make her look like she’s about to run around the world fast enough to turn back time.

Back to what I was talking about earlier. When the conditions are right, lighting with low power is more effective than over-powering the light and knocking the ambient light down. Note I said when the conditions are right. This includes the time of day, the contextual environment, as well as the subject (refer to light-o-mania statement) and the mood you are trying to create. We write with light, but we don’t always have to write the same way. This shot actually could easily have been pulled off with no lights, not even a reflector. The dynamic range of the camera was broad enough to capture plenty of detail in the shadows, but that touch of light provided a little more color, contrast, and style. I didn’t want to sacrifice exposure for the model’s surroundings, so I knew getting out there early would give me this dynamic range to work with, and keeping the Quadra powered all the way down on channel B (the lowest of the low to be non-technical) and backed out a bit from the model knocks the artificial light down to where you know it’s there, it’s just not too intrusive. Just enough!