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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

Some time ago, I wrote about photographing with big light sources, such as large soft boxes. One nice thing about soft boxes is that they provide a large, soft light source that’s not stark and brutally intense like a bare-bulb speedlight or strobe. Before recently (ah, within the past several years, since the popularity of the Strobist movement), you couldn’t find manufactured soft boxes small enough for most speedlights. However, they were commonly found for larger, more traditional lighting rigs. Even today, the really large softboxes are manufactured for studio-grade kits (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping you from sticking a speedlight inside an 84″ octa, but that’s a discussion for another time). While the speedlights are nice, especially when in the field, there is still something nice about knowing you have enough power to over power the sun during the middle of the day with more than a few watt-seconds of power.

Each spring, I teach a photography lighting course at Texas Tech University, and while teaching in the studio is fundamental and necessary for a good deal of this course, that’s not what this lighting series is all about. At least two weeks out of the semester, we’ll drag the lights out of the studio, and commence throwing photons around outside, in an attempt to learn how to work with the ambient light, shoot in a variety of environments, and lug equipment around in the heat (essential for all field photographers)! Since the class is composed of 10 plus students each spring, we are never short of models. Alison Church (@SwinginSquirrel) put her camera down for this particular setting, allowing the rest of the class to work around her and the light.

As I was saying, more powerful lights allow you to override the ambient light, even at 1:00 p.m. on a clear day in April. As long as you are controlling the aperture, a soft box with enough light pushed through it creates a nice, focused (yet soft) source of light that will start to fall off quickly (tip: shoot at the maximum shutter speed the kit will allow you to knock out the ambient; if it’s still not enough, close your aperture down and control the light exposure from the power pack/lights). If it’s an extremely bright day, shutting the ambient light out may create more depth of field in your shot than you wanted, so be aware of your aperture.

Using one light is fairly popular today, and the only source for these shots is a 16″X24″ softbox, running through an 1100 watt-second pack, dialed down about half way. By reverse-engineering the shots, you can tell the top image has the light placed slightly to the left of the camera, and the center of the light source (the soft box) just barely above her head, creating that small shadow dropping down from her nose (a small butterfly lighting effect). The second shot is obviously more dramatic, with the same soft box to the extreme left of the model, slightly above her head again. This allows the shadow side to sink in to the darker levels of the histogram, and by stopping down the aperture and shutter speed, the fall off of light becomes more evident, and in this case, more leading and intriguing. The final shot is actually a movement made on my part, moving in front of Alison. Now, the shadow side doesn’t see so mysterious.

Keep in mind the environment. This corrugated tin background worked well for us, and if you can knock out the ambient all the way, you’ve just created yourself an outside studio…in the middle of the day!