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!

The Junction courses are about to wrap up, and although there are many photos and stories to share, getting to sleep four hours every night is catching up on us! So, I’ll just share a shot of my class, the A-Team! I ended up with four in the videography course, and they are working their butts off! We paired up with Wyman Meinzer’s photography course for 95 percent of the shoots, and hopefully I’ll have images up from the flash flood we caught today soon!

With that, more to come! Enjoy the action above!

Our first and second day at Junction saw us shooting quite a bit of flower work. The rain has come pretty regularly, and we take advantage of the overcast skies by shooting on a macro level. I’m engrossed in high-speed sync flash work again, and I’m finding a few inhabitants along the way. Macro work is such a great exercise in patience and creativity, not to mention technique: FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS!

We do not go without having fun though! Macro videography can put you on the narrative level of an otherwise inconspicuous creature. Below is a few quick shots of a caterpillar my class named Tim…

Have Sixteen Legs, Will Travel from Jerod Foster on Vimeo.

More to come. We shot a cattle branding today on the Llano River Ranch, and we even had a student participate! I might even have a video of the high-speed sync flash work up later…

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

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

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

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

Before:                                                                                       After:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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