I’m sitting in the Albuquerque International Airport and testing out the WordPress app for the iPad. I’m heading back to Denver this weekend for a couple of shoots in Fort Collins and Cheyenne, Wyoming (I might even make a quick trip over to Rocky Mountain National Park).

Colorado has been a big part of my summer work this year, and I’m glad it has. Above is an image made back in July of Poage Lake near South Fork. I could get used to this…

More to come!

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!

Well, maybe not quite a trucker, but that’s how I feel right now. I’ve responded to several e-mails this morning relating how being a freelance photographer is sometimes similar to driving an 18-wheeler down the highway. In some ways, I’ve always envied long-haul truckers because of the immense amount of country they get to see. In the past seven days, I have been from Lubbock, Texas, to South Padre Island, Texas, and back, and as soon as I got back, I shoved out on the trip mapped out below. I still have a couple days left on this 1,000+ mile trip, but fortunately, I get to travel through and shoot in some of my favorite spots in the state.

This is the third trip like this I’ve taken across the state this summer, and I know it gets old to hear it, but Texas is big, and I haven’t covered half of it. I keep a large paper map of the state in my office, and I highlight all the roads I’ve traveled in the past three years. I’m starting to make some laps around the state, but there’s still more to go!

Road weary as anyone might get doing this, you’re always bound to find several images of interest in between stops, such as this group of prickly pear cacti up against the Texas t-posts between Seymour and Olney. Or the simple, dominating sky structures over late summer baled hay fields near Goldthwaite, seen below. One good thing about being on the road (and blogging about it at least), is that I don’t feel bad when I look at another traveler working on spreadsheets for another company and I’m editing photographs and talking to you!

Building in the time for travel and planning somewhat in advance (although this trip came together about three days before I lit out) allows you to take a little more time for photography such as this. I’m not shooting anything remotely related to natural history on this trip officially, but between locations, I’ve found some nice shots to at least share in this post, and I’ve been able to test out a couple of lenses I requested to review.

Traveling by vehicle is a good way to experience some of the smaller aspects of any land. You get a sense of how folks around those areas live, especially in rural areas. The next time you’re out on the road, it might be to your benefit to take the LONG way, just to see something different. I know several photographers that do this, and yet, I know several more that will try to get to their destination via the fastest route, bypassing a great deal of interesting imagery. Of course, depending on what type of photographer the individual is might attenuate traveling like this, but every now and then, it might be worth it…

A tip for the traveler? You’re always going to pass by images that you see are worth stopping for. You’ll get down the road a ways and start thinking to yourself, “Why didn’t I just stop?” Well, why didn’t you? This always happens, but as long as it doesn’t happen to you every time you see something, you’re sure to walk in to your motel/hotel room or campsite that night with an image or two.

That, and don’t worry about the bugs on your windows and mirrors. They’re victims of the road as well…

I’m on the road again this week, and it seems I can’t hardly find the time to blog, let alone e-mail. Regardless, I wanted to make the announcement of yesterday’s International Guild of Visual Peacemakers site launch. You’ve no doubt noticed the IGVP paraphernalia I have on my site, and for good reason!

The International Guild of Visual Peacemakers is a community of diverse cultural, travel, and humanitarian photographers, open to any visual communicator that relates to the organization’s mission of breaking down those barriers visually that separates sectors of humanity, particularly cultural stereotypes and perceptions of the “other.” The community aspect of the organization brings together photographers from all over the world under the scope of this mission, and IGVP only stands to bring more together over time.

I was fortunate enough to beta test the site and become a member of the IGVP community early, and I hope you all explore their site to how it can benefit you. Endorsed by photography heavy-weights, such as David duChemin, Ami Vitale, Matt Brandon, and Gavin Gough, the site serves as a social community bent on sharing those treasures we capture creatively each and every day. The site is already set up with great galleries of world photography, still and video documentaries, and many great photo essays.

Thanks goes to Mario Mattei and Logan McAdams for providing the insight and direction for this organization. Once you visit the site, establish a community membership (free and monthly premium memberships are available), and begin to interact with other members, you’ll get a feel for how much work went in to establishing such a concerted effort between photographers around the globe.

I encourage you to take a look at the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers for yourself! As I said before, it only stands to grow with members knelt on providing a voice in the global cultural community!

I use a similar photograph to the one above to stress to my students how important focus is in a photograph. I was looking through some photographs from years past the other day, and I ran across the set of images this one originates from, and I couldn’t help remembering how a three-day run at photographing jackrabbits and ground squirrels solidified this concept in my head. Why show these critters in a post about focus? If you’ve ever tried to maintain crystal clear clarity while photographing animals that have lightning fast reflexes (with focal lengths between 200mm and 400mm), then you know what I mean.

I learned how to really hunker down on photography from arguably one of the best wildlife photographers in the nation, Wyman Meinzer. Early in his career, Wyman was known as a maverick of sorts when he would submit tack-sharp images of running whitetail deer he had taken while manually focusing an FD 500mm f/4.5 flourite lens mounted on a Canon F1N. The likes of Field & Stream and American Sportsman were stunned by the clarity of the images (usually taken on Kodachrome or Fujichrome Velvia, 100 ISO or lower), and it was his tenacity for sharp, eye-drawing imagery that I picked up when shooting with him.

Focus really does matter. In all actuality, why wouldn’t it? If you want a tip from this: THINK ABOUT YOUR FOCUS! This isn’t saying that every shot NEEDS to be in focus (my style generally lends itself to something in the image being in focus), but this is a call to working on that part of the craft that is psychologically so important for the creator (the photographer) and the viewer. I really can’t stress this enough to my students that accepting an out-of-focus shot (when it certainly needs to be in focus) is not acceptable. Even those shots that are barely out of focus. No amount of “sharpening” in Photoshop actually saves a blurry image. Obviously, sometimes things happen. Sometimes, the shutter speed is too slow, and maybe a happy accident, or non-accident, occurs, and you are provided with a unique vantage of the subject. This does happen. I also can’t say that every shot any working photographer (myself included) takes is in focus. The photographer that tells you so is not being honest. However, the more you work at this technical aspect of photography, the better understanding you have for how to treat it in a way that compliments your technique and style!

Methodical use of focus is a great way to direct how an image, your art, your creation, is supposed to be viewed. We have all these wonderful tools of aesthetics to help us maintain as much control of an image as possible. Just as a photographer would use depth of field and composition, light and form, so he/she can use focus to direct where a viewer’s eyes go first. It’s no secret in the photography community that a viewing eye will quickly drift to where an image is sharp. This is why portraits and photographs of wild and domesticated animals maintain sharpness in the subjects’ eyes. You’ve probably been asked before by your subject (unless they are indeed animals) about why you are moving the camera up and down before snapping the shot. If you’re like me, you’re using auto-focus to make sure the eyes are sharp before re-composing the shot.

Focus, as you can see, is such a powerful tool. Combined with shutter speed and aperture (depth of field), you have three of the greatest technical aspects of photography at your fingertips, able to wield them in order to manipulate three of the greatest aesthetic features of any image. Useful? I would think so! Something to always work on? Definitely! Again, I’m a fan of shots that are in focus. Blame it on my training, my background, the part of the industry that I’m in. I just feel that sharp images convey more of the story that I’m trying to tell. Even shots that show extreme motion, such as David duChemin’s well-known gondola shots, although seemingly out of focus, were shots rendered due to movement and time. I guarantee you that before the time-created blurs and streaks were even a component of the image itself, the photographer placed his plane of focus in the proper place.

I hope I didn’t come across as polemically against out-of-focus images. I’m not that at all, and if I was, I would be shooting down some of the greatest photojournalistic works we have ever seen in photographic history. What I am saying is that it pays to focus (pun intended) on creating sharp images when needed. We haven’t begun to talk about exhibiting images in certain parts of the industry in relationship to their sharpness, but we’ll end here.

I’d love to hear your comments about your perspective on out-of-focus images. It’s an ever-changing visual world, and with it, opinions and attitudes about these types of things change as well. It’s an important concept to discuss, because at some point, focus becomes less about technical aptitude, and more about personal and professional vision and creativity. It’s necessary to get to the second part!

More to come…

Rolando Gomez from Lens Diaries wrote at the beginning of this month about the significance Rembrandt lighting for portraits, from the classics all the way up to today’s digitally rendered photographs. His post reminded me of my recent trip to the Denver Art Museum and its collection of impressionist art from the likes of Picasso and Monet (I didn’t see any van Gogh in the museum). I would like to echo Mr. Gomez in saying that paying close attention to how other art forms, classic forms of visual creation in particular, can lead to a very acute eye for form, light, and character in the photographic world.

Take for example the two images provided in this post. West Texas skies are often compared to paintings from a day gone by, and while I have talked to artists that are inspired by the skies, others can relate the skies themselves to other works. The two images included here reminded me of those impressionist-era paintings I saw in Denver. The camera cannot physically provide the rise and pits of the brush strokes you see in this type of painting, however, the colors and the texture provided by depth and contrast are likened to the tangibility offered through the earlier artists’ creations.

Then again, the camera was never designed (at least at conception) to produce the type of three-dimensional feel that Monet did with his harsh strokes and extremely visible globs of paint on the canvases. What the camera does do, however, is allow us to capture those environments and experiences that often remind us of such artistic feel. The broad-brush clouds and the faint grasslands and the pastel-like colors both images reckon toward a 19th-century oil painting in said style. You can even imagine the distant town in the first image as small dots of white raised from the visual plane.

Recognizing and embracing historical art and art styles raises your awareness of similar occurrences in your own work. While a camera can’t quite offer what early impressionists did in the way of actual, physical touch, there are certain things that impressionism did not do in an equally artistically limiting way that our modern-day digital cameras bring to the table. However, there is a visual foundation that transcends all forms of art, and this foundation, whatever it is, is left up to the creator to find and draw from.

It’s getting to be that doldrum part of the summer, when in West Texas, the photography seems to be getting more sparse in terms of vegetation, and the days drag on. It’s like an old Ford/Wayne western placed in a dried up town with nothing but a jailhouse and the quintessential hotel. Alright, alright, so it’s not that extreme. It’s actually been a nice summer so far, but you can tell the heat is coming on and the photographic days are just creeping along.

The shot above is from a few years back, during the Spring actually. The Chorro Vista campsite in the Big Bend Ranch State Park is found on one of the longest stretches of unmaintained high-clearance road in to the Fresno Canyon area, just south of the Arroyo de los Mexicanos. At the time this photograph was taken, it was one of the newest roads in the park, and in Big Bend, when they say unmaintained and high-clearance, they mean bring two spares and plenty of what they refer to as “desert pin-striping.” The ocatilla and desert yucca are abundant, and the campsite offers some of the best vistas in the park looking toward the Chisos mountain range. Just below the campsite is another jewel of a find in Madrid Falls, the second highest waterfall in the state. It’s pouring straight out of the Chihuahuan desert.

I haven’t been back to this site in a couple years, but I feel an itching to get back that way. The Texas Big Bend is a special sight, and it’s worth every drop of gas getting you out there!

Here are a few formats for the calendar you’re welcome to download:

Large: 2400 X 1600

Laptop: 1440 X 960

iPad: 1024 X 768

iPhone 4: 960 X 640

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…

10.Q Logo is copyrighted by Heber Vega.

I’ve been fortunate this past few months to have met several great people who provide fantastic photographic and creative services to not only their immediate surroundings but to those worldwide as well. Heber Vega, a humanitarian and cultural photographer based in northern Iraq is one such person. Heber’s work as a photographer and aid worker deems recognition, and I hope you visit his site often as it is a wealth of photographic and storytelling resources.

One of the more prominent features of Heber’s site is his 10.Q blog series, where he leads interviews with some of the top cultural/travel/humanitarian photographers in the world. A little while back, Heber asked me if I would like to participate in an interview, and I was humbled. Link here to see the interview. This is a great collection of interviews and an even more impressive group of interviewees, including David duChemin, Matt Brandon, Gavin Gough, Karl Grobl, and Brian Hirschy. I’m lucky/fortunate/proud to be included in this series.

Thanks goes to Heber Vega for this opportunity! Hopefully you’ll see more from him soon on this site as well!

To check out more of Heber’s work:

Web site: http://www.hebervega.com

Twitter: @hebervega

On Facebook

It’s been a busy week, full of shooting, writing, designing, and some great discussions with other photographers, near and afar! I was going through some old images tonight looking for some submit-worthy photographs to go with an assignment, and I came across this image from the Big Bend Ranch State Park near Lajitas, Texas. I drove back in down some fairly fresh cut roads the afternoon before this morning and car-camped until an hour before sunrise.

There is nothing better than waking up before the dawn and hearing nothing, while being able to barely see across this vast expanse of rugged land, decorated with desert vegetation and craggy peaks. Twilight (no, not the movie) is an interesting time to shoot as well, and it’s a good practice to do so if you are interested in understanding the dynamic range capabilities of your camera (sorry, enough of the nerd talk, let’s just soak it in). You sense the stillness at this time of day, regardless of where you are. I continually tell my students that it’s worth waking up at least one morning out of the year before the sunrises. Your life will be better. Wake up more often, go take a few images, and you might just have struck the fountain of youth!

If you happen to be camped out on a mountaintop straddling the Texas-Mexico border, even better!