#52lightstudies

Went off the rails, turned the camera on its side, and pulled out some gels. That’s a straight cyan on the front and a straight yellow on the back. Both are underexposed, which—I guess I’d never internalized—takes the tones way down to an interesting place. Is that because of reduced luminance? To be fair to the final image, I also toned the shadows and highlights just a hair, added some vignette, and desaturated the whole thing maybe 35%. But I would have done that anyway.

So to the lighting...I kept exploring the blocks with the diagonal cut. I painted a white background yellow with a single Acute head w/ 7″ reflector set to 7 or so, enough out from the lamp to let me tape on the gel. I flagged the yellow off the blocks with a piece of black foam core sitting on top of the blocks, plus some cinefoil wrapped around the bottom of the reflector to control spill.

The cyan source (w/ 7″ reflector set up the same as the other) was a few feet away with flags basically knife edged to the light, one knocking down the light on the left block, the other knocking down the right. I built a little box around the background to keep any cyan light from getting back there and making the yellow muddy. In working with the Profoto Acute, I’m learning how to use the ratios (my Broncolors have digital dials and each channel is independent). It’s an interesting constraint and in this case I used both B channels, so I’d get equal power to each head. I then controled balance, intensity, fall off, spread, etc. by moving the light. Such a great practice. Had I used two monolights or a pack with individual controls, I would have been tempted to play with ratios of power rather than distance, and distance changes the shape of the light whereas power does not.

After a 2.5 year hiatus, are we back? I just finished setting up a studio and wanted to explore the light in the space. It’s got a big North Facing window that stays in the shade until about 5pm, and a South Facing window that runs along the entire length of the studio (about 24′) high up (let’s say from 12′-15′ up from the ground).

I took some styrofoam blocks, packing materials for a table I put together, and arranged them and the light for a couple of hours. Remembering some Albert Watson techniques, I got it very dark and then let the light in where I wanted it. It was a fun exercise, one I’ll continue to experiment with. I get the feeling that doing a hundred compositions of these blocks would lead to some interesting pictures.

The Hay story in AdWeek was full of great images. The cover, and my previous post, has the model off the background so that the light, which is in front of her, doesn’t cast shadows on the background. In the other pictures, he places the subject right against the background, creating great shapes with the shadows. Since most of the others riffed on this idea, I combined them to make the image of Caroline above.

The set up is pretty simple. All bare bulb, with placement determined by where the shadows should fall. I think an arc or diagonal line worked really well. Each light creates a shadow and washes out the other shadows that it can “see.” The lights are all powered the same and I placed them equidistant from Caroline (easier than variable distances and, therefore, powers). I also did not get the richness of darks because I placed a light (too strong, probably) camera left.

Where I came up short was either not having small enough lights or not setting the lights far enough away from the subject. Either/both would have made the shadows’ edges harder, and more like Mr. Hay’s. With the gear I have and a relatively small studio, I did what I could and left it at that.

I got interested in hard light right from the start of this project with the Emma Summerton picture in Week 5. It’s still a challenge. I like how Mr. Hay solved the shadow problem—he made it a defining part of the picture.

Rediscovering someone is great fun. I used to look at Alexei Hay’s work when I subscribed to a lot of magazines. His work is beautiful. Color, composition, lighting—everything is there. Some of his celebrity work is particularly interesting, since most celebrity photography these days looks very similar shooter to shooter and magazine to magazine. Anyway, I saw this picture of Gigi Hadid on the cover of AdWeek a while back. 

What I loved, similar to what caught my eye in the Ruven Afanador picture from Week 17, is the brushing of colored light which gives the image a visual strength it simply would not have if all the light was the same color. As you can see, I got a little carried away with the red... because Caroline’s hair blocked much of the light, I just had her turn into it. Also, I just felt that a stronger red worked well with her neckerchief. It’s fairly likely that I had a different color red than Mr. Hay. I passed on trying to make a foil choker (is that what it’s called?) because of the reflectivity issues. But covering the neck is important: it hides weird shadows and creates balance. If I could go back and change one thing, I would flag the red light off Caroline’s shoulder. Here’s the set up: