#ayearin52lightstudies

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:

I really enjoy looking at early color photographs of food. They have a striking pop art quality and lack the soft polish of contemporary food photography. If you ever find a color cookbook from the 50s, 60s, or 70s you’ll see what I mean. Even today, if you pay attention, you can still find packaging with old photographs. I found one on my own Morton Kosher Salt box.

I have no idea who made this picture. For all its information, the internet sometimes comes up short with the very obscure. No doubt it was a commercial photographer, probably in Chicago (home of Morton Salt). I love that after all these years Morton has not updated it.

Old food lighting is great. Overhead, from the side, from the front. Most food now is side or backlit. Based on the shadows (directly under the food), there is a light over head. Based on the reflections, there are lights on either side of the food. It looks like there are 2-3 lights on the right side, one light from the left (variations in veggie skin makes that determination harder than with other reflective surfaces). The light is mostly even, and to accomplish this I used lots of little bounce boards around the food (they were all about 3″ tall, so they didn’t block light coming from the soft boxes). Also, I should mention that I started out using hard light, but the shadow quality and the sheen on the Morton veggies pointed to a softer light. Probably more like a big dish covered with diffusion—I went too far on this, but decided to err on the side of soft rather than hard. Lastly, using a white ground was critical to make the surface reflections on the food lighter. I originally had it on a black surface, but it didn’t look right.

This week I looked at global color. The basic idea is that you gel some of your lights one color (say, orange) and then balance that in the camera either by adjusting the white balance or by using a corresponding filter on the lens (say, blue). The gels push the colors one direction and the filter pulls it back toward the center. This limits the palette. It also "colors” white light (or ambient) the “corrected” color. It’s not as confusing as it sounds, but you have to think about colors in opposite terms.  

There are lots of photographers who use this kind of color well. But Peggy Sirota is one of the best, in my opinion. If you google image search her, you’ll see what I mean. I don't know whether she uses a filter on the lens (limiting the color gamut being recorded) or if someone is doing all that in post production (limiting the color output). I’m almost certain her early work, which was on film, used filters. Regardless, there is a way to do what she does. 

Take this picture of Robin Williams. I am pretty sure the key light is gelled orange/yellow, and the fill (shadows) and background are left white or gelled blue. Then, the whole picture is “corrected” by filter or white balance to “normal.”  

In my picture, because of Sara’s hair color, I decided to go the other way with it: the key light has a 1/4 CTO gel, the fill has a Full CTB gel, and a Blue Intensifier filter on the camera is supposed to push the whole thing toward the blue end of the spectrum. Then, I warmed the whole thing up in the computer (with white balance). The result is that Sara’s neutral skin tones are nicely warm—the Blue Intensifier is not supposed to affect non-blue tones as much as blue ones—but there’s so much common color across the image. While the Robin Williams picture pushes the color so that his eyes match the background, I pulled it back a little for her hair. One thing I probably should have done is place a bounce board on the shadow side. His shadow is not quite as dark, probably a stop above mine. Here’s the diagram. There are plenty of ways to light a picture like this—the key is the color.

This week I spent some time working on another color picture, and it totally bombed. So, setting aside color for a moment, I went the opposite direction and attempted this silhouetted picture below by Ture Lillegraven. I saw it on his Instagram feed and loved it. While continuing the Axe (Ax?) Theme from the previous post, I determined that adding an axe to a picture makes it instantly more interesting (maybe creepier in some cases). This picture with a baseball bat would not be worth much to me. 

What caught my eye was 1) the powerful silhouette, and 2) the white line outlining the front of the subject’s right arm. In basic terms, I wanted to light the background and define a feature against the silhouette I created. (Note: When looking at this picture on my iPhone, I thought it was black and white with no definition in the shadow areas. As you can see from this screen grab, that’s not the case. Still, I think mine works in b/w because removing the color helps flatten the image completely, and I think it strengthens its graphic nature. But, it also opens an interesting idea: using color to create depth.)

I started out by putting 4 lights on a white seamless. I thought I could get a strong enough wrap effect to give me what wanted. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. There is some wrap, but I couldn’t get enough light where I wanted it. I then played with pointing a light toward the handle. That ended up lighting my face and front, so I turned it, flagged it, put a grid on it, etc. with the goal of making that light only “see” the axe handle. I was mostly successful. What I really needed was a long vertical strip of light that didn’t spill on other parts of my body. Ultimately, I was able to get it to a good place by cheating the axe out into the path of the light. I then polished the image in photoshop.

The other thing which you can’t see in the image is the black panel I used overhead to block ceiling reflection. To eliminate all reflected light and all shadow detail, you could surround the subject with black cards and floppies. Of course, had I realized that the inspiration picture did have some shadow detail, I would have approached this differently. In a white-walled studio, all the light bouncing around probably would have given the right amount of definition.