I’ve just been tidying my office after a long weekend of shooting, and there were top hats and spiky goggles and ray guns all over the place. Which can mean only one thing – the BIG Shoot Experience Steampunk Spectacular was a rip-roaring success! We spent two days at The Gem, the fab location run by the fab folks at TipTop Photographic, sharing the fun of shooting and teaching some cool techniques to a sold-out delegation of photographers.
I’m particularly pleased with the haul of pictures that I came back with. It’s important to me that we pack as much variety as possible into what we shoot, showcasing a lot of different skills and not just using the same lighting set-up over and over again. That would get boring for me and, more importantly, it would shortchange the delegates on their photography training.
So I’m chuffed to bits with the amount of different pictures and the variation in the lighting and the number of stories told in the images we shot. But there’s one image in particular I’d like to talk a bit about, because it features a VERY clever technique that I pulled out of my grandmaster’s “bag of tricks”.
In essence this shot is a four-light setup, but it’s a four-light setup with a little bit of cleverness. Behind the subject is an umbrella with a half-cut colour temperature orange gel on it. Normally that would produce quite an intense orange but, because we manipulated the white balance in-camera, it’s not as intense as it could be.
The umbrella is hidden behind the return of the wall that she’s leaning on, so there’s not too much spill on the wall on the opposite side of the room, and it’s adding a gentle warmth to raise the density. So it’s not just the Black Hole of Calcutta, because the light is accenting the hat, the feathers, the hair and standing the model out from the blackness.
Now, the clever bit is in the key light; I wanted a nice, soft, almost moonlight-through-a-window direction to the light, but I only had two three-foot by one-foot strip boxes. I wanted a bigger light source than that would create, so I ganged them together side-by-side and created a three-foot by two-foot softbox that I skimmed across the model.
When you skim a light, the edge that is closest to the subject creates the shape while the opposite side of the modifier offers a degree of fill that wraps round. And normally that would be it. However, because I’d made one larger lighting unit that actually comprised two independent light sources, I could increase the exposure on the right-hand side of the combined softbox by a stop.
In essence what that does for me is adding that accent “kicker” light as well. Because now we haven’t just got the inverse square law helping us with the feather, but because we’ve got disproportionate light (since one side of the combined softbox is brighter than the other) it creates that accented cinematic look.
The next big trick in the picture is the fact that the lights are daylight-balanced. So, by telling my camera that we were shooting with tungsten light, the natural daylight coming through the window to camera left becomes much bluer while the tungsten light (the orange-gelled umbrella in the background) becomes more neutral – it’s less orange than it appeared to the human eye.
Finally to camera right, running down the length of the wall that the subject is leaning on, is a doorway to another room with a window. That was allowing a moderate amount daylight to come through, and by adjusting my shutter speed I could control the fill on that side of her cheek. So I could make it more intense and darker-shadowed by speeding up the shutter, or I could fill the shadow in by slowing it down.
Ultimately I shot the picture at 1/15th of a second handheld, with the 17mm lens at f/2.8. But again, the real magic of the image is the fact that I could in essence control the power of light on each side of the modifier. Getting an extra stop, or perhaps stop-and-a-half, more light out of the right-hand strip box is how we were able to create that extra added dimension.
I hope you enjoy this panel of pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them. If you’d like to join us in taking these kinds of super-stylised images, I can’t recommend highly enough that you join us on a BIG Shoot Experience. The next one is coming up at the end of October at the Victoria Baths in Manchester – that’s somewhere I’ve been looking forward to shooting for a LONG time, so you can be sure that I’ll be pulling even more tricks out of the bag for that one!
And if you’d like to concentrate on learning specific skills and advanced techniques like the one outlined above, have a look at the photography courses page where you’ll find everything from The Art of the Nude to Off Camera Flash With Artistry.
Till next time,
D
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