Saturday In The Park

Ok, actually it was Wednesday, not Saturday. But I was always a fan of the band Chicago and their tune "Saturday In The Park" was one of my favorites. But I digress...

My most precious little buddy, my little grandson Hudson, came for a visit this week. He's now 15 months old and quite mobile. And although most of my photography over the last several months has concentrated on the use of off camera flash, I knew before he ever arrived that highly mobile little people and careful and accurate use of off camera flash just don't go together that well. So now it was really time to go back to natural light.



Any time Hudson comes to visit I try to set aside one block of time just for pictures. So we scheduled a pre-sunset shoot in a local park. Once we arrived, one of the first things to attract his attention was this squirrel that, while careful to maintain his distance, wasn't in too much of a hurry to get away. No doubt somewhat tamed by the constant human traffic in the park, he would let Hudson get to within 5 feet or so before leaping away about 10 feet, waiting for Hudson to catch up, then repeating the whole sequence again. Hudson must have chased him around for 15 minutes.



I guess the squirrel eventually got tired of the game because he finally climbed this tree. Not to be robbed of his play time, Hudson camped out at the base of the squirrel's hide out for several minutes trying to talk him back down for more fun and games.



One of the key pieces of information you need at your finger tips to plan an outdoor natural light shoot is knowledge of the position of the sun at any given time of day. I use a tool provided on-line by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration that will let you overlay a closeup satellite image of any place on the earth with information and diagrams to show the position/angle of sunrise, sunset and current time for any date/time you wish to select. I was already familiar with the layout of the park and using the NOAA solar calculator, I knew precisely what time I wanted to start shooting and where in the park would be the ideal location to get a beautiful, warm, back lit setting for shooting Hudson.



At the end of the day though, all of the photographic technical mumbo jumbo fades in to complete insignificance every time I look at these pictures. He's gone back to Kansas now and these are all I have left to keep him close until I see him again. When I look at that little face smiling back at me from my desktop wallpaper or hanging in a picture frame on my wall, all I remember is how much I love and miss him.
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Hit The Beach!

Matthew and Mary Catherine are related to me somehow (by marriage, not blood). I just can't think of what you call your wife's sister's husband's grandchildren. Matthew just graduated from high school and Mary Catherine is entering the 11th grade. But we first made their accquanintance when they were very small children - maybe 4 to 5 years old. My wife's brother-in-law would rent a beach house for a week each summer and we would spend a few days together with them.

They are visiting this week and my sister-in-law asked if I would shoot some beach pictures to compliment the beach portraits they had made when they were very young. I had asked Matt to strike that pose with his arms around Mary Catherine. But before doing so, he mockingly wrapped his big hands around Mary Catherine's neck, which sent her into a giggle fit. Once he did get his arms wrapped around her, neither one was very comfortable with the pose so we didn't shoot more than a couple but I did manage to get this one while she was still laughing. Although the framing on the right isn't ideal, I just really like the playful spirit they both are displaying here.



In the end, my sister-in-law opted for these two individual shots of each of them, and they will be produced as 16X20 prints and go on the wall to either side of the childhood shot taken of the two of them together on the beach many years ago.



These were lit with a single Canon 430EX II flash in a shoot through umbrella to camera left. The flash was fired with a Cybersync radio trigger. The trick on this type of shot is getting the flash and surrounding abmient lighting balanced and I was very pleased with this and all the other shots we got this evening.
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So You Think You Can Dance

A family friend teaches ballet at a local community center. After seeing some of my recent work, she asked if I would shoot portraits of her students as part of their spring recital activities. Of course I agreed - especially since it seemed like a perfect excuse and opportunity to acquire some new gear.

I wanted more power, faster recycle times, and a larger light surface than I could get with my little speedlight flashes. So for this event I invested in a Paul C. Buff Alien Bee AB800 flash head, their 47" Octabox, which is an 8-sided octagonal shaped softbox, and a nice, neutral gray tie-dyed backdrop and stand.

The setup used four lights. The big AB800/Octabox combination was 45 degrees to camera left for the key light. Front fill was provided by a Canon 430EX II speedlight fired into a 4x6 foot white styrofoam panel just out of view to camera right. Another Canon flash fired into a silver reflective umbrella from the rear right provided the edge/rim illumination. And finally, a 3rd speedlight with a Honl speed grid lit the backdrop.



I shot the first group of 20 students on one evening, and the second group of 20 a couple nights later. They ranged from age 3 all the way up to the late teens.

The first night was a real lesson in humility and learning to shoot under any circumstances. We were shooting in the community center basketball gym. But I arrived at 2:30 in the afternoon on a very hot day to a facility with no air conditioning. The temperature inside was easily in the mid-90s. By the time I spent an hour getting all set up, I was a soaking, sopping mess. I had sweat running down my head and face in buckets and my clothes looked as if I'd been doused with a fire hose.

It wasn't a very professional image to present to the moms and kids when they came in but we had to press ahead and get the shots. Next time I'll think ahead to such circumstances and be sure to at least have a towel and fresh shirt handy to change into before the client sees me.

Blessedly, the second night's shooting was done in a nice, air conditioned ball room.
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Loving The Light

I had commented earlier on taking advantage of an overcast sky to turn it into a giant softbox. The gist of the post was that I was becoming somewhat consumed with the pursuit of flash lighting equipment and techniques and I needed to refocus on some of the fundamentals of natural light.

I had to have that lesson reinforced again this weekend when I discovered that I had lost my remote flash trigger, a small but absolutely indispensable piece of gear for shooting photos with off-camera flash. It is a small radio transmitter that sits in the camera's hot shoe where a flash would usually be attached and sends a firing signal to a receiver that is attached to a remote flash unit several feet, or even several yards away on a light stand.

Consequently, I was forced to spend the weekend with my grandson looking for natural light shooting opportunities. This one presented itself when we pulled up into the driveway of my son's in-laws with little Hudson in tow. They have a beautiful yard, full of greenery and trees. The sun was about 1 hour from settings and the interplay of light and shade immediately caught my eye as we got out of the vehicle.



After visiting for a few minutes, I sat Hudson in this pretty little shady spot with some sun-lit backdrop and a bit of backlight coming through the overhead trees. My intent was to get some close up head and shoulder shots of him, but their family dog Daisy decided she wanted to be included in the shoot.

And who can resist a cute baby with a dog?
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Silence and Solitude

I've visited the Jessie Rogers Memorial Cemetery on a couple of occasions, exploring the photographic potential. There are actually several possibilities here for some nice location/outdoor portraits. I went back today with my light gear, intending to shoot some self-portraits to test out some of the various shooting angles and lighting possibilities.

But I discovered that shooting self-portraits outdoors on a humid Florida day isn't very much fun. After running back and forth to the camera a few times, I was a sweat-soaked, dripping mess.

Fortunately, this beautiful marble sculpture was nearby and sitting in just the perfect spot for some great interplay of ambient and strobe light.

It was an overcast day and the sky above and behind the statue was fairly wide open, with the cloud-shrouded sun providing a very subtle glow to the top and back. Immediately behind my back at the shooting position was a high brick wall, behind which were some fairly thick woods. So the front of the statue was in shadow with a normally exposed background ambient. Knocking the ambient down another stop or so put the sculpture face in to an even darker shadow.

I then brought the exposure of the sculpture face up by placing a speedlight in a 28" Westcott Apollo softbox and set it directly on the ground about 3 feet from the sculpture to camera left.
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Light Science and Magic

"Why" you may be asking yourself, "is he posting a picture of a spatula?"

The answer lies in the title of this post, which happens to be the title of a book I've heard tell of for quite awhile but only got around to reading this weekend. I'm referring to what is apparently a classic in the photographic literature, "Light Science and Magic", now in it's third edition and available from Amazon.com.

I'm really starting to get the hang of lighting people. I need to stretch my creative vision some but I'm pretty confident and comfortable now that I can pull of a reasonably good portrait under normal conditions.

What has eluded me has been photographing things rather than people. I've always said that I don't have much interest in shooting objects. But some of that ambivalence is due to the fact that I really had no concept on how to light them. So whenever I try it, I end up just doing a lot of guessing, coupled with trial and error. This does not make for a very enjoyable photography experience.

I've always read rave reviews about this book and finally plunked down for it. I read through the first several chapters in one setting. After wards I decided to take a quick attempt at one of the exercises for photographing shiny metal objects - one of the subjects that gives most photographers fits.

Using the principals explained in Light Science and Magic, I set this shot up on my bedroom floor with one light and had it in the camera and ready to upload in about 5 minutes. The last time I tried to shoot something shiny like this, I must have taken 50 frames in one hour and never did get something even close to usable.

This one wouldn't get me an A at the Parson's School of Design but I was very pleased with the result on a first attempt and the ease with which I was able to achieve it.

Next chapter...Glass.
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All Growed Up

The youngest child is graduating from college in a few weeks. God, do I feel old!

He made his last trip home for the semester this week and I took the opportunity to get a quick head and shoulders shot of him to include in the graduation announcements.

Looks like a very typical sort of outdoor shot with a soft, diffused light from the front and the sun providing highlights on the rear quarter. Except in this case, he wanted to be shot in front of our grape fines, even though they are still void of leaves from the winter. And that meant facing toward the sun rather than away from it.

To rectify the situation and give us acceptable quality of lighting, I had my wife standing to the left of him holding a large diffuser up between him and the sun. It was late in the day and there were a few clouds hanging about that periodically softened the sunlight, but the use of the diffuser guaranteed that we had an acceptable soft light source for his face.

Then I placed a gridded flash to his rear right and set it at about 1 stop above the ambient light level that I was shooting at. I probably could have more closely approximated sunlight by adding a CTO gel. But I think the effect is still quite convincing.

He actually showed me a nifty little Photoshop technique to produce this bit of desaturated/pastel color look. After doing all of the other typical retouches like contrast, color, etc, I added a Black and White adjustment layer. With the B&W adjustment layer in place, I played with the color channel sliders to darken the shirt abit and cranked the red up some to give that classic red filter appearance to the skin. Finally, I turned the opacity of the B&W layer down to about 70%, allowing a touch of the underlying colors to show through.

I really like the overall effect, which gives a little more contemporary look for a subject his age.
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Shooting On The Shore - Chapter Two

I had posted an earlier blog declaring my new appreciation for the photographic opportunities along the shore. I revisited the same spot this evening. All though the basic setting is the same, the changing season brings new opportunities with new qualities, angles and direction of the light.



Of course, one of the challenges as well as rewards of shooting at this time of day is you can be working in dramatically different light conditions within just a few minutes. This shot with the sun just ready to dip below the horizon was taken only about 20 minutes after the shot above of the heron looking full into the late afternoon sunlight. There are usually a couple hundred of these birds hanging around this spot because a lady comes on a fairly regular basis to feed them. They are usually just bobbing around on the water waiting for a handout. But this evening, an American Bald Eagle swooped in from above and startled them up in to the air. I just started shooting as fast as I could and caught this great view with the circular arrangement of the birds converging and leading the eye to the setting sun.



In a rare moment when the rest of the flock wasn't cluttering up the scene, I caught this guy just hanging like a kite in the very stiff wind that was blowing off the water.
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First, Fly The Plane

There is a saying in aviation - during an emergency, the first thing you do is fly the plane. The idea being that, no matter what else is going on in the cockpit, the pilot still has to pay attention to operating the primary flight controls to maintain control of the plane. Otherwise, what's the point? That lesson was brought back home to me last Saturday when I attempted to undertake my first shooting opportunity on the beach.

Above you see one of the real keeper shots from the session - a beautiful (in my opinion) mother/daughter portrait. We shot about 100 frames that day. One of my goals in a shoot like this is to make it as hard as possible for the client to select the images they want because there are just too many good ones to choose from.

I'm sorry to say that the image above is one of only about 20 that are suitable for print, at least according to my standards.



The rest of them look sort of like this one. Do you see the problem? It looks like their falling backwards. It's actually somewhat of an optical illusion caused by the slope of the sand dune on the left. Their legs are running in a contrary line and the feet appear to be too high in relation to the rest of their bodies.

This was something that I just didn't notice when I was looking through the view finder. One of the challenges of shooting at this time of day is you have a very narrow window of ideal, golden light just before the sun goes below the horizon. At this location on this date, the sun is going down just a short distance out over the water and well to the right of the subject. So my lighting concept was to have the fading sunlight shining on their rear shoulder and head, rather than shining on their face and front torso. So I turned their bodies slightly away from the sun to get the effect I wanted. But I was so consumed with getting the light just right - which included an umbrella-mounted flash to the left - that I forgot to pay attention to what I was actually photographing. I forgot to fly the plane.

So next time you are looking down the lens at your subject, don't forget to fly the plane. No amount of creative lighting will rescue a fatally flawed composition.
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Making Lemonade Out Of Lemons

I spent a lot of time over the last couple of days looking at various Flickr photostreams and blogs. And for some reason the theme of "making the most with what you have" kept circling back in my thoughts. This rang particularly true as I looked through Ainsley Joseph's Flickr photostream. I was amazed at the work he was doing in his garage and in various corners of his house.

I've been on the hunt lately for some good north facing outdoor locations and our town just doesn't have that much available. But I do have decent space on the north side of my own home. It just seemed like every time I looked at it, all I saw was the flotsam and jetsam of a typical suburban neighborhood - my own chain link fence, the big honking house next door, garden hose reels, cars in driveways, etc. So while I was always loving the light, the shooting possibilities never really sank into my brain.

Well, this morning I decided to see if i could make some lemonade out of those lemons. Turns out the swing on my deck (which I made, by the way) offers a great setting for an outdoor portrait when all the elements are framed just right.

Here I am sitting in the north side shade of the house, with the house and foliage across the street underexposed by 2 stops at ISO100 160/f5.6. I metered the northern skylight coming in from the right at 60/f5.6 and set up an Apollo 28 softbox on camera left with a Canon 430EX II flash and Cybersync to give me a total 160/f5.6 exposure.

Now the real beautiful part is the big honking two story house next door is behind and to the right of me as seen from my sitting position, is painted a light, fairly neutral color, and is catching the full sun and reflecting it back on my rear right shoulder for some great diffused rim light.

The double-wide chain link gate directly behind me has been opened all the way to get it out of the shot.

A wider aperture for some more bokeh on the background would be just the ticket.

Here's my setup and exterior environment. You can see how on first inspection this area might seem rather unappealing for a photo shoot. But I'm really looking forward to getting a real subject in front of the camera in this spot so I can see just how much I squeeze out of it.


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Beauty Of The Ages

I had an usual pair of shooting opportunities this weekend - unusal in that they represented opposite ends of the spectrum of American womanhood.

First up was Cara, a 20-something collge student and aspiring musical theater actress. She is also the daughter of a good friend of mine and I've known her since she was 8 or 9 years old. I was struck by that fact while shooting about 100 frames of her on a chilly Saturday morning.

She needs some 8 X 10 black and whites for a couple of scholarship auditions she has coming up and this is one of the shots she chose.



On the next day, I shot portraits of 24 widows in our church. Every year at Valentines Day, a group of men in the church host a Valentines Day banquet for the widows in our congregation. In addition to the usual gift of flowers and candy, I suggested this year we also shoot a nice portrait of each of the ladies in attendance.

I set up a makeshift studio in an open area of the church, and each of the ladies dropped by and sat for a picture. There's something about the character in the face of this lovely saint that just really captivated me when I first saw it come up on the monitor.
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Unless You Come As A Little Child

There is a small cemetery at the edge of our town that sits along the water, nestled back up under an expansive canopy of oak trees. I've passed it hundreds of times over the years and was always rather intrigued by its appearance but never ventured in before.

Today I visited the Jessie Rogers Memorial Cemetery with my camera. While I don't make it a habit of strolling through cemeteries, when I do find myself in one, I tend to be drawn to the graves of those who passed away very young.

The tombstone pictured above would seem to belong to the young child of the family for whom this place is named. It is located in a section of plots all bearing the names of various members of the Rogers family from the mid to late 1800's.

One of the things I noticed during my visit was that many of the graves have been and continue to be adorned by all sorts of paraphernalia and mementos, some bordering on the absurd for their garish or absurd nature, or just sheer volume.



Being a father myself though, I was particular touched by this one. Here is the final resting place of a young child who passed away nearly 22 years ago as of this posting. Yet it continues to be adorned with small toys. Many are obviously quite weather worn and I just couldn't help but marvel at the fact that they have stayed here undisturbed for however long they've been in place.



I'm not sure what caught my eye about this particular spot. The time was getting late in the day and the entire site was completely shaded over, which would usually render the light very flat and unappealing. But there was some quality in the stone of this marker that for whatever reason gave it a very distinct glow. With the granite nicely contrasted against the surrounding colors of the flowers, I felt compelled to capture this image.

All shots were taken in natural light. The black and white of young Ida Rogers was taken earlier in the day with near direct, but low in the sky sunlight striking a hard angle from my rear left camera position. The other two shots were in total shade of the surrounding oak trees and the sun approaching the horizon well out of the angle of view.
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Heartbreak For Haiti

As of this post, the whole world knows of the tragedy in earthquake stricken Haiti. This poorest of nations was already in dire straits before this calamity. Now all the more so.

These occurrences have an added significance for those of our church family at Wright Baptist Church in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Among our membership is Chuck Martindale, pictured above. Chuck is a walking miracle. After having been delivered from 26 years of alcohol addiction and having his wife and sons restored to him, Chuck answered a call from God to take up mission work in Haiti.

Chuck has formed his own ministry, Truth Evangelistic Ministries, through which he makes multiple trips each year to some of the most remote and impoverished areas of that country, bringing food, medicine, construction support to build orphanages and churches, and the Gospel.

Even before the earthquake struck, Chuck was already planning a return trip to Haiti this month. With normal travel cut off, he has worked through multiple international contacts to establish an overland route into Haiti from the Dominican Republic and will be returning to the island in a few days to continue his work.

I had already been talking to Chuck about doing a photo shoot with him and these events created an even greater sense of urgency to push forward with the project before he made his next trip.



While we were shooting, Chuck was continuing to take phone calls and emails, receiving word from his friends and colleagues in country, and answering questions from people who wanted to know how they could get involved in the relief effort. We just went right on shooting and a friend who was assisting me said this was the most natural look for Chuck because this is what he does pretty much all day.

The background for the shot is a projected image file on a movie screen that is about 10 feet behind Chuck, being shot from a ceiling mounted LCD projector high above my head at the camera position. I used both of my new pieces of gear here.

In the first shot, the Honl Speed Grid is mounted high and to the right, providing the main light falling on Chuck's face, and the Apollo 28 softbox is just immediately to camera left providing fill. A third speedlight with a snoot is high and to the rear left for the accent light on Chuck's head and shoulder.

For the second shot, we went back to a little more traditional, softer setup with the softbox providing the key at camera right, a flash in a shoot through umbrella for fill on camera left, and the grid on the accent light to the left rear.
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Shooting The In-laws

These are my son's in-laws. I couldn't resist the play on words in the title. We actually have a great relationship with them. Stephanie's (my daughter-in-law, far right) parents live here in the same town with us. Her sisters and their families live in Georgia and Texas, respectively.

Their entire clan was home for Christmas and so I suggested a family photo shoot while they were all together. In addition to this group shot, I also got a couple of different settings with each of the individual families and various combinations of grandparents and cousins.



Although I'm getting pretty comfortable shooting small groups up to 3 or 4 people, bigger groups are still a challenge, mainly because small speedlight-type flashes tend to be a little underpowered for this, especially when they are mounted in a light modifier like an umbrella.

In the group shot I have two flashes set up, right and left of the camera, both in shoot through umbrellas. My main goal was just to get even lighting left to right and front to back. I had to slightly lighten a couple of facial shadows in Photoshop but overall I was very pleased with the end result.
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