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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