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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