May 21, 2013 (Tuesday) - NYC July 16, 2013 (Tuesday) - NYC - only 3 spots left
Oct 22, 2013 (Tuesday) - NYC - 8 spots still open
These workshops will each be limited to 10 people, and there will be two models available. I do want to give everyone as much individual attention, hence the limit in class size.
I had the pleasure of photographing Rebecca and Max’s elopement wedding in New York. They’re both from Denmark. (Actually, Max is from Spain originally.) They both planned to get married in New York while over on a trip here. I met up with them at City Hall on the day, where I was the witness to their wedding ceremony. That’s quite an honor too. Then, after the ceremony, we ventured out into Manhattan for an extended photo session.
The straight-forward recipe is to make my subject(s) the center of the image by:
- careful composition,
- minimizing extraneous clutter,
- eliminating distracting backgrounds,
- compressing the perspective with a long lens,
- by using a wide aperture on a tele-zoom for shallow depth-of-field.
Great. This works well when the area that we’re photographing our subject in, is just something to have as an interesting, but non-specific background. The background might even be defocused so you can’t really tell where it was. Now, when the location is very much part of what is happening, then as a photographer we need to definitely include the location as part of a “character” in this story. I recently did it with the father and son portrait in Times Square.
And so it is with a wedding taking place in New York, where New York was very specifically chosen as an exotic destination. The photographs of Rebecca and Max had to show a wide range – from the more specifically portrait-like images, to photos which show the city they are in. But I also wanted to avoid a cookie-cutter touristy thing where we move from landmark to landmark and just have them pose in front of things and buildings.
I still wanted to show how they interact with each other. For me, wedding photography, and photography of couples, should be about how they interact with each other. It should reveal something very much *them* along the way.
So there’s the challenge – to take photographs of the couple in Manhattan, and have the range of photos – from elegantly simple portraits, all the way to showing them against the backdrop of the busy city. And yet, not have that same busy-ness intruding, and distracting attention away from them when their family and friends look at the photos.
Let’s run through some of the images and look at the thought-process behind them …
the Good Light magazine interview – the black foamie thing
The (by now) infamous Black Foamie Thing features in the latest issue (#5) of Good Light Magazine as their Gear Tip this time. This subscription magazine is available in the App Store, as well as for Android devices. This 96-page issue also features articles by articles on photography technique, with an obvious bias towards lighting. Check out the App Store for a complimentary copy of the 1st issue. All other issues are $3.99 each.
My friend, Chuck Arlund, visited New York with his son Lachlan, for a few days. At the end of the trip, I had a short opportunity to photograph them. Since this is Chuck, whom I greatly admire, and his son (who is so used to a camera by now), I wanted to come up with something outside of the usual guaranteed way of working with a longer lens, and a simpler background. I wanted something a little out of the ordinary.
What I envisioned was some place in New York that was very busy, and then go to a slow shutter speed, and let everyone that is moving around them, turn into ghostly figures. The idea I had in mind, was with the two of them central in the image, and figures flowing around them on either side. I wanted that symmetry.
But as usually happens, real life limitations and opportunities kick in, and you end up with something slightly different than originally envisioned.
The article on that simple lighting setup with two speedlights, explained our choice of camera and flash settings in detail, so we’ll only briefly cover it this time. Still, a different explanation from a different angle might trigger new ideas and questions.
Another from the most recent publicity photo session with the Modern Gypsies, with two of the girls in French period costume … inside plastic bubbles. Seemingly an easy setup, it took a few quick adjustments to the off-camera lighting while they were enclosed in the plastic bubbles. Time is very limited!
Let’s start off with the test shots, and see the progression from there …
PhotoWhoa is offering another great deal: Lighting Studio Portraits, by Damien Lovegrove, will show you how to create amazing studio quality portraits.
With over 3 hours of content, the video emphasizes the most important technical skills necessary to capture these stunning photographs. From where to position the lighting, to explanations of camera settings and composition, this video will give you the understanding and confidence to reproduce striking work.
camera & flash settings: what do you want to achieve? (model: Ulorin Vex)
In one of the multitude of photography groups on Facebook, I saw a newcomer to off-camera flash say that she bought an Alien-Bee set, but she has no idea what to set it to. My reply was that she needed a light-meter. My thinking is that then she’d know what the specific output of the flash or strobe would be, and then be able to set her camera to it. But then, thinking about it some more, I realized if there is hesitation there or confusion, it is about what specific camera settings (mostly aperture) should be in the first place.
I think this is the baffling part of using off-camera lighting or studio gear on location for the first time – where do you start? What should your camera and flash settings be?
Well, if you shoot on location, your settings are usually decided for you by your available light.
So it really comes down to .. what do you want to achieve?
Still working with Ulorin Vex during the photo session which was shown in the recent article on using a neutral density (ND) filter, let’s have a look at a different setup. With the example where we used the ND filter, we had Ulorin Vex with her back to the sun, and her hair lit from behind by the sun. So there was a specific thought-process there.
But moving around the corner at those same warehouses, we were in the shade. I liked the surroundings … but the light was blah. Using the same kind of idea as shown in this article - off-camera flash for that extra bit of drama - we got to the dramatic image shown at the top.
I wanted it to appear as if Ulorin Vex was in a pool of light.
video clip: Direction and Quality of Light – your key to better portrait photography
The video clip of the presentation I did at B&H to promote my book – Direction of Light – has by now been viewed more than 56,000 times since it was posted four months ago!
But as the saying inevitably goes, the book is always better than the movie. So in case you haven’t seen the video clip yet, it is a good introduction to the book, while also taking a few detours along the way. If you liked the video clip, the book contains even more, and for less than $20, you can own and hold and touch and smell the book. All yours!
And for those of you who have already bought the book, a big thank you! The support is always appreciated. And if I could ask a small favor – a nice review on Amazon always helps. (more…)
using a neutral density (ND) filter to control depth of field when using flash
When working in bright sunlight with flash units that can’t go into high-speed flash sync, we have a ceiling in terms of our shutter speed / aperture combination. The shutter speed limitation then would be our maximum flash sync speed. The bright daylight would then imply a small aperture – most likely around f/11
Why f/11 ?
The Sunny 16 Rule dictates that in bright sunlight,
we’re most likely working at 1/100 @ f/16 @ 100 ISO.
This translates into a handy short-cut of: 1/200 @ f/11 @ 100 ISO,
where 1/200 is the maximum flash sync speed of many cameras.
I use Nikons so my max flash sync speed is 1/250 hence that is where I normally operate when using flash in bright light.
To get to wider apertures for a shallower depth-of-field, we then need to cut the amount of light. We can do this with a Neutral Density filter.
The first concern is usually that the ND filter cuts the flash, but this isn’t a particular problem, since the ND filter cuts flash and ambient light by equal amounts.
So if we have 1/200 @ f/11 and then add a 3-stop ND filter, we end up with f/4 which is much wider than f/11 and gives us better control over our DoF. A 3-stop ND filter is usually denoted as an .9 ND filter, where 0.3 is a stop, and hence 0.1 is a third of a stop. A Neutral Density filter that is marked as 3.0 will therefore be a 10-stop ND filter.
As a side comment, please note that shallow depth-of-field is not the same as ‘bokeh‘.
With the recent photo shoot with Ulorin Vex , I decided that it might be as good an opportunity as any to see how a Neutral Density filter affects the results.
