At 123 metres (404 feet) Salisbury Cathedral’s spire is the tallest in the United Kingdom. To get the whole thing into a frame along with the actual subject of the portrait is no easy task and you need to get a decent distance away to achieve some sort of balance between foreground and background. I’ve written a lot about compromises that you have to make to get good pictures. I’ve written about juxtaposing elements within a frame to get what you need and my love of lighting my subjects outdoors and shooting from the shade has been explained many times on this site. All of those concepts came together in one photograph and, for the technically curious I’ll explain all a bit lower down the page.

I wanted a reasonably shallow depth of field so that the spire didn’t dominate the frame. I wanted the lighting to be subtle. I am really pleased to have achieved all of that in a relatively short space in time. I didn’t want to be so close that I had to shoot from a low angle to get the spire in. I couldn’t get that much further away without losing the deep shade.

There was a fairly suitable patch of shade under the trees in the grounds of the Cathedral. That was actually ideal for the headshots. For the portrait I would have preferred it to have been another twenty metres or so away from the spire. If we had been shooting on an unlimited budget with lots of time for set up and testing I would have put up a large screen to shelter him from the sun in exactly the right place. That would have also given me the flexibility to use a row of small trees to obscure the cars parked in the field behind him. The compromises that I had to make were significant and somewhat limiting but they didn’t make my task impossible.

Of all of the work that I do, this has to be one of my favourite kinds of commission. In the month leading up to this job I had shot ten equally interesting individual portraits for the Salisbury Diocese. They are now being used on their website in their Share Your Story Testimony Campaign to accompany some video interviews that the comms team created.

Moving on to the techie stuff. I was delighted to be able to do all of this using a couple of Canon EL5 flash units and high speed synch. They were controlled by the wonderful ST-E10 transmitter on my EOS R5 MkII camera with a couple of different lenses. Without the high speed flash synchronisation I wouldn’t have been able to shoot with the shallow depth of field. With this image, I was really pushing the boundaries of what the technology was capable of. The frame above was shot at 1/8000th of a second at f4 at 640 ISO. I shot this on a Canon RF 70-200 f4L lens at 75mm.

The RAW file needed to be lightened by about one f-stop in Adobe Camera RAW. I was shooting on E-TTL and the automatic exposure wasn’t giving me the perfect exposure. In the camera I could see that the images were a little dark but they were well within the exposure latitude of the R5 MkII. The exposure on my other camera (shooting without high speed synch) was 1/200th of a second at f11 at 160 ISO (manual flash output) and the depth of field was nowhere near as pleasing.

The flash, set at about 45 degrees to the left of the camera, was shooting through a Phottix 28″ collapsible beauty dish on a stand about 2 metres from the subject. At that distance it was putting out pretty much full power. The light from behind was just a bit of ambient coming through the trees and it was different on every single frame as there was some breeze moving the branches as we shot. Being able to shoot at f4 in early afternoon light with flash is something I’d love to have been had the option to do all of my career. I didn’t really get into high speed synch until I bought my Elinchrom Quadra ELB flashes. Even with those and the right heads I was never really able to shoot at much more than 1/1000th of a second reliably. The Canon’s ability to do what I did here makes carrying them on jobs really worthwhile. The recycle times of the EL5 with the LP-EL batteries are sufficiently quick to allow me to work the way that I like to. More power would definitely be good but any significant increase in weight wouldn’t.

When it comes to white balance, that’s always a tough call when you are combining flash and ambient light. That becomes a tiny bit more complicated when you are using a light modifier. They ALL make a difference to the colour temperature of the light that they put out. Sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s a bit less than subtle. I like the Phottix beauty dish used for the main light on this job for all sorts of reasons but it does add a little bit of warmth. In the post-production I moved the white balance from 5400 degrees where I had shot down to 4900 degrees. I suspect that the tone of the light modifier is due to its age. My favourite Westcott oblong soft box is warmer still. In general, diffusion fabric appears to yellow with age. That’s something that I try to bear in mind when selecting which ones to use as well as when I’m setting or adjusting white balances.

All of this stuff gets a lot easier when you are working under controlled conditions. Studios are extremely useful for so much work but it’s out there making compromises between flash and ambient and aligning subjects and immovable backgrounds that I get the most satisfaction from.