When most people take their first steps with using lights they try to make the photographs shadowless. The ability to do this is very useful, but sometimes it’s far better to place your own shadows exactly where you want them.

Some subjects need to be given a distinct treatment. This portrait of an award winning student was crying out for an unusual image and it was obvious that he would do pretty much anything I asked. The college where he had been studying plastering was a large space divided up into small rooms that the students then practiced their craft in. It was dark and dull coloured with no reflective surfaces so it was pretty much an ideal location for me to work in (apart from the dust).

I quickly spotted a whole series of arches and windows that would serve as a perfect frame to the photograph and set a Lumedyne light up inside the small room.The beauty of working with battery powered kit is that you don’t have to find power points, which were few and far between in the workshop area.I first tried to shoot with a softbox on the flash unit, but the dull colours and the subjects plain T-shirt made it a pretty boring shot so I decided to shoot without any form of light modifier and removed the softbox in order to get the hard shadow.

The flash exposure was f5.6 at 200 ISO with the softbox in place, but this leapt to f13 with just the metal reflector in place. There was so little available light that everything not lit by the flash was in total darkness. This effect was perfect for the shot. (more…)

It’s quite often the case that the available light looks great, but that there just isn’t enough of it. The trick here is to use flash to supplement the ambient light without replacing it. When you have the headmaster of one of the world’s oldest and grandest schools it isn’t difficult to choose a location in which to make his portrait.

After a very quick stroll around the fourteenth century buildings we settled on this well worn flight of steps to shoot the pictures. There was no sunlight on the scene, what light there was had been reflected from a nearby pale stone building so it was nicely diffused whilst still directional. Unfortunately this gave a 200 ISO light reading of 1/45th of a second at f2.8. This is simply not enough to guarantee sharp images so I decided to supplement that small level of ambient light with flash.

The available light was coming from my left so I decided that a softbox would best replicate the quality of light that was there. I have a two foot (60cm) x three foot (90cm) Chimera softbox so I fitted it to a Lumedyne head and placed it on a lighting stand about six feet to the subject’s right at about 20 degrees above his eye level. (more…)

Having glass or any reflective surface in a photograph normally strikes fear into the heart of most photographers. This portrait has at least ten panes of glass in shot, but careful lighting and liberal use of the LCD screen on my digital camera made the glass nearly invisible.

The scientist featured in this portrait is an eminent professor of Biology at the University of Sheffield. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of the United Kingdom, it’s a good four hour drive from central London so I had plenty of time to make plans of how the shoot would go in my head.
I had been briefed that there was a museum at the University and that the professor was it’s senior curator in his spare time. Museums = glass cases = trouble. The portrait was part of a series of about fourteen that had to have two shots.

The first had to match one another and the second (this one) had to be very different from one another. There were few places around the campus that offered an interesting environment so I decided that once the simple shot was over I would try the museum. (more…)

This is going over old ground somewhat, but I think that given a second and third example of techniques discussed before and combined here you start to get a deeper understanding of how various techniques can be intertwined.

The brief for this photograph was simple: A portrait of a School’s nursing sister who specializes in bereavement with children who are not clients of hers and cannot be identified.
The original idea was to have the nursing sister standing absolutely still and have the children running around and therefore blurred. Unfortunately the weather got in the way and harsh direct sunshine made shutter speeds long enough to achieve a blur virtually impossible.

Another case of “the best laid planned of mice and men….” The school playground was southeast facing, with a big area of shadow covering a large part of it. Fairly quickly I decided that the children would need to be in silhouette and the options for the light background were the concrete surface of the playground and the deep blue sky. (more…)

Sometimes you have no other option than to get your flash unit out of it’s hot shoe and make it perform like a studio style strobe. Whether it’s the Canon 550ex, the Nikon SB28DX or another make altogether there are some simple steps you can take to produce cultured and interesting images.

The telephone message goes something like this: “Meet this guy, not sure of his name yet at Euston railway station and take him somewhere to shoot a nice portrait. We’ll probably only use a mugshot, so don’t go mad.” The second message wasn’t a lot better, but I was well on my way to one of Europe’s busiest rail stations to meet the man with no name who was to meet me by platform six. The third call said “His name is Molyneux, he’s about fifty and he’s there now”. I jumped out of the car (having parked it legally) and with camera bag in hand I ran to meet my man. Knowing the area well I planned to drag him back to a small park, via the car to grab lights, and shoot some outdoor portraits in the evening sunshine.

Having found him a lot more easily than I had bargained for I then discovered that he was shortly to catch a train and had to be interviewed in the mean time. This gave me about ten minutes to shoot the pictures and no way of getting back to the car to gather kit, oh! and it was about to rain.

The sky was still blue just outside the station concourse and the buildings gave us an area of shade so I decided to go with a similar idea to the “shooting from the shade” technique explained a few months ago. (more…)

When you have just spent three hours driving to a job going over what the picture editor and the designer said to you about the pictures that were required it is inevitable that you start to make some plans. This job was certainly such an occasion.

Blue skies accompanied me all the way and I was planning to light the shot against a wonderful sky.I arrived in plenty of time and as the young musicians gathered and put their costumes on I sat drinking coffee. I then watched as the sky turned from blue to grey to black in the space of seconds and the rain started to fall. Those plans hatched in the car had to be changed. Quickly.

The room set aside for the photographs to be shot in was large enough but full of tables and with very cluttered walls. In this kind of situation there are only two options: a) cry and go home, or b) make the most of the surroundings.

The floor was a messy carpet and the ceiling was pretty even and plain white. If in doubt, get up high and shoot down or get down low and shoot upwards. I decided to try both. (more…)

The way that an image is destined to be used dictates how you shoot it. This example talks about the difference in approach to shooting what is essentially the same subject, but for two different uses. I went to this southwest London school to shoot a “fly on the wall” documentary article about a music project to fill a couple of pages in a tabloid sized magazine.

The journalist commissioned to write about the project arrived well before me because I had been delayed shooting an urgent news job. By the time I arrived the workshops with three professional musicians and the composer of the piece they were working on were well under way. I had a quick word with the writer and got on with shooting the pictures. I hadn’t missed anything that wasn’t going to happen again so I relaxed and worked on shooting images that I knew would fit into the style of those pages.

Some of the photographs were lit with Lumedyne lights, but most were either available light (400 ISO) or used one or more Canon 550ex speedlites triggered with a Canon ST-E2 transmitter. Within the two hours remaining I had completely covered the project, it’s key personnel and I was really confident that I had filled my brief so I went home to edit the pictures. I sent twelve images back to the picture desk by dial up ISDN connection. (more…)

The “Interview Portrait” is one of the most difficult tasks that I am asked to undertake. Of course it’s easy enough to just turn up and shoot a picture, but actually making a proper portrait is a really difficult task. This portrait was frame 64 out of 73, frames 1- 30 were the safe shots and 31 – 73 were far more experimental.

The beauty of the interview portrait is that you know that as long as the subject and the journalist are talking you can carry on shooting. You normally have fixed amount of time so you can plan a strategy. Mine tends to be to divide the time up and shoot safe, tight, softly lit photographs for the first ten minutes or so. During this time you get to know where the eye contact is going to be, how likely the subject is to use extravagant hand gestures and how tolerant they are to flash.

If at all possible the photographer should seat everyone involved to give themself as many options to move around and get different angles, to get the right background and to be able to light the picture. The huge plate glass window behind him dictated many of the angles but the drama of the sky makes that a worthwhile compromise.

Once the safe images were “in the can” I decided that the light needed to be a lot more dramatic and that the buildings outside the window needed to be used. He was having genuine eye contact with the the reporter so I decided that the light should be coming from that angle. (more…)