Every once in a while someone throws down a technical gauntlet and I always find myself picking it up. I like the challenge I suppose, and I’m usually waiting for the challenge to be made. On this occasion it came from left field with no real warning, but a challenge is a challenge….

The students at this acting school had been set a project where they were given a painting and had to reconstruct the scene as precisely as they could at the end of a short drama that they had to write which set the scene. A painting done in Spain by an Englishman a long time ago was the challenge that the students had accepted and they showed off their command of drama and Spanish for my journalist colleague and myself with great professionalism.

Unfortunately their command of lighting was less well developed. The few dim lights that there were mimicked the painting to the human eye but meant an exposure of two seconds at f2.8 (400 ISO) with the camera.
Being the kind of photographer who rarely has an assistant I had come without a tripod, so I was forced to light the scene myself. They had a print of the painting so I had to study it very quickly and make a plan. I have written before about reading other people’s work, but I had never had to do that quite so literally with any other job! The composition was their department so I concentrated on the light making mental notes of it’s direction, colour, contrast and intensity. (more…)

Some images are so obviously set up that there is little point in trying to make them seem otherwise. This job was all about a teacher who was in training for the London Marathon and was timed so that the pictures would be shot ready for the story to appear just two days before the event.

The photograph was commissioned by a picture editor who knew the area well, so I had to sure that the location featured in the final image.

Late afternoon is one of my favourite times of day for shooting photographs so I was pleased that the job was booked for about an hour or so before sunset, but less pleased to find out that I wouldn’t be able to make use of that sunset because the teacher had another engagement to make by then.

I picked him up from the school where he works as a modern languages teacher, and by the time I got there he was already changed into his training kit. We drove the mile or so to the shingle beach and I started out shooting some long lens pictures of him running along the crest of the shingle bank. (more…)

In a very similar vein to last month’s technique page I am going to talk about this portrait of a school head teacher that required a fair bit of messing around to get it right. It seems to me sometimes that the further you get the flash away from the camera, the more interesting the result!

This picture was shot as part of a set about the work of the headteacher of a very small school in rural Cambridgeshire. Her duties are many and various so as well as being the head, she is also a full time class teacher and general fixer. To add to her workload, the school is also being rebuilt and this metal shack doubles as the school office.

When I arrived at the school, the weather was sunny and she was teaching a class so I shot a lot of “fly on the wall” pictures of her teaching and of the kids doing their work. Playtime came and went and I shot more pictures of her interacting with the children, this time at play. What I didn’t have was anything of her role as an administrator and leader so we went to the office to see what we could do.

My instinct was to shoot some of the head with the secretary, so I tried all sorts of ways of doing so but the cramped space just made making good pictures extremely difficult. Then it started to rain so I went outside the room to grab a lighting case that was starting to get wet and as I turned I noticed the possibility for this composition.

Sometimes you just have to take advantage of chance so while she was happy to remain in the warm and dry I got my bags inside (out of sight of course) and positioned a Lumedyne head on a Manfrotto stand with a Wein high sensitivity slave inside the room at an angle of about seventy degrees from the axis of the lens. This was a bit wider than I would have liked, but the flash had to be inside the building to make the picture work and that dictated my angle. (more…)

I get a sore throat telling people that flash isn’t just a way of lighting the whole scene. It can, if used properly, pick out a small detail and give it real emphasis. Studio photographers and cinematographers have always known this, so it’s time that us little guys adopt the technique for ourselves. Taking a flash unit off of the camera for the first time is both a frightening and a liberating experience. When that little cartoon lightbulb goes on just above your head you instantly become a better photographer. You might not use the technique, but you know about it and therefore have it as part of your arsenal.
This job was on a sunny but cold beautiful January day. The light levels were pretty high, but the shadows were deep and plentiful. Once anyone was behind anything they were in the dark. Ordinary fill flash would have bleached out the concrete dinosaur’s jaw and thrown an awful shadow accross the restorer’s face.

The exposure for the general scene was a healthy 1/180th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO. The face of the restorer in the shadow was four stops down at 1/45th at f2.8 and the inside of the dinosaur’s mouth was nearly as bad.

That kind of exposure difference makes for poor images. This gives the photographer two options…change the composition so that everything is in sunshine or to balance the the background with the important shadow detail using flash. (more…)

It is regularly the case that the simplest looking image actually requires a lot of thought, mental arithmetic and good old fashioned compromise. This picture has a number of compromises.

I have talked before about using light to make a scene look as if it hasn’t been lit. Achieving a look where the whole scene looks natural in a large room is difficult unless you have five or six lights unless you think laterally.

Direct flash presents all sorts of flash fall off problems. The formula goes something like this:

The amount of light reaching a subject will halve if the flash to subject distance increases by a factor of 1.4x
If there are two subjects in the image and one of them is double the distance from the light source then the further one will be two stops underexposed if the first is correctly exposed.
Sounds complicated? It isn’t. There are some things in the theory of photography, and more specifically in the theory of photographic lighting that need practical examples to make sense.

Hopefully this makes sense, the distance from the camera to the subject doesn’t make any difference. It’s the flash to subject distance that is all important, so as you can see in this example double the distance/quarter the light. (more…)

For just over a year I have been writing these “how to do it” columns about the use of flash in my daily news photography. This time the picture I want to talk about was shot with good old fashioned available light. Not only that it was shot using what artists and early photographers loved for their studios – North light.

Sometimes even I think that there isn’t enough time to set up lights. This was a launch event for an English stately home and it’s education programme for children. There were actors playing the parts of major figures in the history of the building and dozens of children were there to enjoy themselves.
Lots of little people running around means that setting your gear up is difficult, the presence of other photographers makes it harder still.

I decided that this actress was the picture and managed to get her in the room without children for a very short time. The weather outside as bright enough, but it was raining steadily and the light coming through the window was really nice. (more…)

I am often asked to photograph dance and drama. This time it was an early rehearsal for a piece involving Japanese dancers that was taking place in a messy rehearsal room. I decided to watch what they were doing and make notes of the best scenes to re-create with decent lighting. I think that still counts as news photography….

Life is usually easier when you are dealing with professionals and that is often true with actors and dancers. The group of four dancers that I was working with were really happy for me to watch them and were a little relieved when I offered them the chance to pose the photographs as their rehearsals were at such an early stage that they felt it would make them more comfortable to do so.

I watched them working for about fifteen minutes and used my digital camera as a notebook, photographing small scenes that we could then set up and light properly. The dancers quickly forgot that I was there and with the images being purely a form of notation I shot at 1600 ISO from the back of the room.

When they reached a suitable break I got them and the director together and we looked through the various quick images that I had shot on the LCD screen. I explained to them what I liked and disliked about the various positions and we settled on three scenes to photograph. (more…)

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…)