If there is one thing I’d like visitors to this site to take away with them, it’s that they can have quite a lot of influence over light as well as composition. As a professional editorial photographer I have little or no say about the subject matter. This portrait of a young Army officer recently returned from active service was very much intended as a supporting image to those that he had by or of himself in Afghanistan. Never one to accept the supporting role, I wanted my portrait shot in an English barracks to still be the big lead image.

By the time I had driven to the location, got through security and decided where to shoot the picture it was well into the afternoon on a winter day. If the sun is in the right place and you have the right conditions this can be a wonderful time to shoot this kind of picture.

I couldn’t show anything that might give too much away and so we decided that the front of an Army truck with a Military ambulance in the background was pretty safe. My subject wasn’t actually in shadow in this picture but the angle of the sun was throwing my shadow across some of his body. Decided to use my custom Lumedyne head with a 200 joule Signature series pack. No light modifier (no umbrella or soft box) other than a bit of frost filter (thin white paper type material) over the reflector. I placed the flash about three metres from my subject and turned the power up to full. The flash was about sixty degrees from the access of the lens and ten dgerees above his eye line. (more…)

Following on swiftly from the previous after dark example, this portrait has a very similar story behind it. This school teacher is part of a scheme to get people to leave the world of business and go into school management and become head teachers after a few years of teaching. She had worked in the advertising and promotions field and so the picture editor wanted her pictures to show this in some way. One of the assistant picture editors and I dreamed up this idea and at 7.00pm on a winter evening, once all of the lights are on we met up and shot these portraits.

London’s Piccadilly Circus is a bit of a mini Times Square. It is a major road junction right in the heart of the capital and so shooting pictures here presentss it’s own problems. Once again I was blessed with very light winds and so I could use my Chimera 24″ x 36″ soft box on a Lumedyne (I used the custom creation shown here).

The fastest way to judge the exposure on the lit advertising was to shoot a couple of test frames. I quickly worked out that 1/60th at f5.6 was about right on 200 ISO and so I got my flash into position about 1.5 metres from the subject with the centre of the box pretty much level with her eye line. (more…)

Important people often need to be photographed in a way that makes them look powerful. Some of them even like to be seen looking down at you, which is madness when you consider that 99% of people looking down get two chins! This portrait of the Chief Executive of a government agency was made at their offices in London where I had to wait whilst another photographer shot him first. My picture editor had agreed that we would get access to a flat roof area outside if the weather was good so that we could take advantages of the most famous backdrop that I know: Big Ben.

In true PR person style they had failed to get the key. The weather was superb and whilst we waited for the first photographer and then the key search the sky went from brilliant blue to really dull grey. Plan two. The offices have some brightly painted walls, plenty of glass partitions and quite a lot of space and so I decided to go with this corridor where the far wall is a bright red and the nearer one is sky blue.

Most of my work involves balancing flash with available light in some form. This shot avoids any complications with ambient light by using high powered Lumedyne flash and a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second indoors. (more…)

It’s been well over a year since I last posted a new technique page. Life just got in the way! Anyway, they’re back and this photograph was taken as a portrait of a woman who had made a huge career change from a high flying public service to becoming a secondary school teacher. When it was taken she was still studying and hadn’t got a job in a settled school yet and so the situation and the deadline meant that we had to shoot at a certain time of day (an hour after dark) outside the school.

My middle name ought to be “get the safe shot first” and after meeting her and realising that the rapidly falling temperature meant a quick shoot outdoors I did just that. With the flash lit image “in the can” I decided that I wanted to use the unusual sky with clouds and the eerie orange colours of London street lights.

I had a Lumedyne kit with me and there was only a slight breeze which enabled me to use a 24″ x 36″ soft box. The Lumedyne Signature series packs can be turned right down to only 6 joules (6 w/s) and so balancing the flash with the almost non-existent daylight wasn’t going to be a problem. My biggest problem was getting my subject into the “shade” away from any of the street lights so that she could be lit by flash alone. (more…)

When I was searching for an opening image for a recent “dg28 live” seminar I only had to look back a few days to find this example of exactly WHY WE USE LIGHTS.

Early Autumn on a Friday evening in the UK isn’t often a time when the best opportunities to shoot great pictures present themselves. This one, was a real exception. The subject of the portrait runs an educational organisation that serves a coastal area near where I was born. I should know the area like the back of my hand but I don’t and when my subject suggested that we went up on top of the Isle of Portland (not an island at all, just a peninsula!) I thought that it would make a decent enough backdrop but that the view might be obscured by mist. The two pictures below were taken with different lenses but they were taken within a few seconds of each other and show just how much of a difference a bit of flash can make.

We drove up to the highest point and sure enough, the view was spoiled by some low cloud and mist but the sky through the slight mist had real potential. To get any decent contrast into the scene I knew that I’d have to use quite a bit of light and so I carried my Lumedyne kit from the car to the vantage point that we were going to use. I’m very glad that I did. (more…)

I used to get requests for “technique” pages based on images that I had posted when I did monthly updates. This one received a record number of requests!

Jacqueline Wilson is one of the world’s best selling childrens’ authors. I had to take pictures of her twice in ten days and the first set of pictures (including the left had one below) were taken at a press launch for the UK’s National Fostering Fortnight – a charity of which she is a supporter. A few days later I went to her home in Surrey to take some different pictures and amongst them was this one of her looking through one of the many boxes of childrens’ letters that she gets every month.

I did some evenly lit pictures of the author looking through the letters, some close ups of her hands wearing her trade mark rings sorting through papers and then I had the idea of getting her to look into the box and to make it “magical” in the same way that her books grab the imagination of children. After a few frames of evenly lit pictures I decided to place a second flash unit inside the box, mainly to give her face better highlights. Balancing the Lumedyne flash that I had been using on it’s own with the Canon 550ex speedlight placed inside the box was a relatively simple task and with both flash units attached to Pocket Wizard receivers everything went pretty easily. (more…)

One of the classic lines that you’ll read in most lighting manuals is that “there’s only one sun in the sky”. You cannot argue with that but there are often times when a second light source used with subtlety can really boost an otherwise OK image. This technique example is a bit of a recap on a couple of earlier ones, but I thought that it would make the point about adding a bit of a “kick light” very well. It was a simple and straight forward enough job – ten minute portrait of somebody not very well known outside her own field of expertise and not used to having her picture taken. The room was less than inspiring but had a couple of plants and some windows and so was a more than adequate venue to make a decent portrait.

The top picture was taken first without any lighting other than that on the subject. She was lit with a Lumedyne 200 w/s kit using a shoot through umbrella, triggered by a pair of Pocket Wizard Plus units. There was very little light in the room – the ambient reading was 1/20th of a second at f2.8 on 100 ISO and the light was flat and slightly green.

With the Lumedyne positioned at about sixty degrees from the axis of the lens and two metres (80 inches) on it’s 50 w/s setting the subject needed f5.6 on 100 ISO to expose her accurately. With almost no ambient light figuring on the subject I was able to shoot with the shutter speed at 1/15th of a second just to get some light into the window behind the plant on a dull London winter’s day. (more…)

As a working news photographer, the one job that I dread is the “quick product shot” that I am often asked to do without access to a properly equipped studio. For most of the year it only happens once a month or so, but very occasionally I’ll get a run of requests. It helps to have a few standard tactics up your sleeve.

These two shots ere booth for a special “e-supplement” that we did. A special edition about the use of technology in higher education and the feel of the supplement was magazine orientated rather than the usual newspaper style that we are all used to working with.

The two pictures were taken a few days apart and that made having a reasonably consistent approach more important. The first to come up was the iPod picture and the brief was blazingly simple – a nice upright picture of an iPod that wasn’t a catalogue product shot and that didn’t scream APPLE at you. I was handed the iPod in the office and told that I couldn’t take it away, which was unfortunate because I often do these small still life pictures at home where there is a lot more room to play around. (more…)