lighting

A rant against dull and predictable photography

Originally posted in November 2002, this was a classic rant against dull and predictable photography…

I’m afraid that I get quite excited by a good argument. The cut and thrust of intellectual discourse is both stimulating and fulfilling, but I have decided that there really is no point in arguing with a disciple!

Discussion forums are great places to spend five minutes, pick up a few tips and dispense some of one’s own “wisdom”. I visit a few photography forums from time to time, and I hope that advice that I have given has helped a few people get more from their photography. The thing that upsets me, however, is the prevalence of self appointed experts who follow the teachings of photographic gurus.

A couple of months ago I wrote about various bits of advice that I have been given in my time wielding a camera. I came to the unremarkable conclusion that the best bit of advice had been to ignore advice from somebody who claims that there is only one way to achieve something in photography. The world of High Street photography seems to be fertile territory for gurus and their disciples. One or two high profile photographers have established ways of doing family portraiture that have barely moved on since the 1980s. Whole industries have grown up manufacturing the cliche’d accessories that keep the cult of posing guide and lighting ratios going. No matter which High Street around the world you go to, there they are… the blotchy canvas backdrops and fake bookcases, posing cushions and fake rugs that are featured in the “How You Must Do Portraiture” videos.

As a production line and money making business model these methods of portraiture are singularly successful. Every home in the world seems to have some images produced by the “factory photographers”, but just like factory farming you get bland and often tasteless products churned out by people who either don’t care, have lost sight of why they did the job in the first place or just see it as a way to make money. Whilst this all saddens me a great deal, it is a good business model and you have to make a living and pay your bills somehow.

What really upsets me about this kind of work is that there is a massive number of people out there who are exposed to this kind of work and follow the gurus. They go out and buy the video because that’s what they believe portraiture is all about, they buy the blotchy canvases because they feature heavily in the videos and they finally get sucked into thinking that this is what photography is all about. I want to kick and shout and make people realise that you don’t have to have battery hens to get eggs. If you want battery eggs, go to the supermarket and buy them – but if you want something better, something tastier then you have got to start keeping your own chickens. Photography at all levels of ability allows you to produce what you want to. Creative and interesting portraiture is just around the corner as long as you don’t get suckered into believing that there is anything remotely original about canvas backdrops and set lighting ratios.

I was working in a school the other day and a parent had come to collect their child’s “portrait” taken at school. She picked it up and went to leave when the receptionist called after her to say that she had picked up the wrong child. The parent replied “…does it matter, all the kids look the b****y same in these snaps anyway!” I wanted to applaud her, she was so right. The “individually created” portrait is no better unless the photographer is going to create a new canvas back cloth for each client and then dispose of them straight afterwards.

I hope that the people pedaling the lie that this kind of work is somehow “classic portraiture” all over the internet will throw off their robes and admit that there just might be another way of achieving wonderful and desirable images.

My call goes out – Amateur photographers, wannabes and bored professionals everywhere… rise up, burn those backdrops, dump those videos and escape the cult now. There is a world of interesting, unique and occasionally truly original work to be done out there. Before you know where you are, that chant (ommmm-mainlight,fill light,hair light,backlight-ommmm) will just be a distant and mildly embarrassing memory.

©Neil “don’t copy me, just learn from my mistakes” Turner.

Brutal architecture and portraits

I have an admission to make… I love shooting portraits on cloudy days around concrete buildings with urban skylines. There, I’ve said it. As a photographer I find brutal architecture and grey winter days both challenging and creatively stimulating. Combine the two and you have a blank canvas for interesting images – as long as you have a cooperative subject.

©Neil Turner, February 2009

This portrait is of an academic working at a central London research and teaching institute. The building is a classic modern brutal concrete one and I have shot pictures there dozens of times over the years. I have never managed to get access to the roof before and I have always imagined that it would be a great place to shoot, with decent views of the surrounding skyline.

It was a windy and dark February day and so I wanted to find a spot out of the wind. The roof features a couple of large concrete towers which contain lift machinery and other services and the southerly one has a short walkway running through it. On a sunny day this would be perfect shade in which to place your subject. On this day it was equally perfect shelter from the wind and probable rain. There are also railings which are perfect for attaching lighting stands to so that they don’t blow away.

The picture above wasn’t the first that I shot. I had tried quite a few angles to get the London skyline in but the wind forced a retreat into the covered walkway. I decided that being out of the wind gave me the chance to shoot with a 24″ x 36″ (60cm x 90cm) Chimera soft box on my Lumedyne flash head. The softbox is old and has both the inner and outer diffusers permanently sewn in and I wanted to make use of it’s softness so I placed it as close to the subject as possible. In this frame it is about three feet (90cm) from his face off at about a 45 degree angle to the left of the camera with the bottom of the softbox about level with his chin.

I always try to start with an available light reading for the sky which came out at about 1/250th of a second at f5.6 on 200 ISO. I wanted the sky to be darker and so I decided to shoot at f8 instead. This meant that I had to adjust the power output on the flash to give me the aperture that I wanted and that meant 1/4 power (50 watt/seconds). The first test shot told me that I needed some separation between his hair and the dirty grey concrete and so I set a second flash (Vivitar 285 HV) on a stand directly behind him on 1/16th power to give him a fairly aggressive hair/rim light. This isn’t a technique that I use very often but in this case it made the difference between a muddy image and one with some real edge. The combination of the big soft light and the hard hair light gives the portrait a particular mood which compliments the sky and the architecture.

Like many of the techniques that I use, this one needs to be used sparingly so that it has maximum effect when it does get used.

Owning up to some bad habits

“It’s all about light”. That’s a message that I hope everyone who visited the technique pages on my web site will take away. When you are the one who controls that light, you have a large number of options open to you. This month I have been trying a new toy and I thought that I’d use that as an excuse to write about how and why I choose the quality of the light.

©Neil Turner/TSL | London | December 2004

The first thing I have to do is own up to some fairly bad habits:

The first is that I go through personal fashions in the way I light and in the kit that I carry with me. One month I’ll use softboxes and then the next month I’ll use umbrellas. One week I will keep the flash as only one element of the scene and the next the flash will overwhelm the ambient light.

My second bad habit is that I will light women in a different way to men. 99% of the time I will use a much softer set up for female subjects than I would for males.

Thirdly, I’m aware that I tend to use a harder light on older skin (especially men). Older people seem to have a lot less moisture in their skin and so their faces have a lot less shine.

I’m much more likely to direct a spectacles wearer about the angle of their head, simply to avoid getting bad reflections in their glasses. I also try to find out if people wear contact lenses and get them to look more squarely at me to avoid getting any strange shapes in their eyes.

So far I’m painting myself as a bit of a lazy photographer. I like to think that it’s not laziness – more a realistic attitude towards getting the shot right. When you are shooting people, you often end up shooting a very different picture than the one that you first envisaged so my bad habits are there to simply give me an easy starting point. Getting on with the shoot is part of my style. I rarely spend very much time wandering around formulating ideas, largely because I am regularly expected to set up, shoot and break down in a matter of minutes. Having the “safe shot” in the bag is something of a religion to me and I find that giving in to my “bad habits” makes my practice a lot easier.

Many photographers use the same technique day in and day out. I cannot claim to do everything differently every day, and sometimes I feel like a chef who has a limited range of ingredients that I can select, mix and adapt to create new and interesting combinations. Every once in a while a new ingredient becomes available, a new toy to play with. Does that make me gadget boy? Or does it simply help to keep my work fresh?

The last refuge of the desperate photographer

Originally posted in January 2009, this piece is one of the ‘new’ technique pieces that I published around that time.

The use of the silhouette as a deliberate ploy in photography was once branded as “the last refuge of the desperate photographer” – a label that I have always contested. I have used the technique many times when I have not been allowed to identify the subject of the picture (usually children or vulnerable adults whose identity needs to be concealed) but I also use it when there is a need for an image with real impact. Creating a silhouette with flash isn’t difficult, using the technique sparingly can be.

Once you have made the decision to try a silhouette using flash, there are a few basics that you need to consider:

  • The subject must have little or no available light on them
  • You must have a background that can be lit easily
  • If the background has important detail you need enough depth of field to keep both subject and background sharp
  • The subject to be silhouetted should be in sharp focus and have a distinct outline

Once the basics are in place, then there are creative decisions to be made such as composition, placement of flash. This first example is of a member of my family who spends time at the gym so that he can show the world his physique. We were chatting one day and he said that he wanted something striking for the top of his Facebook page. I showed him a couple of ideas using silhouettes and we shot this…

©Neil Turner, October 2008

I was shooting with a Canon EOS1D MkII and a Canon 24-70 f2.8L lens. I wasn’t able to move myself around too much without shifting furniture and would have preferred to be shooting nearer the telephoto end of the range to deliberately remove any clutter. As it was, the lens was at 34mm (add the 1.3x factor and you get a 44.2 full frame equivalent field of view) and I cropped the image to the “letterbox” shape.

In this case I used the subject himself to mask the flash which was a Canon 550ex speedlight triggered in manual mode by a Canon ST-E2 transmitter. The first few frames had the background (a wall in my dining room) pretty evenly lit, which was a bit boring. The background is unimportant in this image and so the depth of field doesn’t matter too much. The exposure was 1/90th of a second at f13 on 200 ISO. I don’t recall why the exposure was 1/90th instead of 1/250th to utterly eliminate any available light but in a normal situation I would have gone for 1/250th.

I have some grid attachments for my Lumedyne flash heads and so I taped one of those over the flash to give me more of a circular pool of light. I aimed the flash slightly upwards so that I achieved the effect that you see above. It’s a very simple image that works for the intended purpose very well.

The second example is from a story I shot for a magazine about two brothers who work together at a school in London. I had shot hundreds of images of the buildings and a lot of portraits of the elder brother who is the boss. I had a lot of more conventional portraits of the two of them together as well so I decided to try this two person silhouette which shows the special cladding used throughout the central core of the building.

©Neil Turner, September 2008

The cladding itself has a yellow colour and so I decided to place a Lumedyne flash unit directly behind the seat that they were sitting on. It was very close to the wall, which give far steeper fall off of the light and a more dramatic outline. I find that the best place to focus for a silhouette is on the edge of the subject rather than the normal eye or face. I was shooting with a 16-35 f2.8L lens on a Canon EOS1D MkII at the wide end of the scale and the exposure here was 1/250th at f9.5. The flash was dialed down to 1/8th power and at that aperture I had easily enough depth of field to get the brothers both sharp and to have easily enough detail in the background.

Magazines seem to like this kind of image if they have a spread to fill or they want something a bit different for the contents page. You don’t always have to use flash to create silhouettes but the conditions required in nature to get a good one aren’t easy to arrange! Low level winter sunshine here in the UK is good and of course dusk and dawn without cloud cover anywhere in the world are great. I have also used illuminated signs and billboards when they are bright enough but for the sheer degree of simplicity and control, these flash-lit examples are hard to beat.