"The pictures you make are like a connect-the-dots game that becomes the line of your life, as real and vibrant as the lines on your face and hands. We tell stories with our pictures. In turn, our pictures tell our story - what we did, and how well or poorly we did it, and very significantly, if we stuck with it." - Joe McNally
Sophie, On a Moment's Notice
Lots of good, young, ballet dancers aspire to attend summer intensive workshops put on by some of the most prestigious ballet companies in the nation. To be accepted, the girls need to submit an application, accompanied by a photo of the dancer doing one or more ballet poses, including an arabesque, and a headshot. Many times, a dancer (or a bunch of dancers at a studio) will simply have a mom or dad with a camera snap a frame or two at the studio and submit them with the girls' applications. So these apparently don't need to be portfolio shots, but they get the job done.
Me? I'm not satisfied with that approach. I've done several of these audition sessions. Until last night, my approach has been to set up a white backdrop, whether muslin or 12' seamless, and light the heck out of it. Last time I did this, I set up two completely separate shooting sets, one for the dance pose and another for the headshot. The dance pose was lit by four moonlights, including a key fitted with a big octa, a broad umbrella fill, and two accent lights in stripbanks. The headshot was lit with a Qflash in a beauty dish augmented with two speedlights to hit the back. Lots of setup time, but when you're shooting a dozen or more girls, the results were worth it.
So yesterday (Wednesday), I got an urgent phone call from a mom whose daughter, Sophie, needed an arabesque/headshot combo for an audition this weekend. She needed the photos ASAP. Uh, okay.... I'm thinking to myself, how am I going to pull this off? No time to set up the usual grid, and I certainly don't want to set up two. But the most important aspect is the need to have a qualified ballet instructor present to ensure that the pose is good, and that the image selected is the best one captured. So I immediately called the studio, whose staff helped secure the assistance of one of the instructors who kindly agreed to stay after her last class to help with this.
Knowing that the instructor would stay after class was a big relief, but the pressure to set up quickly and efficiently to not abuse her generosity weighed heavily in my thoughts on the approach I decided to take. First off, no backdrop. Setup time for the seamless is not long, but steaming a muslin would be out of the question. Instead, I decided to use the environment of the studio, including the marley floor and the ballet barre as a setting. My lights of choice: the Qflash T5DR mounted in a Photek 60" Softlighter to provide a big, soft, pillow of light. It was set just to the left of the camera position, because I wanted to get a slight gradient effect from left to right as the light falls off. In post, I decided that the gradient was a distraction, and a quick fix in Lightroom took care of that. The other light was an unmodified speedlight from camera left pointing to the wall, to add a bit of spark to Sophie's face and knock down the barre shadows just a bit. Manual mode, maybe 1/32 power.
We needed to get in and get out quickly, so I put together the Qflash and Softlighter at home and brought it to the studio already assembled. I even decided on exposure settings ahead of time: ISO 400, f/6.3 at 1/160 of a second. I set the Qflash to give me that at around 6 feet away from Sophie. I also mounted the speedlight on a small stand at home. On arrival, all I needed to do was mount the main light on a C stand and check the exposures of both the key and accent lights with my trusty Sekonic flash meter. Total setup time: less than five minutes. Call in the instructor, make about 20 frames, and here's the result:
I'll take it. Sophie's form is good, the instructor's happy, Sophie's happy, and that's what matters.
So on to the headshot. I brought a popup Westcott black/white reversible "Illumimator" muslin with me. Allowing it to spring open and propping it up on the floor against the wall, it became my backdrop. I put Sophie on a stool about two feet in front of it. I moved the speedlight on the stand to a position immediately behind Sophie (so as not to see it), opened its zoom setting to it's widest at 14mm, aimed it at the backdrop and metered it to just clip behind her head (giving me f/16). I then moved the Softlighter to a position about 3 feet from Sophie at about an 11:30 position. Not quite straight over camera position, but close. Dialed down the power and metered her face at f/8. I then asked her mom to sit on the floor in front of Sophie and hold up a white foamcore fill card just out of frame below her chest. Total setup and test time, less than five minutes. Because Sophie has a perfect face, about ten snaps later we have this:
I like delivering headshots in landscape orientation. It allows me to put the subject's name in an attractive font to the side of the image if desired. Plus, I just like the look of a horizontal headshot better than the old-school vertical.
So, from arrival at the studio to turning the lights off and locking the door, we spent less than an hour. Post-processing at home was minimal, including cloning out some distractions on the floor and wall on the arabesque shot, and not much on the headshot. Delivered five shots to Sophie's mom last night via email. She prints them today, and Sophie's good to go for Saturday.
Why I Love Lightroom
My last blog post described the challenges we face when shooting in late afternoon unfiltered, slashing light. This one follows on that, but from a different perspective, editing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
I was asked to photograph the Santa Margarita Catholic High School Girls Soccer teams at the Frosh/Soph and JV levels this year. (The school's official sports photographer Bob Russell had responsibility for the Varsity, which won the Trinity League for the fourth straight year, by the way.) The intended result of this assignment is to provide images for the teams' awards banquet at the end of the season.
So today's game was the final game of the season, a convincing 4-0 victory over neighbor and rival JSerra. Lots of family members came out for the finale, and with the win, the girls were upbeat and in a celebratory mood. Perfect for a big group photo, for which one of the moms eagerly asked the girls to organize themselves, and they happily obliged.
I absolutely love the composition of this group. It's natural, with no posing direction whatsoever. Every girl's expression is great, and despite the glaring sun, there are no blinks and surprisingly little squinting.
But here's where we started from:
Yikes!
This is the result of hard, slashing sunlight, which produces blinding highlights and deep shadows. Exposing to avoid blowing out the white jerseys results in an underexposed image right from the start, which forces the shadows even deeper. But I'm just one of several folks shooting here, and am in no position to re-orient the group or to keep them from their celebration. I'm not sure I could replicate the spontaneity and genuine joy of this particular moment anyway. I'd rather deal with what I have going for me already.
Fortunately, I can bring this photo to some semblance of balance relatively quickly in Lightroom. The current version of Lightroom (4.3) is a vast improvement over previous versions in the way it segments certain tonalities and luminosity values, allowing more targeted adjustments even when applied across the board. I shot over a thousand frames during the game, meaning I shot jpgs, which have their own parameters baked in already, giving me less flexibility than had I shot in RAW. With about 150 keepers to edit, most of which suffered from harsh light and deep shadows, this is a real timesaver, especially when you're on deadline.
So what did it take to resuscitate this file? First, in the late afternoon sun, the photo was a bit too warm, so I lowered the Temperature slider a bit. Next, to counteract the reflectivity of the grass, which produces a green cast, I upped the Tint a bit to introduce a bit of magenta. You'd think that adding exposure would be counterintuitive, but with the underexposure to begin with, I moved the Exposure up by around a half stop, which did quite a bit of the heavy lifting needed to bring the darker tones up. Recovering the now blown jerseys was accomplished by a countering move downward with the Highlight slider. The most radical move here was a very aggressive application of the Shadow slider, nearly a full stop. This brought up the shadows in most of the image, including the back, but it also introduced a quirky, almost HDR-like feel to the image. I kinda liked it, but it was a bit too heavy handed, so I reduced the Vibrance slider a bit to modulate it somewhat. That left just a couple of the girls' faces in deep shadow. Fortunately, the Adjustment Brush took care of that, with additional exposure of another half-stop of light. That left me with the following result, accomplished in less time than it took to write about it.
The only thing I couldn't do in Lightroom to finish this off was to remove the tree trunk behind the girl in the middle of the back row and a bit of a house up in the upper left corner. A quick trip to Photoshop took care of that. This one fix is the only Photoshop edit in the entire batch of 148 images posted that night after the game.
Is this a portfolio shot? No. Is it a genuinely joyful capture of a perfect moment in these girls' year? Absolutely.
Nuclear Light
High school dances are a lot different today than when I went to school, back in the middle of the last century. These days, at least among Katherine's cohorts, a high school dance is first and foremost a fashion show and an opportunity to take pictures before the gig. What comes after is apparently anticlimactic (or so I hear).
This year's photoshoot was scheduled for sunset on the grounds of the beautiful Montage Hotel overlooking the ocean in Laguna Beach. It's a favorite spot for this sort of thing. Last time we did this, a blanket of fog enveloped the hotel and beach, giving the kids and their camera-toting parents a lot more dampness and softness to the light than they bargained for.
This time, we had the opposite circumstance, a cool, cloudless, low-humidity afternoon, producing hard, slashing, brilliant, unforgiving, blasting light. The girls and their parents were scrambling to find light that (a) didn't produce squints, or (b) didn't produce absolute silhouettes when shot into the western sky, or (c) didn't produce razor-sharp delineation from blown highlights to deep shadows on their faces.
That's the problem that slashing sunlight gives you. Undiffused by clouds, the sun's a highly directional, pinpoint source of light, putting out more photons than a billion hydrogen bombs. It travels in a straight line, packing a punch. It does not fall gently, gracefully on the face, filling the shadows nicely. It hits hard, and to get a good image, you have to fight back.
Okay, how? Well, first up, you probably want to avoid the squints by putting the sun to the subjects' back. This is why you're at the Montage at sunset in the first place, right? Then, to avoid the absolute silhouette, you need to bring your own punch, in this case, a simple 580EXII speedlite. If this were a commissioned shoot, I'd consider bringing in a big light and an octa or at least an umbrella, and have a chance at overpowering the sun. In this mob scene, that's just not gonna happen. So instead of walloping back, I'm just going to jab, with the most mobile setup I can bring. I'm not even going to drive the flash into high speed sync. Instead, I'm going to peg my exposure at the native sync speed of 1/200 and let the aperture go wherever it will, to give me a nice baseline exposure for the scene behind my subjects. In this case, it's about f/16 or so, not your typical portrait setting, but who cares about shallow depth of field when the nearest background element is 26 miles offshore?
So then, it's a matter of balancing your exposure on the faces, lit entirely by the flash. In the shot above, I wanted to bring the sun into the frame, which drove my aperture way, way down (the camera was squinting). That meant cranking the little speedlite to the max, full power. Undiffused, except for a Stofen Omnibounce, it cried for help but gave me enough to light Katherine and Chris. Still not as powerful as the sun, which left a nice rim light on the couple.
Moving the sun out of the frame, I was able to give the speedlite a bit of a break, and reduced the power to give me this:
And this:
I liked this pose especially for Chris, and thought it might make a pleasing black and white conversion:
I finally settled on this composition:
As the sun gets lower in the sky, it begins to lose some of its punch. It's still highly directional, but you can have your subjects look in the general direction of the light without overly squinting. Color balance becomes an issue, but a late afternoon shot like this can be effective and very pleasing, if your subjects are.
Of course, there are other problems with slashing light, and several ways to deal with them. As mentioned at the outset, the transition between blown highlights and deep shadows can be very stark, which is rarely a good thing in a portrait, especially portraits of beautiful young ladies. So you take what the light gives you and follow its lead. No longer a boxing match, it's now a dance. Instead of trying to bring the exposure down to a conventional level, you go the other way, and fill the shadows with overexposure in camera. Here, there's just a hint of fill flash, not even pointing directly at the girls.
You can also achieve this in post processing, going high key to even out the transitions between highlight and shadow.
This is nowhere near what the human eye sees at this moment in time, but it's a great way to solve a problem that the camera's limited dynamic range can't handle.
And here's the interesting part...the difference in time between the final shot above and the scene below: about five minutes.
One Light, Two Very Different Looks
This past weekend, I did a promotional shoot for the Center Stage Dance and Performing Arts studio in my hometown, the beginning of what I hope will be a lasting relationship. The purpose of this shoot was to create a promotional poster to be displayed in the studio for some upcoming portrait shoots at the studio, including individual and group shots. Some of the groups will be rather large, and the individual shots may be static full-length portraits, tighter headshots, or aggressive jumps and leaps. There won't be time to change the lighting setup between shots, so the set and lighting grid will have to be broad, open, and flexible to accommodate shooting changes on the fly. Typical dance studio environment for me.
But the point of this blog post is that broad, open static lighting setups can still yield vastly different results, with only minor modifications and no change to the basic lighting grid or even exposure settings in camera.
The two shots above were made with the same single light, in the same position, with pretty much the same exposure values in camera. The shot on the left is Brooke, made before we started, as nothing more than a lighting/exposure check. I wanted to make sure that my key light, a monolight mounted in a 53" octagonal softbox located 45 degrees up at camera left was positioned so as to capture light in the eye sockets and not leave them "hooded". I placed Brooke about five feet from the octa and asked her to simply look at me and we made a test. It was fine in terms of light placement, so I asked her to look at the light, and the result is what you see on the left. The gray background you see is a big Westcott "Pearl" backdrop mounted horizontally to give me 24 feet of lateral coverage for a large group. It's lit with another broad fill light in a 60" umbrella at camera and two more lights in stripbanks at the wings to guarantee even fill across the entire sweep. But for all practical purposes, Brooke is lit entirely by the key light in the octa. The exposure was made at ISO 200, 1/160 second at f/7.1 (to give me sufficient depth of field for a group shot). I tweaked the exposure a bit in Lightroom, giving me what would effectively be f/6.3. Done deal. I didn't measure the light at various places on her face, but the lighting is pretty even, showing decent but not overly dramatic rotation between light and shadow. Very forgiving light, good for fast production shooting on a schedule. I went manual for the rest of the day at 1/160 at f/6.3.
As we moved through the planned shots for the day, Jacqueline took her turn, dressed in a black costume with a neat, intricate hoodie. I knew right away that I wanted a dark and moody headshot with the black hood enveloping her face. But with everyone waiting and much more to shoot, there was no time to change the lighting grid or the set. How to accomplish what I envisioned for Jacqueline? Easy. Bring her right next to and parallel to the octa, add a black panel behind her to cut the pearl backdrop and attendant lighting on it, and hold an additional 2 stop diffuser between the octa and Jacqueline. She's about 8 inches from the octa's front diffuser, and the handheld 2-stop is no more than 3 inches from her shoulder, just out of frame. The location and power level on the key light haven't changed and the exposure value in camera is still f/6.3 at 1/160.
But the difference is dramatic. The light is much softer; the shadow rotation is rich, and the effectively larger source of light wraps around the hoodie into the recesses of her face next to her eyes. This is all due to the proximity of Jacqueline to the key light and extra diffusion between the light and her face. These two images couldn't be more different. The time needed to set up this second shot? About 30 seconds.
As is so often the case, thanks go to Joe McNally for this one.
Nutcrackin'
For the past three years I've had the pleasure and the honor of photographing the Pacific Theatre Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker Suite". Under the direction of Ann-Marie McClellan, the production draws its cast from the Pacific Ballet Conservatory and spends months in preparation, choreography, costuming, and rehearsal, culminating in a weekend of six performances at the Laguna Hills Community Center.
My part of the process begins with portraiture, which occurs on one day a few weeks prior to the performances. This year, with a growing cast, the challenge was to keep things fresh throughout the very long day of shooting. The lighting setup has to be open and flexible, enabling the girls to cycle through in about five minutes each, giving us precious little time to shoot a number of poses for the families to consider. They range from traditional ballet poses, to poses with props, and sometimes as whimsical as we can make them. I light them with a key light in a 53 inch octabank from a traditional 45 degrees up and over position (from the left this year), supplemented by a broad fill to give me an approximately 2:1 ratio, with two back 45's in strip boxes to accent and separate the girls from the background.
The performances, as noted above, are held in a multipurpose room at the Laguna Hills Community Center. I've described this location before. It's a small stage, maybe thirty feet wide by twenty feet deep, lit by nothing but overhead cans. Sometimes a light from above can be missing, but when they're all working, the lighting is predictable, warm, and surprisingly flattering.
From the back of the audience, shooting with a 70-200mm lens, you can get the entire stage, and get what might be called "record" shots of the production. I don't mean to discount these shots, because the cast is really good, and you can pick up some nice images.
But I much prefer to capture these dances from the sides, and focus on individuals or small groups of dancers. With the amount of light available in the room, shooting at 1/250 is about all I can get, and at f/2.8, the depth of field is pretty limited. Also, shooting at acute angles means the stage is also angled, which presents another limitation. But from these angles, you can really focus in on the dance skill of these performers.
As nice as this venue is, one thing it is not is "grand". One of my dance photographer colleagues, Ron McKinney, recently showed some marvelous Nutcracker images of the Ballet Chicago on a very large and very brightly-lit stage. His sweeping images were stunning, but absolutely impossible to get in the intimate setting of the Laguna Hills Community Center. Instead, I go in an entirely different direction. My favorite images from this production are those that capture the expressions of joy that these performers display. One of my favorite performance lessons comes from hip hop choreographer Shane Sparks, who once told my daughter's class that performing on stage is like selling shoes: "If you ain't sellin' it, the audience ain't buyin' it!" These ladies knew how to sell it. I think they sold it, because they genuinely love it.
As I write this on Christmas evening, one of the things I'm grateful for is the opportunity to get to know this community of dancers and their families, and to photograph them doing what they love to do.