This post comes from a photographer that I’ve been checking out for many years now, Neil Cowley. Neil’s efforts to better the lighting community can be showcased on his lighting website, Make Light Real. Neil goes pretty deep here to talk about his motivations to get this artistic shot during one of his engagement sessions. He also tosses in a cool “how to” with textures and his lighting overlay demo…

 

Neil pulled a quote from one of my past FF posts about “Epic” photography.

adj. Surpassing the usual or ordinary, particularly in scope or size.

When photographing a setting, it is the photographer / photojournalist’s duty to tell the complete story. Sometimes that requires the photo author to step back and see the big picture, incorporating the grand scale of the event in the frame. This sounds easy however one needs to make careful compositional decisions when shooting wide lenses.

How does the off camera flash come into this equation?

Wendy is a native of Manhattan, lived there her whole life and I shot her wedding to Billy last year. I definitely wanted to give them the epic treatment as I met them at Madison Square Park to shoot some portraits. Trying to impress a Manhattan native starts an epic job. I started out by the Flatiron building on the street with the natural light failing to sunset and coming from behind the flatiron building leaving me few options for good street pictures. So we moved into the park.

We curiously noticed the shiny tree sculptures and worked our way past the fence to get access. Upon wandering up to the sculptures we were quickly ask to leave by a bossy photographer who was shooting the sculpture for a documentary project and evidently didn’t care to have anyone in his 4×5 images. I could see that I needed just a little more time for the sunset to lower to bring some color into the other side of the sky - so we went and shot by the pool for a few minutes. Upon our return, I immediately recognized that the conditions were perfect, and I needed to work fast.

Out of my camera bag came my Canon 550 shoe flash, a Photoflex XTC softbox and plugged it into my digital camera battery high voltage battery. In a minute they were put together and positioned on my camera bag lower to camera left to give a slight under light to the couple so that they glowed against the sunset illuminated clouds. I then positioned my second 550 on a Bogen 3350 Baby stand (out of my bag) far camera right and triggered them both with pocket wizards.

I quickly determined the ambient exposure in manual mode and allowed one stop of underexposure for the sky. I then adjusted the light in the soft box to give a proper illumination to the couple. Looking back now at my camera files, I started at 6:07, and by 6:15 the cloud had passed and my one exposure with good expression is shown above. I was shooting at 1/250th of a second f/4.0 with a 24mm lens on my Canon 1Ds Mark II.

I have a suspicion that there must be something like a 6min rule when trying to work a location. Either you can capture it within the first few minutes or you’ve blown your opportunity; either because of environmental reasons or subject reasons. Looking into my camera files shows me that this images was created at 6:11pm. The first in the series was shot at 6:07, and by 6:15 the lighting and the couple’s interest with continuing this same thing had ended. With my capture of the unique shapes of the sculptures in Madison Square Park, the environmental sky and the Empire State building in the background I think I’ve exceeded the Epic expectations of my clients.

Not being able to highlight the distant tendrils of the sculpture better remains my only regret. The silver of the sculpture presented a uniquely backwards challenge to light. Unlike standard objects such as tree branches, pointing the second flash unit at them did me no visible good. Because the surface of the sculpture was reflective it presented a reflection of whatever light was hitting it, not a reflection of itself. So to allow the sculpture to reflect something, I should have pointed my second flash away from the sculpture into the grass and trees nearby. If I had the prescience to make this move while shooting, I would have liked to have put the flash far enough into the camera frame and behind the couple so as to give them a little rim light as well. Live and learn to do better! When I have no more regrets from my photos, I’ll know I’m out of creativity - so maybe that’s a good feeling to have.

But the location lighting and scene is not the limit of my vision, and so I push on in Photoshop - and share with you the image out of camera raw:

I try to process my images with the mantra of ‘make light real’ and in this image, I feel I failed to nail the balance between subject and sky with the perfect balance for a realistic effect, I underexposed the sky too much, or the light on the sky failed to give the right amount of contrast with the exposure I was using. So to correct the issue and bring the necessary balance to the image, I used my One Photoshop Action which takes me through a LAB color space work flow in which I can heavily alter the tonalities and colors in the least destructive way possible. Here is the screen shot of my Photoshop layers:

I also felt inspired to add a lighting overlay to accentuate the cloud form as a repeated shape in the toning of the image. You can download that image from my website as a ‘Free Light Friday’ image on 11-9-07. You see the lighting overlay used as a hard light and overlay layer to help unite the mood between the foreground and background and prepare the image for it’s final printed destiny.

I also used this photograph in an acrylic collage on canvas, and you can see it in it’s current state above.

________________________
Neil Cowley - Visual Artist

 

Neil, You are so right about your 6 minute rule… When working in the “magic hour” as the light is leaving or coming, one must absolutely work quickly to achieve the desired settings given the current circumstances, because if you blink, current becomes PAST!

cheers!

Matt

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under Photographers, Neil Cowley. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.