My current series of photography workshops are well underway again, and last weekend saw the first of my portrait workshops for the year on what must have been one of the wettest days in Canberra that I can remember.

Despite the weather, and dodging the leaks in the roof, I was really impressed with what we managed to achieve and I think everyone got a lot out of the day.

I shot the above image of Blake towards the end of the morning session, which was taken up mainly by demonstrations of the conventional portrait lighting patterns and viewpoints, as well as an introduction to the principles of light control.

I liked the way that Blake was able to gaze comfortably right at the camera so I thought that this style of portrait would suit him and that making this image would be a good way to end the morning session. It’s an effective style of lighting, but relatively straight forward to execute although it does require care. I chose to process the image in a somewhat “grungy” style, although I didn’t do that during the workshop itself.

The rim lighting on Blake was created with two strip softboxes, fitted with grids to reign in the spread of light, placed symmetrically behind and to the side of him. The two things that I really try to watch for with this lighting setup is (1) ensure the rim light is more-or-less the same on both sides of his head and body, and (2) that there is no (or minimal) splash of light on the side of his nose. I find the latter is quite distracting so I always take care to avoid it if I can.

The front light is directly in front of him and angled down at about 45 degrees — just enough to push light into his eye sockets. The light modifier that I chose for this front light is a medium beauty dish which has a bit of punch to it to match the character of the side lights.

There are things that I would improve or tweak, but given that we were pushing time to try to get lunch out of the way and be ready for the afternoon session, I had to be satisfied with what we did. What would I change? Two things: (1) I think the rim lights might be a little hot (bright) so I would try a shot with them down a smidge, and (2) I would try changing the front light for a softbox over Blake’s head, parallel to the floor, and slightly in front of him so that he is right at the edge of the light coming down over him to get a slightly more contrasty look. But that will have to wait for the next workshop.

And so what images did the participants make? I’ll put some of them here later this week.

It was a lot of fun shooting the cover photograph for the The String Contingent’s new CD, TSC II.

It’s out there and starting to be heard, and it’s great to see that it will be the featured CD on the Weekend Planet — the music program on Radio National — on the 19th of February this year.

The band had the idea of having the origami figures made — each representing one of the band members: Chris (fiddle), Graham (guitar), and Holly (double bass). They asked me what I thought about the idea, and a week later they delivered the paper figures to me as they passed through on their way to play concerts in Melbourne.

The idea was that the figures should look like they’re playing on a stage, just as the band would look when they play live.

The first thing I did was go to the local junk shops and hunt around for an old piece of furniture of some sort with a wooden surface that might look like a stage floor. The puppets are only 25cm high, or thereabouts, and so the scale of the setup was quite small, but it didn’t take long to find the perfect surface in the form of an old coffee table that was broken and falling apart. I got it for ten dollars (I was probably ripped off!) and after brushing a little bit of wood oil on it that I had in my garage, it was perfect.

It was then just a matter of positioning the puppets in the best way that I could, and then lighting the setup to mimic concert lighting.

I decided to use just speedlights for this shoot — studio lights were too big to get the effect that I wanted, whereas speedlights were ideal for the scale of the puppets.

Directly above the puppets is an SB900 speedlight, aimed straight down at the them, and fitted with a Honl grid to really limit the spread of light to just where the figures are placed on the ‘stage’. This is the light that casts the deep shadows right under the figures to give the impression of stage lights.

To camera right, and reasonably close to the setup, is another SB900 — this time shooting through a Lastolite 24″ Ezybox softbox. This provides the wash of soft light that gives shape and depth to the figures, but at a level that’s low enough to avoid competing with the effect of the top light.

Finally, a direct, unmodified SB900 speedlight is pointing down at the setup from camera left, and from a distance of a couple of metres. You can see the effect of this light in the relatively hard shadow under the arm of the fiddle puppet. It also contributes to the dimensionality of the scene.

The power of all three flashes was set manually, and the flash in the softbox was triggered by an Elinchrom Skyport radio trigger (I used these so that I didn’t have to worry about line of sight triggers, or cables). The other two are triggered optically so that they flash as soon as the softbox light fires.

Simple, effective, easy — and all for 10 dollars!

I wish The String Contingent every success with the CD.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the problem of taking photographs of people that we don’t know. I’m talking about those situations where you might be walking along a street and you see a person that you think would make a good subject for a photograph and you then have to decide whether you’re going to approach them and ask to photograph them, or try to photograph—perhaps furtively—without engaging with them in any way, or let the opportunity go.

If you’re as shy as I am then the first option is really, really tough—to the point where it’s even a last resort. Yet, on those occasions when I have managed to engage with the subject, a complete stranger, even briefly, then the resulting picture is usually so many more times better and more engaging to the viewer than those that were taken furtively without the subject’s knowledge.
The above picture is a case in point. It was taken a long time ago in the town of Guadix in the south of Spain, and it still remains one of my personal favourites. The reason is that I still see in this picture something of the character of the woman—her calm, direct gaze at the camera and the way that she seems to command and own the space that she is in, despite the fact that she has been intruded upon by this strange, foreign, passing photographer who could not even speak her language. In a sense the picture is the result of a moment of collaboration between the two of us in which we both contributed to its making. Although I clearly got something out of it—the picture—I’d also like to think that I’ve given something back in the way that I’ve tried to visually ‘tell’ her story of that moment. And that’s something that I don’t think could have happened without her knowledge and willingness to engage with me and my camera, however fleetingly.
Of course, that’s not to say that it’s impossible to get great, narrative pictures of moments without the full engagement of the people in it—of course it is. Staying with the Spanish theme for the moment, here are two more of my favourites in which the people in the pictures had no idea that I was making a picture.

In the first one, I love the way that there is a connection between the large, inanimate statue and the small, very animate girl. And in the second one, I like the way the chess players are so engrossed in their game that they’re oblivious to everything, including me. But in neither of these two photographs was my presence, or my act of making the pictures, done furtively or secretively in any sense. I was fully present in both of those places and managed to be quick enough to catch the story of those fleeting moments in which the people in them were the protagonists. I don’t feel that I stole anything from them.
But I’m a lot less comfortable with the following two pictures, in which I do feel as though I have stolen something from the people in them. (And I’m fully aware of the irony here of using these pictures in this blog despite this sense of discomfort.)

The first picture was taken in Adelaide a couple of years ago, on the lawn outside one of the public buildings in the city. I was walking past and was gazing at the guy feeding the birds, and I confess that I deliberately tried to take the picture furtively, from a distance. The camera was to my eye and just as I took the picture he looked around and caught me in the act! I really thought for a moment that he was going to come after me, but that wasn’t to be. However, I still get that sense of having stolen something from him when I look at the picture—the expression on his face gives it away, and I’d be really interested to know if others see this too or if it’s just my imagination.
In the last picture, taken in Edinburgh, I saw the tailor working on a Scottish kilt through the window of his workshop. I took the picture, but, again, the elements of the image give away the fact that it was taken without his knowledge, looking into his personal space, in a quasi-secretive manner. The furtiveness of the image is clear in the semiology of the picture, and I think it’s a weak image because of that. Imagine how much stronger it would have been if I’d gone into the shop and arranged to photograph him directly and honestly.
The photographer Michael Kenna talks very eloquently about this idea of giving and taking in photography in his conversation with John Paul Caponigro, reproduced as a transcript on John Paul Caponigro’s website. It’s well worth reading. In it he basically says that you can’t steal from life and expect to get the most out of it; you need to participate, be present, and be engaged. I agree — even though the shyness and embarrassment gets in the way all the time.
I don’t know how to get around the shyness problem except to ask yourself what the worst is that can happen. The subject will say no? Well, no big deal. I recall a few occasions when a lot worse has happened when trying to be furtive—in fact, on one occasion a man in Cairo took offence and started throwing chairs at me! That was embarrassing.

I made this picture for two reasons. The first is that I wanted a kind of visual sketch of the oil lamp — just to see how it would render photographically because I have in mind using it for another project; and the second reason was to see if it would make a suitable exercise for my next flash photography workshop next month.

Here’s how I made it …

Here is the shot straight out of the camera. You can see that it is pretty close to the final image, except that I cropped it slightly to centre the lamp in the frame, and I cleaned up some of the stray reflections from the flame and a couple of minor details that would have been impossible to eliminate at the point of taking the picture (well, impossible without burning something — it was a live flame after all).

The lamp is standing on a piece of dark, reflective glass. I actually salvaged that piece of glass from one of those old chrome coffee tables that I saw in a junk shop. I paid $10 for the table and just took the glass off the top. Behind the lamp, pointing back at the camera, is a strobe with a 100 x 100cm softbox, over which I draped a piece of black cloth leaving only the sides of the softbox (out of frame on each side) uncovered. That’s the basic light setup — it’s very simple — but it’s still not quite enough, as the following shows.

Here you can see the edges of the cloth that I used to block the softbox, ensuring that light only hits the lamp from the edges. But you can also see that the area behind me (the camera) is reflected in the lamp, and the lovely amber colour of the oil is completely lost.

To fix the first problem I simply draped more black cloth over the top and sides of the setup, and darkened the area behind me. Er … be very careful with this and try not to burn the place down! No liability accepted!

The second problem was fixed by adding a second light to the setup. In this case, I added another strobe below the softbox with a gridded snoot attached to really limit the throw of the light to just a small area. I aimed it up from just below the level of the table to light the back of the oil bowl of the lamp from behind. Doing so lit it very nicely and completed the setup. You’ll see that I also corrected the colour balance to a more appropriate setting to show off the warmth of the lamplight.

There is nothing tricky about the exposure. I used an aperture of f8 and adjusted the power of the strobes to suit. I slowed the shutter speed down to 1/4 of a second to allow some of the glow of the flame on the black cloth to register in the image and to improve the look of the flame itself.

So, quite simple really — although a bit fiddly — to get a very effective result.

I then decided that I would add some other elements to the frame just for fun.

The light for this arrangement is exactly the same as it was for the lamp alone, but for one small difference. Compare the following image:

Beside having removed some of the minor, but distracting reflections on the wine bottle, the problem is that the label on the (cheap) wine can’t be seen. There was only one realistic option here, and that was to photograph the bottle independently and then superimpose the well-light label on the final image using a layer mask in Photoshop — and that’s just what I did. Any additional light that I might have added to the original setup to light just the label would have created a lot of unwanted and unavoidable reflections. Using a two-shot composite was quick, easy and effective. I just removed the lamp, candle and glass from the setup and then photographed the bottle using a hand-held speedlight to light the label.

In a commercial context I would consider shooting each of the elements separately so that difficult reflections are completely controlled — but here I like the way that the reflections from the lamp can be seen on the base of the silver candle holder, the glass, and on the right side of the bottle.It keeps it looking ‘real’ — which of course it is.

To improve the image more, I would have spent more time to get the outline of the lamp perfectly even on both sides, and I would adjust the result so that the very feint red glow on the black background is a more evenly distributed across the width of the frame. These would be subtle but important improvements. Overall, the results as they stand are very pleasing for such a simple configuration of lights.

This particular image was put together from a bracketed exposure sequence using the HDR software, Photomatix Pro. I’m generally not a big fan of HDR images — I find the HDR effect tends to flatten the dimensionality of the image too much for my liking — but I do use the technique when I’m concerned that the dynamic range, or latitude, of the scene (the brightness range of the light from the shadows to the highlights) is too much for the camera and when I think I might actually need both the shadow and highlight details in the image. This is especially true when I don’t have graduated ND filters with me, but that’s another story!

In this case, I blended the HDR result with one of the original frames from the sequence and then further refined the mix using layer masks. There was a little more Photoshop post-processing involved — some tonal enhancements and some local contrast enhancements — and here is the result to that point in colour.

I like the composition, and the subject matter was irresistible, and I went on to render it in monochrome, even though I didn’t initially pre-visualise the frame in black and white.

Now I’ve got a problem … I like both versions. This image has everything I look for in monochrome images — strong shapes and formal design, good contrast and light gradation, and great textures. But it also has a lovely colour palette that makes the colour image very strong too, although I think a bit of work is probably required to warm the cloud colours just a little as they are a little bit too grey and don’t compliment the boat’s colours at all.

Right now, after living with this image for a few days, I’m leaning toward the b/w version.

Decision, decisions … I guess I’m going to have to keep living with these images for a while longer until I start remembering one version more than the other. That’s how I generally end up deciding.

Until now I have managed two sites: one for my own images (which has been sadly neglected), and the other for the photography workshops that I run. I have been wanting to integrate both into the one site, with room for expansion. I think this new site accomplishes those goals.

It’s still a little bit short on content, but I reached the stage where I just had to get the thing online even though it’s not yet quite to the point that I would like. So in the future I hope you’ll find more images in the portfolio pages (including samples of my studio work, commercial work, and personal projects), as well as the option to purchase selected images as prints.

As for this blog section … well, it will be a mixture of whatever I happen to be thinking about or working on, notes and information written primarily for my workshop participants that I think can be shared with everyone, as well as discussions of particular images. We’ll just see where it all leads, I guess.

And, well — I built this website myself, all hand-coded and put together from scratch. No templates or web designers involved, so if you notice anything wrong with it please do let me know. There’s no-one to blame but me for any problems with the site.

Equally, if you like it let me know too!

– Brad.