Connections
Recently, one of my former jujutsu students, Fedja Kecman, reached out for some advice about which camera he should buy. I told him to select a mirrorless camera, which seems to be the future. (I have both a mirrorless Sony A9II and a DSLR, the Canon 5DIV.) He bought the Canon R6 and I offered to let him borrow my Canon 70-200 f/2.8L II zoom lens. Though I rarely see Fedja anymore, I think of him as a dear friend. We scheduled a time for him to come to my house and show me the camera, which is incredibly small and light, and he also agreed to sit for a headshot.
The session went well, despite the fact that I’m out of practice due to pandemic restrictions. I still am limited in the use of my right arm after my shoulder surgery, so I had Fedja help me to set up the lights and modifiers on C stands. I plugged in my laptop and started shooting tethered with Capture One Pro. I explained to Fedja how to set up certain modifiers (2x3’ softbox, 1x3’ strip light, beauty dish, grids, etc.) and why I selected them. He works at 3M in the optics division and his understanding of light is way beyond my own, so he was a quick study. At one point we talked about incident light contamination and noticed that I was shooting at 2500 ISO! I felt like a fool. I normally shoot at 100-200 ISO when using monolights (strobes). Even so, I looked at the images and they seemed relatively free of noise. Then we talked about how a wide aperture affects an image.. I usually shoot headshots at f/8 to keep the full head in focus. But to demonstrate a point, I took a photo of Fedja at f/1.4 using ambient light from some small overhead fixtures. Unfortunately, I used the aperture ring on my Sony 85mm GM lens and forgot to reset it to f/8. So we finished the session shooting at f/1.4. Despite these missteps, the photos came out pretty good.
Professional photographers make mistakes just like amateurs. But a pro keeps at it until he or she gets good results and then analyzes what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. Fedja and I kept at it until we got some images we both liked. I also learned that using a wide aperture for a studio portrait isn’t necessarily a bad idea. The session got me excited to start shooting again. Shortly afterward, I noticed that a department store liquidator was selling some mannequins for $100. I had been looking for one to practice my lighting setups for about a year, but they get snapped up quickly and good ones sell for considerably more. I bought one, named her Charlotte, and got to work on a project using colored gels.
I have used gels in the past to add a hint of color to a subject’s hair or a splash of color on the background. But I did not get the kind of results I see when Lindsay Adler uses them for her fashion shoots, or Alexis Cuarezma uses them for sports and dance. I took Adler’s online course, “The Magic of Gels,” and decided to try again using Charlotte. I experimented using gels with various modifiers and noticed that diffusion modifiers make the colors less saturated and softened the edges. Hard modifiers, like reflectors, helped to saturate the colors. I played with setting the camera’s white balance to tungsten, which turns the light coming from the strobes to blue. That reduced the number of gels I needed but it also threw the color too broadly. I wanted to use lights and gels to mimick a harelquin. That is, to throw color in very specific quadrants with distinct borders. I got partway there through light placement. But I struggled to get a distinct line from the blue gel, a technique Adler showed in her course. I knew that the gel had to be as close as possible to the subject without being in the frame. So I used a C stand to hold the gel in place, but the edge still was too soft. So I pulled back the light to create a harder edge and added a 10-degree grid to keep the light from scattering too much. It worked.
While it’s fun and entertaining to work with gels, the real value of this exercise was in refining my understanding of how light works, and how to control it to achieve the effects I want. Sometimes that means using modifiers, or moving lights. Sometimes that means moving my feet or changing lenses and angles of view. Sometimes it means moving the model, or directing the model through conversation to elicit a certain look.
Photography is infinitely complex. I hope to be at this for a very long time to come. You’re welcome to join me at your earliest convenience.
