Chiaroscuro
I began studying art seriously in about the fourth grade. My mother had always wanted to be a painter, and she got me started with a private instructor in Fullerton, California. I painted with oils, often with a heavy use of the palette knife. My instructor, whose name I no longer remember, specialized in charcoal sketches, often of Latinos on Mexican newspaper and treated with a copel varnish. I gave that technique a try and when I was about 11 years old I produced two portraits of Chinese men on Chinese newspaper. My mother loved these two pieces as she said they represented the comedy and tragedy masks of the theatre. After her death, I rescued these pieces and two of my oil paintings: a seascape, seen through a cave, and a basset hound, copied from a flea collar box. I quit painting around age 12 because the lessons and equipment were costly and my eldest sister had taken up lessons as well. My mother would often complain about the cost. A couple of my dad’s friends had offered to buy some of my paintings for what was then substantial sums ($350, as I recall, in 1966-67) but my parents said no, as they did not want me motivated by money. So I quit painting.
Even so, images from the Dutch and Flemish painters stuck with me. I was particularly attracted to the chiaroscuro technique — the use of bright colors against dark backgrounds to draw attention to and through a scene as a way of adding depth to an image. I recently saw some beautiful flowers at a farmer’s market and bought a bouquet with the intention of photographing it. I am primarily a portrait and dance photographer, but in a pandemic we take our subjects where we find them. These flowers were stunning.
I’ve been setting up a small photograpy studio in my basement. This would be my first project there. I arranged the flowers in a cut glass Mikasa vase as best I could and placed them on an old wooden cabinet. I noticed that the base of the vase, where it rested on the table, seemed empty in contrast with the colorful bouquet. So I added some delicata squash and apples around the base to hold the eye within the frame and balance the strong pull from the flowers.
For lighting I started with a beauty dish just slightly off center. The ceilings are a bit low (7.5 feet), so I was limited in the height of my lights. (Note to self: This will be a problem with tall subjects who want standing shots, so I will need to move back upstairs for those.) I shot the flowers against a handpainted background that my daughter made me for my birthday a year ago. It’s green-gray with speckles of gold. The light, a Profoto B10-Plus, seemed too harsh, so I added a diffuser. The light was pleasant on the flowers but too much light spilled onto the background, making it a distraction. I added a grid to narrow the spread of light. By itself, it was too contrasty again, so I put the diffuser over the top of the grid. The combination was beautiful. The light caressed the flowers and fell off quickly enough to leave the background dark. I added a B10 behind the vase to illuminate the background. I experimented with a couple of different grids to constrain the light in a circle behind the flowers. The theme of these images was harvest time, so I added a yellow gel to suggest the warm colors of a fall sunset. I added a reflector to fill the shadows. I tried a white reflector first, then a gold reflector. I rarely use a gold reflector as it’s too warm for portraits, but it looked good on the flowers. I later added a Profoto A1X speedlite with a grid to fill the shadows but I set the power a bit too high and did not like any of the results. I swapped in a lovely cinnamon-brown, handpainted backdrop that I bought on sale and experimented some more with the lights.
In the end, I had a smorgasbord of images that were reasonably good. I preferred the ones with a bright bouquet set aganist a dark background, but I decided to post a variety to my social media accounts to see what others had to say. Opinions varied, but several people mentioned that they liked the ones I liked. If I analyze them, these versions resemble the chiaroscuro and related tenebrism techniques of some 15th-17th Century Dutch masters such as Rachel Ruysch and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder. I don’t want to misrepresent myself as an art history expert. I am not. But in visiting art galleries I am often drawn to the works of Dutch masters even before I know who painted them. I have a particular affinity for the use of contrast and color in images to evoke emotion and to control eye flow through an image.
For me, these lighting techniques and color palettes evoke a depth of spirit evident in the faces of my subjects. I can practice with flowers and vegetables but the challenge lies in applying these techniques to people. Finding subjects in a pandemic is challenging.
I have good news for those of you thinking of getting your portrait, headshot, family portrait, dancer portrait, modeling portfolio or holdiay card photos! I will be retiring from my job as a newspaper editor on Dec. 1 and plan to work exclusively on photography. I also am spending down my accumulated “personal time off” by taking off the month of November. So please consider booking a COVID-safe session with me. As an added incentive, I will discount my creative fee by 20% through November 2020.
