Be careful to question dogma – in photography like everywhere else.
Two items of such dogma:
So this is not OK?
Sure it is. No rule, even the best ones, always holds. Sometimes art can be made by breaking rules you thought were sacrosanct!
Prior to a class the other day, I decided to do a very quick self portrait or two. Let me share, and explain how.
How? This is how:
Not bad eh?
Finally, one more with a different gel on the background flash: egg yolk yellow, my favourite colour.
Total time taken: Maybe two, three minutes.
I took this shot of jazz great Peter Appleyard, the wizard of the vibraphone, back in 2009:
So how did I do this – what was behind my decisions?
Here’s my thinking and execution:
This is the thinking that goes though a photographer’s mind quickly. Practice the same – think about things like lens, light, exposure, and composition. You will see you will get quick at this just by asking the right questions.
Ah.. who does not want their face and skin to look smoother and younger? I thought so.
So here, from a Flash class I taught at the School of Imaging the other day, is a simple example. All of you can do this – simple camera, simple lens, and simple flash, in a small room with white walls and ceilings. To ensure that only flash light shows in your image, set the camera to manual, at 1/25th second, 400 ISO, f/5.6.
First, let’s do it wrong (sorry and apologies to my volunteer): aim the flash straight up at the ceiling. Result: dark circles under the eyes, many wrinkles: ouch. Do not do this at home!
Instead, when close to your subject, aim the flash behind you, up 45 degrees. That gets you a much better image:
That’s a nice portrait. But now look at this: let’s “overexpose” it by one stop: to do this, set your Flash Exposure Compensation (FEC) to “+1.0”.
Aha, that is better! We have taken years off the subject’s age just by lighting brightly. These images, basically straight out of the camera, show very clearly how you light and expose well: now go try to do it yourself!
Flash rocks, once you know how it works. This post shows just one small sample of what I teach you in my Flash courses and coaching.
I hear people say sometimes that “you cannot shoot portraits at wide open apertures”.
So then how this available light portrait, shot on a full frame camera with a 50mm lens at f/1.2 (yes, f/1.2!)?
Well yes, it is shallow, but not too shallow. Because I have enough distance.
Remember: depth of field (“DOF”) is a function of three things: aperture, distance, and lens focal length. The closer I get, the lower my f-number, and the more I zoom in, the more I get shallow depth of field.
So portrait like this, with the person small enough like this, gives me plenty of DOF. Of course I would not want to do a full headshot at these large apertures, but in this type of portrait the shallow DOF is not too shallow, and the super blurry background makes things better.
So -get yourself an affordable 24- 35- or 50mm lens!
Here’s a snap of my friend and student Ray, taken Saturday night:
As you can see, he is backlit – and I used whatever light was available.
This means that to avoid the usual “silhouette”, I needed to expose very long – 1/25th sec at f/2.8, using 6400 ISO; using the 24-70 lens set to 25mm, which on a 1D is 25 x 1.3 = a “real” 33mm. (See how nice the “real” 35mm is? That’s why some cameras, like my Fuji X100, have fixed lenses of that focal length).
So – 6400 ISO? Is that doable?
Sure. Of course if we were to zoom in all the way we would see grain, but this image is pretty OK – especially after a little noise cancellation in Lightroom.
The moral: do not be afraid to go to high ISO values when needed. It’s better than not getting the shot.
When I shoot glamour portraits, I like to use black and white, and I like to make them high-key, as in this example below from a few days ago.
Why high key b/w?
That’s four good reasons to do this if you want someone to look great and flawless. And who doesn’t want to look young and flawless?
I shot some demo product shots with my student Merav today, and I thought I would share them here to underline the importance of colour.
Here’s one, a simple one. Lit by a softbox on the leeft, an umbrella on the right, and against a grey backdrop. That gives us this:
Bit boring? Yes it is. So I add a gridded, “egg-yolk yellow” gelled speedlight aiming at the background. (I use the excellent Honl Photo grids, gels, and other small flash modifiers):
Much better. Then we added another light – a green-blue gelled speedlight shining in from the left:
Then we reversed the gel colours:
Then, tried another background colour, rose purple:
And finally got to a background coloured Just Blue, which had been Merav’s idea all along:
Which one did you prefer? Can you see how different they all are?
To shoot this I used this setup:
This works as follows:
Simple. Once you know!
Why the rum? It was the only bottle I had in the house. Amazingly, for the first time I can remember, I had not a single bottle of beer or wine or anything else available in the house. Time to hit the liqor store!
Look at this image I shot just the other day – yes, it is another post in my recent model portrait series, this time to show you a simple creative technique you can use in camera:
Pretty in Pink (Photo: Michael Willems)
Namely.. the blur at the bottom.
This surely looks like something I did in Photoshop – perhaps even Lightroom? But no – I did this while shooting, using the camera.
How?
Here’s how. I simply placed an object (a mirror, in this case) in front of me, very close to my lens, and shot right over it. That blurs the bottom of the image, because the mirror is completely out of focus.
And call me crazy, but I like doing things in camera when I can. This image is basically “straight out of camera” (“SOOC”). Shot using a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV, 1/60 sec at f / 5.6, ISO 400, and lit with two speedlights, one on camera, one off camera. Using TTL, with flash compensation set to +1 stop to expose high-key. This is visually stunning, and also smooths skin.
By the way – I blurred to make it a “work safe” image. If you want to see some of my art nudes, head over to my occasionally-updated Tumblr site at http://mvwphoto.tumblr.com
I often, as you know, write about what I have been photographing recently, and that has been a number of sessions with a regular and excellent model, Kim – so I shall do one more post on this today.
When shooting a model, or fashion, or art portraits – anything creative – it is important to try different poses all the time. A good model changes his or her pose every two or three seconds. It is the photographer’s duty to go with that; even to encourage that with less experienced models.
So in seconds you go from this – and all these are from yesterday, all shot within minutes:
To this:
To this:
To this:
And so on… all in seconds. Try different poses, angles, look, zoom angles.
That is difficult sometimes, because in a shoot like that, you have to shoot quickly. No time to meter, to set up lights. So I:
By doing it this way, I can react quickly to the different areas and poses. And that, in this kind of shoot, is key
So when you shoot anything, think “what type of shoot is this”. In this type of shoot, quick reactions are key. In other types of shooting, I can spend ten minutes setting up lights for each shot – both are valid ways of shooting. Know which one you are doing and shoot accordingly.