I warned in my very first post here that I was into photography in a very big way and that it would likely be a commonly discussed topic here then, for a month and a half and 34 posts, I never mentioned it again. Hmm. Seems I had more I wanted to say on other topics. Well the time has come so, for those of you who are used to reading my usual soap box rants and introspective drivel, here is a little something different.

Over the holidays I’ve been reading an excellent book called “The Moment it Clicks” by Joe McNally. For those of you not familiar with Joe, he is an amazing photographer who has shot many major celebrities, many stories for National Geographic (the ultimate photographer’s fantasy gig) and was the first staff photographer in 34 years for Time magazine. He is, to say the least, a very impressive photographer. The focus of the book is on sharing some of the hundreds of little tidbits Joe has picked up during his time on the job.

Two of those tidbits in particular got me thinking. They were both to do with controlling lighting. In one, regarding a shoot he did of Tony Bennett, he quotes a Time photo editor as saying “If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.” In another section he says that “The hardest thing about lighting is NOT lighting. We’re talking control of lighting here – lighting THIS but not THAT.” Now, if you’ve ever spent any time playing with studio lights or, worse yet, trying to get the lighting you want on-site using available light, you know that these both present major challenges. To pull off the first part (not lighting all of something) you have to accomplish the second part (controlling the light) in a very big way.

Those two things were swimming around in my head and resulted in an idea for a concept shot. Something that would graphically illustrate controlling light in a conceptual manner while, at the same time, requiring me to actually do it. To light some of a scene and not other nearby parts is much harder than it might sound. That is especially true in enclosed spaces and doubly so in small enclosed spaces because of the light reflecting off all the walls and back onto whatever you are trying not to light. That is to say, if you are in an open field there is nothing but the ground for light to reflect off of so pretty much the only light hitting your subject is the light you put on them directly (assuming it is at night and the sun isn’t out, of course) but if you are in an enclosed space light reflects off all available surfaces and spills light back onto your subject. Photographers use that to their advantage all the time in location photography. Look at any photographer at, say, a wedding reception. Assuming there isn’t an insanely high ceiling you will almost always find them with their flash pointed more toward the ceiling than whatever they are photographing. That is because light hitting someone from your camera directly produces an unappealing, flat light – that is why most point and shoot shots stink – but light coming from another direction lets you see shadows and creates depth. By pointing their flash up they are bouncing the light off the ceiling effectively turning it into a big, soft flash.

The reason I say you will only see that when the ceiling isn’t way high is that , if it is too far up, the light ‘falls off’ too much. Light falloff is governed by the inverse square law. Put in non-geek terms, if you double the distance between a light and a subject, the subject will not receive half as much light but one quarter. Triple the distance and they don’t receive a third the light but a ninth. Because smaller spaces have surfaces much closer in all directions the light falls off much less, so you get lots of reflected light. That’s why photo studios – I’m not talking about Sears here, I mean real studios – are typically pretty big rooms.

So it is with all that in mind that I contemplated trying the shot I had conceived in my own studio. The problem is that, not only is the room I use very small for a studio but the walls are light colored so they reflect more light than darker walls would. So my big challenge would be to control the spill light to get the effect I intended.

What I had in mind was giving the illusion of a literal control of light. Having someone actually ‘holding’ light. Since I needed to work out the concept and see if I could pull it off I used myself as a subject. As much as I hate pictures of me (all of them) I didn’t want to waste someone else’s time before working it out. The shot shown here is what I came up with so far. It is (a) me, so I don’t like it and (b) photographically so-so and (c) not really even posed since I was just checking the effect. Having said all that, it does show kinda what I had in mind. I would like to get a model and re-shoot it for real but that will have to wait until life settles down.

To pull this off I had to hang more black paper than a goth house at halloween and, even then, I had to clean up some light spill in post-processing. Nothing in the shot is what it appears. The ball of light is a small studio strobe sitting just behind me aimed directly at the camera with a deep reflector to keep the light from hitting me. My hand is actually a foot or more in front of the light, just positioned below it to give the appearance of it being in my hand. I had to hang black behind the camera position to keep that reflection down. The light actually hitting my face is from a 36×48 soft box with the face removed to produce a harder, more directional light. I had to put up a large black ‘flag’ just out of frame to my right to control reflection from that direction too. The bright light on my palm is actually from a strobe boomed overhead with an improvised snoot to keep it to throwing a small tight spot of light that would just hit my hand. I ran that one at full power to produce that blown out harsh glow on my hand. The final piece of the lighting was a strobe next to the camera with a slot shaped mask so it would throw a stripe of light across my eyes to make my right eye visible. I kept it pretty dim just for effect. The whole thing was shot on 9′ seamless black paper.

I am reasonably satisfied with the end result but will work to refine it more. If I get a chance to shoot it with a model under more ideal circumstances I will add it to the post. I’m also working on a lighting diagram that I’ll put up when I’m done with it. In the mean time, I promise to rant more and photo-geek less… maybe.

/g