My shoot with Laura Hollick the other evening was a multi-purpose one. We were aiming to get three things out of this evening’s shoot: a video, a “magazine cover” photo and a more artistic photo. Sue Upton did a great job with hair and makeup, transforming Laura into the field fairy.
We shot all of this at “Golden Hour,” which is that magical period just before sunset when everything looks like a fairy tale. Unfortunately, because of cloud cover, golden hour didn’t materialize in quite the striking way it usually does at this time of year. However, it was still a good time to shoot. When it’s a little overcast, the brightness of foreground and sky are close enough at this time of day so you can get some nice sky details in your backgrounds rather than boring white.
The video is a visual poem. It was fun shooting this, because it really challenged me to find new and interesting ways to frame shots and move the camera. This was the first attempt at using our new Blackbird DSLR camera stabilizer. It was a challenging test. The Blackbird has a piece that dangles down beneath the camera. That piece has a crossbar on it. While moving through the field, the crossbar would constantly touch or impact on grasses and other plants, often making the shots waver unpredictably. In the end, because we didn’t need a lot of footage, it wasn’t a problem. However, my arm was so numb after holding this stabilized rig steady for about an hour, I could barely operate the camera for the regular photos! Using this thing regularly is going to make my left bicep humongous.
Admittedly, I’m relatively new at shooting and editing video, but today’s tools make both so easy and intuitive. It wasn’t hard to get a result that we were both happy with.
I had a shoot with Shan the other day at one of Hamilton’s many waterfalls. Shan wanted to have photos of himself doing yoga at Albion Falls. Albion Falls is a great place to shoot because it’s big and has plenty of dramatic platforms at different levels. We had beautiful weather for the shoot. It was warm, and the sun ducked in and out from behind the occasional cloud to provide a variety of interesting lighting conditions. We hiked down the side of the escarpment to reach the bottom of the waterfall’s bowl. Then, Shan climbed up to the various terraces of the falls to do yoga poses while I shot from on top of some big rocks below. The rushing sound of the water and peaceful surroundings made it a very pleasant and easy shoot. What a pleasure it is to shoot photos of people doing what they are passionate about.
Technically, the shoot was pretty simple. I shot in aperture priority mode so I could control the depth of field. I would decrease the aperture for some of the shots to lengthen the shutter speed, giving a little more blur to the fast-moving water. A stabilized lens helps in this situation so you can shoot hand-held at long focal lengths without worrying about camera shake. Shooting at the right time of day really helps. We were there in the late afternoon, when the sun was still high enough to get over the lip of the waterfall and into our shooting area, but still low enough to provide a nice rim light on Shan, and a soft glow to the water droplets. It wasn’t quite golden hour, but still late enough for the atmosphere to filter out those ugly UV rays.
When I work with Laura Hollick, my job is as the photographer is to be the visual editor. A lot of photographers talk about editing as the process that happens after the shoot, with choosing and touching up photos. While I agree that’s something that needs to happen, I also think a good deal of the editing must be done before and during a shoot. The energy you direct towards this important editing phase, especially when you’re doing conceptual work, the easier and smoother your post-shoot editing process will be. It doesn’t mean that every single detail must be planned in advance, but it does allow you to hone your visual communication down to its essence so that your photos are “speaking” clearly and strongly.
Anyway, Laura is a bursting fountain of ideas. She’ll bring an idea to me, and it’s up to me to compress it into the rectangular frame of a photo. In a recent shoot, Laura wanted to put a black fairy in a swamp with an interesting dead tree. She’d found this location on a drive in the country, and asked if we could do a photo there. I scouted the location with her, and we decided the tree would make a great counter-balance to a sculptural costume piece she’d made in her studio. The sculpture, along with the tree, would form the wings of the black fairy, and communicate the concept of her connection to nature. Whenever there’s an opportunity to scout a location before the shoot, I do it. Sometimes time constraints or other circumstances don’t allow this, but if it’s at all possible, I’ll take the opportunity. Scouting a location allows you to come prepared for any difficulties the site may present, as well as giving you an idea what time of day and weather conditions will yield the best shooting conditions.
I took the photos above on the day of the shoot. These “sketches” are an important part of my editing process as we move towards getting the final shot. I tried various combinations of pose and camera position and orientation. I experimented with different focal lengths to try to come up with a good balance between drama and distraction.
As a side note, one factor of primary importance to me is the comfort of the model or subject of the photo. If the person you’re shooting is uncomfortable, you’re almost certain to get a bad photo of them. This is one reason Laura wasn’t wearing her costume in the sketch photos until we needed it to figure out the composition. I don’t want to feel rushed because she might be feeling uncomfortable or awkward in a costume. So, we avoid putting the costume on until absolutely necessary.
There were a lot of competing elements in this location, including trees, bushes, tall grasses, reflections, clouds, etc. I wanted to keep the black fairy clear of distractions, but in balance with other environmental elements so she would stand out. At the same time, we were limited by the fact that the tree had to be in the right position in the frame to form that other wing. In the end, I found just the right spot and focal length to get the shot. Laura was standing on a chair, which was slowly but surely sinking into the marshy ground; we had to work quickly once her costume was in place, otherwise our whole setup would have toppled into the swamp! Laura did a great job of looking serene, even as the chair inexorably tilted towards the water. We’d been blessed by a stormy-looking sky that day, so I snapped a series of bracketed shots so I could maintain the detail of those beautiful clouds. Later, I discovered that judicious processing of the RAW file allowed me to extract the detail from just a single exposure.
Here's the final image of Laura Hollick as the Black Fairy in the swamp.
I had some fun today. It was a beautiful spring morning, and the parking lot at my building was mostly empty. I decided to play with my new car and my Hartblei Super-Rotator lens. I picked up this lens on eBay last year, but haven’t used it a lot. The Hartblei is an f/3.5 65mm tilt-shift lens that can rotate both tilt and shift segments 360 degrees. What does this mean? It basically means you can put together some pretty crazy focal planes.
Tilt-shift lenses are great at creating a “miniature” effect. It’s the perfect effect to make a fun statement about how small Pepper, my little MINI Cooper S is. I parked Pepper rakishly in the middle of the lot, and climbed the metal ladder to the roof of my building, because the tilt-shift miniature effect only really works if you’re shooting from a high angle.
Because the Hartblei is a completely manual lens, it doesn’t communicate with your camera body at all. The camera’s display told me that my aperture was f/00. I dialed in f/3.5 on the barrel of the lens, and then used the camera’s meter to determine the right shutter speed.
I shot a few different angles, experimenting with different combinations of tilt, shift, and rotation. I have to admit, it’s a bit hard for me to predict how the different tilts and shifts will affect the final image, but half the fun is in the trying.
In the end, I found the miniature effect to be pretty convincing. The unexpected planes of focus and unusual depth of field created some fascinating results, and made Pepper look like a die-cast metal toy.
Laura and I are continuing to shoot our series of photos depicting scenes from her inner world, like the ones we exhibited at the Birth Your Dreams exhibition in August. We work well as a team. She comes up with these brilliant and beautiful concepts and I refine those concepts to their visual essence. By the time we take the photo, the vision is clear and more powerful than anything we could have come up with on our own.
This time, we shot Laura as a red tree growing in a forest. The concept illustrates Laura’s mission of growing spirit on Earth. There was some setup involved. First, we had to find the perfect stand of trees. Laura had located a spot out in the country where there was forest on both sides of the street. Then, we had to wait for the weather. The vision was to have fresh snow on the ground. When the day finally came, we packed up the car and headed out to that little forest. We drove along this stretch of road slowly a few times, scanning the woods for the right spot for the photo. I wanted to find a spot with mostly vertical trees, with few fallen trunks and distracting diagonal branches. I also wanted the right sized clearing for Laura to stand in, as I wanted her to appear to be part of the continuous forest, rather than feeling like she was wedged in, or was surrounded by too much space. Finally we spotted the right place. Here’s what it looked like from the road.
Next, we had to unpack all our stuff, including camera, tripod, lenses, costume, chair, mirror, props, etc. We had to tread carefully, approaching the scene from the side and back so as not to disturb the beautiful fresh snowy landscape in the foreground. We set Laura up on a chair to give her the extra height required by her tree costume. I tested the composition and exposure while she was still wearing her winter clothes, because we wouldn’t have much time to shoot with her in the costume before she turned into an icicle. It was cold!
When we got the composition we wanted, I locked the camera down on the tripod, and we got Laura into her costume. The long skirt and red top were held together by fabric ties and plastic clamps. It’s not exactly comfortable or easy to wear! In fact, after we got her all strapped in, Laura was pretty much immobile.
I worked pretty quickly to get the exposures I needed. I took three bracketed exposures of each shot: regular, 1.5 stops above, and 1.5 stops below. I used continuous drive and a shutter release cable so that as little as possible would move in between the exposures. In contrasty scenes like this, I think it’s a good idea to bracket because it will allow you to merge the details from the various exposures to end up with something with wider dynamic range. It’s not exactly HDR photography, but more like the techniques that film photographers like Karsh used to use when sandwiching bracketed negatives to create richly tonal scenes under difficult lighting conditions.
I also shot at f2.8 and at f9.0. Normally, I love shooting f2.8 because I like to isolate my subject. But, in this case, the forest was as much the subject as the trees, and I had a feeling I’d want to make use of the extra depth provided by the smaller aperture.
Shooting done, we got Laura out of that costume and bundled up again in her winter jacket. I’m sure that was quite a relief. When I got the images back to the studio and into the computer, I was glad that I’d shot all those bracketed exposures as well as the f9.0 shots. There was very little work to be done on the photo to make it “perfect.” I emphasized the brightness and misty atmosphere of the forest by using a low-contrast process of the over-exposed bracketed shot. This also gave Laura’s skin a lovely translucent quality. I brought detail into the costume by masking in the regular exposure. I didn’t need the under-exposed version. I cloned out some of the excess branches and debris to keep everything as vertical as possible. Light sharpening brought out the detail in the bark of the trees.
The photo looks amazing at high resolution. I can’t wait to present it in an exhibition in some huge format.
