Outdoor Portraits 1

The blog gives me an opportunity to discuss some of my images both in terms of set-up, the situation and the technical stuff. If you read my blog, you will I hope, find some of these posts useful. This post concerns a simple  one-light exterior set-up.

This was a commission from the subject, Adam Scales, a young actor from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama who needed an image for Spotlight, the repository of actors’ faces since time immemorial. This is not that picture, this is:

The idea is to try and capture an image that the actor feels will reach out to casting directors; to suggest openness, intelligence combined with neutrality. Not always easy things to put in one photograph. The portrait above was my opportunity to do something more elaborate, staged, albeit with very simple lighting appropriate to the outdoor location environment. Now I do like ambient light and have made whole series without switching my flashgun on or reaching for the Elinchrom. However, natural light is not always the best light, and nearly all scenarios can be subtly enhanced if the photographer has more control over the light. I will save my philosophy of lighting to another entry although I will add this: lighting, or more specifically control of lighting, is one thing that separates the ‘photographer’ from everyone else in the world with a camera.

The colour image above was made at the end of the shoot: complete the job first then experiment. Pretty much all of the images shot that day had been shot with a subtle splash of fill-light including this image to the left (shot on a canon 5DII with 85mm lens, converted to black and white in Adobe Lightroom). Adam wanted a natural look but with defocused background; he had seen some other pictures of mine of a fellow student and interestingly pointed out that other members of his cohort had pictures with distractingly sharp backgrounds and mine stood out because the person photographed ‘stood out’. There is no mystery to this: you use a wide aperture lens set to a wide aperture (ensuring that what you want in focus – both eyes – is in focus). The joy of TTL flash combined with flash exposure compensation is that you can get a dash of extra light in the eyes and lift the skin tone without it being obvious to most viewers. For the colour portrait, I changed tactics and went for a bolder look.

The main picture was made close to the where the other images were shot, in the walled garden at Singleton Park, Swansea. After shooting several hundred images tight with the 85mm lens, I switched to the 24-70 zoom and found a suitable area that would frame him well with the added advantage that, although not a bright day, I had enough shade to overpower the ambient light. Even in the shade, controlling the light in this way with my Canon flashgun on a stand would have been difficult. I wanted to underexpose the ambient by at least 2 f-stops and, as the frame was wide, the light had to be some distance (about 10ft) away. I could have moved the light into frame and removed it in Photoshop but I like to get everything in camera and I wanted illumination of the whole frame; so the light had to be moved out of frame-right.

I used a Lumedyne 400 w/s (watt-second) pack with a single head, reflector in the wide position. I had enough power to put a softening modifier on – my Lastolite Umbrella Box or even a standard umbrella – but I wanted fairly hard light and I didn’t have an assistant to prevent an umbrella-ed light getting carried away on the wind like Mary Poppins. I also knew that the remaining ambient would act as fill and soften the shadows generated by the Lumedyne. This is an important factor in location lighting. The ambient light is a help or a hindrance; it can work for you or you can overpower it completely – effectively create a studio environment on location. To do the latter outdoors in the middle of the afternoon would require more than 400 watt-seconds of light and a camera that synced above 1/200 second. What the light had to do was create drama and bring out some texture in the grass and tree. The light is placed at an angle a bit greater than the regulation 45 degrees beloved of tradition, maybe 60 or so; just enough to get some light in Adam’s right eye.

The technique is pretty much the same in this portrait of the illustrator, film-maker and artist Dave McKean for the book, Making Great Illustration, right down to the raw Lumedyne light and the desire to bring out the texture of the environment. This is a little less ‘lit’ than Adam’s, so the ambient light is more apparent, but subject and foreground are in shade and mainly flash-lit.

One lighting issue to keep in mind when placing the light outside a wide frame, as with both of these images, is avoiding ‘overheating’ of the ground between light and subject. Not too much of an issue in either of these scenarios but you should raise the light up high enough so that it’s not too close to the ground, especially if the ground is light – a pavement for example. Then consider ‘feathering’ the light upward so that the ‘sweetspot’ lights your subject but the fall-off is greater closer to the light-source. I will discuss feathering light in other posts as it’s one of the most important and subtle techniques in lighting.

This image is a portrait in the gallery on my website called ‘Portraits’, but is it a portrait? As I’ve said, this was off-brief. If a portrait has limited meaning or purpose (unlike the black and white image that at least serves its practical purpose), does it count. This is me thinking with my lecturer’s hat on (if you must know, a brown fedora with three feathers in the band and a well worn Petersham). This image has effect, maybe visual drama, and it shows a person posing for the camera; it has all the appurtenances of a portrait. But Adam, as far as I know, does not hang out amongst the shrubs. He is not known (currently) except by the people who know him, so only they can comment further. The Dave McKean portrait may work because of visual drama, but his work/home environment – the ‘primitive’ footbridge to his studio space, for example – suggested to me, and hopefully to some who know his work, a relationship he has with his own creative world. The portrait of Adam reflects however, something that any editorial photographer occasionally does: making an encounter with an unknown subject visually interesting when the physical environment of the set-up isn’t interesting; adding value with technique and skill to make a viewer take notice. One day, this portrait may find its true purpose when Adam lands the role in a drama about an environmental activist protecting an ecosystem from the developer’s diggers. Until then it’s an image, albeit one I like very much, with more effect than substance.