You do what? Why?

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to work with my friend Jamie, the owner of Cowbelly Pet Photography here in Seattle. As part of her 3-day intensive workshop on pet photography, I was asked to come in an give a mini lighting seminar to her 14 workshop attendees. I had spent the night before working on the outline for the talk. I only had a few hours to give a crash course and I was trying to figure out my game plan. The first talking point on my outline looked this: WHY WE LIGHT • Control • Reveal Form, Texture, Depth • Represent 3D objects in 2D • Mood It's the typical Dean Collins/strobist answer. To someone who's studied lighting and knows the work of Collins and Hobby, it seems like a canned answer. At least it does to me. It's their reason. Not mine. Since yesterday I've thought long and hard about the question why do we light? and I think I have my answer: We light because lighting provides us the greatest amount of control to execute our artistic vision. I think that sums it up pretty simply. As a side note if you're looking for an intense, hands-on workshop that teaches the kibbles and bits of pet photography, contact Jamie. Maybe we'll run into each other during the lighting portion of the workshop.

I'm Looking at the Man in the Mirror

Despite any anecdotal evidence to the contrary, I'm not a narcissist. I just play one on Flickr. Self portraits, for me, are kind of a necessity. You see, despite what I'd like to think, I don't have a hoard of models running around my apartment snacking on celery and spritzer water waiting for my next idea to strike. I do it becuase I'm all I've got handy most of the time. When there's some new lighting technique I'd like to try, or maybe I need to practice using my meter, I have to shoot myself. There are two methods I find most useful when doing selfies. 1. Hook your camera up to your computer and shoot tethered. Not only do you get instant feedback about your composition, you also get to chimp your lighting on a big LCD. We know the little one on the back of your camera lies straight to your face. No matter how much you crank down all the settings to turn your jpg image into a boring, lifeless representation of that awesome shot you just made. Anyway, shooting tethered into Lightroom or Aperture gives you the exposure as it really is, pulling no punches. UPDATE:You'll need a piece of software to go between your camera and Lightroom/Aperture. For Canon it's the EOS Utility. I'm sure Nikon has theirs but I'm a Canon shooter and don't know what the Nikon software is off-hand. 2. This is the really fun part if you have one of those fancy big screen TVs. You know, the kind where you feel like your living room is an IMAX theater. Anyway you can get a long video cable and plug it right into the camera. So when you're doing your selfie, you just put yourself facing the TV and shazam! You're ready for your closeup. Now the really cool thing about this is, if your camera has liveview, then you can chimp the composition on the fly right on the big screen before you even hit the shutter. Actually the best way to do it, if you have the means, is to combine both. Use the big screen to compose the image and then use the captured image from the tether as your exposure guide. It's the best of both worlds. Oh, and don't let the big LCD thing scare you off. Any TV, monitor, projector with a standard Video input will do just fine. You just need a cable that has a 1/8" mono plug at one end and an RCA plug at the other. I went to Radio Shack and got a long video cable and an RCA to mini phone converter. The converter has a female RCA jack and a 1/8" mini phone plug all in one molded plastic package. It looks like a funny looking headphone adapter.

Your Lights go to Eleven?

So, over on the Flickr Strobist Group, there's another post asking if people have meters. Let me say this: If you're serious about light and you really want to get it right, then you should own a light flash meter. A photographic exposure has four main components: the diffused value, the shadow areas, the highlight areas, and the specular. (Please forgive me, Mr. Collins for adding a fourth to your list.) The diffused value is the value of exposure that properly exposes the true tone of the subject. The diffused value is determined by using an incident flash meter. You can chimp it but unless you're shooting tethered to a big monitor and performing some kind of metric on the image, you just don't know. The other thing the meter will tell you is ratios. Your camera's meter just ain't built for that action. It can only give you exposure values for reflected ambient light. So let's say you're using one of those fancy Martin Prihoda setups with two hard lights at 45° behind your subject and a big fat softbox on camera axis. In that case you're wanting the hard lights to be rims and the softbox to be the main light. Where do you start? Well, if you're chimping, you pick aperture - probably f/8 because you like f/8. Then you point your camera at the air and see what the ambient is. If it's at least two stops above your max sync speed then you crank the shutter speed down two stops otherwise you crank the aperture up until you're within two stops of max sync. Then you pick a some starting point for flash power and fire a shot, look at the screen, look at the histogram, look for blinkies and then fidgit with the lights until it looks right on your LCD. But beware -- your LCD will lie straight to your face. We all know that, right? BUT, if you have a meter, you first set the max sync speed on the meter and take an ambient reading. You want to underexpose ambient by two stops so you dial the shutter speed down two stops and then the meter will tell you your shooting aperture. You then switch the dial over to meter flash. Great. Aim the meter at the main light, take a reading and adjust the main light until its power measures at your shooting aperture. Next you meter the rims. You want them one stop over the base? No problem. Aim the meter, take a reading, adjust and repeat until you're one stop over your shooting aperture. Do this for both lights and you're done. Right? Maybe. You probably did the metering all at the subject's head (I'm assuming a portait of some kind here). But with a meter you can actually "see" the spread of light before you even fire your camera. I'm not talking about the need to gobo the rims. I'm talking about metering down the subject's body, on the ground, in the air, toward the background. The cool thing is that doing this will let you know if your lights are aimed right. Then you press the shutter. When you do it this way, the camera becomes a composition tool first and an exposure tool second. Now let's say you want to shoot a portrait with a very shallow depth of field. You've got that sweet 85/1.8 and you know that 1.8 is it. Or maybe 2.0. You want your subject to have tack sharp eyes and blurry ears. So what do you do? Same as above except now you adjust the lights until the meter reads the aperture you've chosen. Simple. I know David Hobby doesn't do it this way. And Chase Jarvis doesn't do it this way. But you aren't them, are you?