Behind the scenes

Hey, I seem to be not very good about getting blogs out at a decent rate... sorry.

Here is a shot from last week. I'm planning to give you a how'd he do that blog. I'll talk about how it was made from the concept to print.

We started doing a portrait session for Mark, a Lieutenant for The Parksville Fire Department. While shooting inside the hall Mark mentioned that Ladder 41 is his favorite truck and he love to do some shots on it. Right on!

I started to build the shot in my head: shoot him from above wide... to exaggerate the height. I'd light him to bring the detail of the sky and bring him off the background. I was thinking about a dramatic/gritty looking image.

So, I had a concept now it was time to make it happen. The truck was moved behind the fire hall and I began to set up lights for the shoot. So why light it? It was daytime an I could have gotten a decent exposure without flash. Well, at the concept stage I though about the feel I wanted for it and having a dark detailed cloudy sky would definitely do that.

The problem was that the sky was a good three stops brighter than my Mark. When you look at the behind the scenes shoots you will see the the sky totally blows out.

There are a few ways to solve the problem. I could have shot a bracketed burst of shots and made and HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. My camera will shoot eight frames per second so I can get away with hand holding HDR captures. But I chose to use off camera flash instead.

The off camera flash, in this circumstance, has some advantages to get me the image I had imagined at the concept stage. I personally have a preference for off camera light as I can usually get an image out of the camera that requires little to no post production. That fact alone makes it worth it for me as I regularly output up to thousands of images a month; needing to spend even 10 minutes per image in post would kill me.

I missed taking an image of the setup so you will have to gleam it from my super cheesy self portrait.

I took two SB-900s and a couple lite-tites (umbrella holders) with cold shoe clamps and zap-strapped and gaffer taped them to the truck ladder. Both flashes were set to remote, one group A and one group B. I zoomed them both to 50mm for a little bit of kick. It was beginning to rain so I put the flashes in zip lock bags for insurance. I had a third SB-900 as the master flash on the camera.

I brought two cameras with me up the ladder as I didn't wan't to do a lens change up top or have everyone climb down to do the same. As it turns out I would have been fine with just the wide angle. For the record: I am still having nightmares of cameras falling 40ft to a gravely death.

I shot the camera in manual so that I could easily balance the flash and the ambient light. I set f 5.6 (that gives lots of depth of field at 14mm and doesn't tax the flashes too much) aimed the camera at the sky and set a shutter speed that gave me a two stop under exposure to bring out the details. I told the master flash on the camera to make group A over expose by one and a third stops and group B to over expose by two thirds of a stop. This would bring my subject of the background and still retain details in the unlit areas of the picture.

Using manual modes for balancing flash is a great way to maintain consistency between images. By setting and exposure for the sky I am choosing to keep that exposure constant throughout the shots as it is unaffected by the flash. Although I'm using a manual mode in the camera the flashes are still pre-flashing and I'm able to task the camera with adjusting flash outputs automatically. This is awesome because it gives me total control on the overall exposure while the flash automatically adjusts exposure as my subject moves closer and further from the lights.

I made a test shot and a few adjustments and then started to work with Mark on posing for the shot. I leave my display set to RGB "blikies" so that I'm easily able to see if my highlights are blowing out. I also use a loupe to view the display when I'm shooting outside. The loupe lets me have a very good view of the display in the field rather than to get things back to the cutting room just to find out I missed the shot. I shoot tethered when I can for the same reason and I'll cover that in a future blog. I'm not a light meter person when using TTL light setups. For that matter I often just use my camera as a flash meter even when I'm shooting manual flashes (don't tell anyone).

After getting a good set of images in the camera I did a little post production on this one and I'll go over here. I've been using Topaz plug-ins for a while now, specifically Adjust and Detail. I'm easily able to ad contrast to different tonal ranges without having to ad multiple adjustment layers making short work of an otherwise long photoshop session.

In this image I made a quick adjustment to level the horizon (I'm incapable of holding a camera level no matter how hard I try). I made a graduated filter in Lightroom and fine tuned the exposure and contrast for the sky. I then sent the file to Photoshop and made a duplicate layer of the background and sent it to the Topaz Detail filter. I started with the Interior Detail preset and did a couple minor tweaks before saving the changes. I then slightly reduced the opacity of the new layer and I was done.

So, in review we came up with a concept, considered the options for production and chose one, shot the images and finished with some post production. It's important to mention that throughout the process I had the final image in mind. Without that I would have been bumbling around waiting for something to happen. That's not to say that creative accidents are a good thing, quite the opposite in fact. But it's really important to visualize the finished image before you start out to make it.

Cheers, Greg