Surprises Happen

I was scheduled to work in the kitchen serving food and bussing tables at a surprise birthday party. The party was for a man turning 80, and he had relatives coming all the way from Texas to celebrate with him.

As I was being given instructions for kitchen duty, I overheard one of the party planners talking about a photographer. Due to a miscommunication, this photographer had no camera! I was shocked this could have happened. It’s sort of like a racecar driver showing up for a championship race without a car, or a soldier going off to fight a war without a rifle. (I’d better give my brother Matt credit for that last one.) Without entirely thinking the situation through, I spoke up.

“I have a bunch of photo gear.”

“With you now?”

“I can run home and get it really quick.”

“Do you have a camera?”

(Here I’m thinking, by whose definition of “a bunch of photo gear” does that not include a camera?) “...Yes, I have a camera.”

And so I got the job of photographing this man’s surprise 80th birthday party. I had maybe 20 minutes to plan, most of which was spent driving home and back to get my camera bag. That’s gotta be the smallest amount of time I’ve ever had between being hired and starting to photograph an event! It was cut so close that I got back to the location, put my stuff down, assembled my camera, and was walking out onto the event floor guessing the correct exposure settings while the lights were being turned off because the birthday boy was arriving!

My part in the party ended up working out surprisingly well. There were lots of things to shoot while the party happened. Everybody seemed to really love this man who they were celebrating with.

Partway through the event came the announcement: “The photographer doesn’t know this, but we’re gonna do a group picture now!” After a second of panic, I remembered shooting a similar group photo in this exact same room about a month back... I set my camera up about the same way, save the tripod and wireless shutter remote to get myself in the other photo.

To get everyone in the group well lit, well exposed, and sharp, I bounced my 2 most powerful flashes on full power off the high white ceiling. This made the ceiling act like a giant diffuse light source, making everyone look pretty. With both flashes firing, they gave me enough light that I was able to use a small enough aperture to keep everyone in focus without bumping my ISO up where I would get excessive noise in the photo. (In this case, it was f4 at ISO 400.)

What lesson should you take away from this? If you want to be a photographer, the #1 requirement is that you have your camera ready and available for whatever life throws at you!

With a little makeup...

I had an awesome shoot this week with a makeup artist and 4 different models, each with a distinct look. While I can’t say this is my favorite type of photography, or that I’m an expert in the world of fashion (quite the opposite), this was definitely a fun photoshoot. It’s something I haven’t done before, which automatically makes it exciting!

Anh Thu Tran was my partner in crime for this shoot. She’s a makeup artist able to do makeup for all occasions, as well as the super extravagant. She applied themed makeup to each of our four models before I photographed them. The day’s schedule for four models was turned upside down when our first two models didn’t show up to the shoot, but two of Anh Thu’s friends were nice enough to step up and fill their places.


It’s always fun when I get to shoot four distinctly different things in a day. Our first model, Mia, was a Victoria’s Secret model. I lit her with a beauty dish off to the side along with a fill flash on low power bouncing off the ceiling. The light reflected all over the place off the walls of the small white room, giving a relatively even light to the scene. The photos didn’t work out quite like I had hoped, but we still had 3 models to go!


Next up was Alyssa, who did a 1920s flapper style look. (Google it, it’s cool.) Anh Thu did her up in all the correct makeup, and the dress finished off the look. I researched portrait styles of the era and made notes on the poses and lighting. Lighting this portrait was pretty straightforward, using a beauty dish and a large silver reflector. (That beauty dish is quickly becoming my favorite light modifier, now that I’ve figured how to make it work right!) This is period-accurate lighting, using a one-light setup for simple yet attractive lighting. With the light down, Alyssa knew how to pose in her dress and hat. I later converted the photos to black and white and added a bit of grain for the complete 1920s look. We got several great shots from that set.


Then we had Vanessa, with a winter grunge look. I misunderstood what she was going for at first, shooting some dark grimy alley photos, kind of a “intentionally crappy” theme. With a better idea of the theme, I then moved to a different area and shot some slightly more traditional photos on a staircase. I put the beauty dish way up high to cover the whole staircase, and kept an umbrella light down low on low power to act as a fill light. Two majorly different styles of photo, but they both have their place.


Last we had Courtney, our second sorority stand-in girl. She got all dressed up in a great punk outfit, complete with fishnet tights, lots of necklaces and rings, and colorful makeup. Being the last shoot of the day, this is where we tried some more outrageous shots... sitting on a computer desk, perched on a bare metal couch frame, tossing around an 8-ball on a pool table, even with the camera peeking over a bathroom stall! It all definitely went with the punk-rebel getup.

Lots of things learned, cool photos produced, and new friends made. A very successful day.

Check my website for more photos from this shoot. http://andysutterfield.com/portfolio.html

How To Make Your Light Better

Good lighting makes a huge difference in photography. When taking pictures in less-than-ideal light, you might find yourself wanting to add some light to the scene to help out the photo. The most common way of doing this is with the flash that’s built into your digital camera. While this is certainly not a terrible thing to do, a lot of photographers don’t realise the full potential of flashes of this type... there are literally endless amounts of things you can do with a flash!

There is one relatively minor, yet critically important, change you must make to your flash to begin unlocking its lighting potential, however. You must move the flash away from your camera. This means you should have an external flash unit, and some way to tell it to fire when you need it to when it’s not attached to the top of your camera.

Lately, I’ve been shooting lots of photos with off-camera flashes. There are lots of benefits to moving your flash away from the axis of your lens (your camera) instead of thinking of it as only a way to add light to a dark scene. You can add contrast and depth to a scene, you can create drama and excitement, you can supplement existing light to make subjects pop, you can add three-dimensional quality to a subject, and the list goes on and on and on! Flashes can be used in ways very similar to large studio lights used in professional photo studios, but they’re small, lightweight, portable, and relatively cheap! When you don’t think of a flash as simply a way to add light to a dark scene and begin to think of it as a flexible light in a photo studio setup, worlds begin to open up.

A flash, or strobe as it is often called, is a light source that only lights up when it is needed: when a photo is being exposed. Flashes contain a flash bulb, a capacitor bank, and batteries (usually 4 AAs.) While the flash is on, the batteries work constantly to keep the capacitor bank charged, and when a flash is called for, the bulb takes power from the capacitor bank. Flash durations are very short, usually between 1/1000th of a second and 1/30,000th of a second, depending on the power level.

Flashes can be used along with a variety of light modifiers, (umbrellas, dishes, gels, reflectors, diffusers, etc.) to give you the photographer control over the direction, brightness, quality, color, and overall look of the light in a photo. This control over light enables you to change the appearance of a photo in ways you’ve never thought possible. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’m always learning new things to do with my light!

I’ll get more into specifics of how to use flashes in this manner another day. Now, here are some tricks you can do with the camera you already have!

You might have noticed that a direct on-camera flash often gives a harsh, unattractive look to a photo of a person. In general, it’s better to diffuse your flash to get a softer, less deer-in-the-headlights look in your flash pictures. Try to modify your flash so the part that emits light looks bigger.

-If you have a point-and-shoot camera, put a loop of clear scotch tape across the flash, so the strip of tape is held 1-2 inches away from the flash bulb.

-If you use your DSLR’s pop-up flash, cut a hole in the bottom of a styrofoam cup and slide it over the flash so the side of the cup covers the flash bulb. The cup should be pointed forward and up.

-If you have an external flash unit, look for white or grey ceilings or walls to bounce light off of. Turn the flash head so it points at the ceiling instead of directly at the subject.

-Try and think of different ways to bounce, reflect, diffuse or enlarge your light source for softer, more natural looking flash light. Your photos will really show a difference!

The photo at the top of this post was shot in a dark room at night with a single flash on the ground to the right of the camera, pointing up at my friends and I.

Keep on shooting!

Ballet

I am fortunate enough to know a couple of girls who are, among other things, very good ballet dancers. So while reading another (Joe McNally’s) blog, I was inspired by a photo of his to create some similar photos of my friends.

These obviously aren’t your standard dance photos. Basically I needed to have a completely black background and two directional light sources, one on each side of the dancers. Aylin and Rachel were happy to redo their same moves over and over again while I popped off test shots and dialed in my lights for the “real” shots.

When it was all set, the photos started looking really cool- I was able to underexpose the background to make it look black, and the hard directional light on the girls had a very dramatic effect. Being the oaf that I am, I know nothing about dance at all- I just told the girls to do anything they thought would look cool on top of the X I taped on the floor. And the photos did most definitely come out looking cool.

For this setup, I used three flashes, all on manual, full power. Two were firing from the left side, and a third fired from the right. I could have used only one flash on each side, at a lower power, but that’s not the way I did it that day. Using my bargain bin wireless flash triggers, sometimes the right side flash wouldn’t fire at all... but surprisingly, that’s when some of the best looking photos happened! (see bottom photo) Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win.