Here are a couple images from a model portfolio shoot over the weekend. Same model, similar poses, but very different looks. Let’s start with the lighting – can you describe the differences between the two of them? Hint: click on the images for the larger versions, then look at her eyes. If you look really carefully, you should be able to see the reflections of the lights I was using in her pupils. This is a standard photographer’s trick for reverse engineering lighting…

The image on the left is a standard portrait lighting. A large softbox provides the key light, coming in from the left, and a less bright softbox comes in from the right, providing the fill light. A small softbox on a boom stand shines down from above, providing a hairlight for separation from the background (which is black paper, not lit). Because her face is more towards the darker fill light, we see more of the bright side of her face, which is considered “broad lighting”. If her face were pointed more towards the key light, we would see more of her darker side, and it would be short lighting.

The second image is a standard “beauty lighting”, also called “butterfly lighting”. There is a single light shining down from above and in front. In this case a large rectangular softbox turned sideways (and I am shooting from underneath it). There are also two lights shining on the white paper to overexpose it (see my previous posts on high key lighting). In this case there is quite a bit of shadow under her chin and back towards her ears. I could have added a fill light to shoot up from near the ground, or had her hold a reflector out flat in front of her out of the frame, either of which would have filled in those shadows more.

However, what I think really makes these shots look so different from each other is not the lighting at all, but the fact that the first is shot from slightly above her face level, and the second is shot from slightly below. A slight change in your perspective can make a huge difference.

This is probably my favorite shot from the day…

The lighting is a combination of the above two – key and fill softboxes on the sides like the first image (though in this case the lighting ratio is more even, so it is not really broad or short lighting), with two lights on the background. A fifth light for the hair would not have hurt.

I am following three basic rules for posing women here:

1. Never let the shoulders be in a perfectly horizontal line.
2. Never let the spine be in a perfectly vertical line.
3. Always pay attention to where the hands are.

Of course rules are meant to be broken, but nevertheless it is worth knowing what they are so you can decide when to break them.

This weekend was the opening of the Burien Interim Art Space, a year long experiment in temporary art. A developer has lent a piece of land in downtown Burien Washington (just south of Seattle) to be used as a public sculpture park for a year, until it gets built on. The centerpiece of the park is The Passage, a phenomenal sculpture by Dan Das Mann, first created for Burning Man 2005. This is one of my all time favorite pieces of Burning Man art.

My full set of images can be seen at http://imageevent.com/pmattf/misc/burieninterimart, but here are a few highlights. Click on any images to see a larger version…

Firepod doing its thing with The Passage in the background…

The Spinergy fire performance group. To get fire trails like this and still see the performer you need to shoot with slow synchro flash mode. Shutter priority mode can be a good way to go here, so you can vary the length of the exposure to get the amount of trails you want. This one is 1.3 seconds, which is definitely on the long side…

Detail from The Passage…

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Burning Man in Burien…

Just to give some context, this is The Passage being installed at Burning Man 2005…

And my favorite shot of The Passage from 2005. A 60″x40″ print of this one was hung at the 21 Days of Black Rock City show last summer in Marin County…

After doing quite a few extremely dark shadowy images for La Figa, lately I have been on a bit of a high key kick. As I mentioned in my last blog post, when shooting with white seamless paper as a background you have two basic choices as to how to light it – leave the paper visible (i.e. it appears as off white or even very light grey), or blast it with enough light so that it blows out to pure white. There is no “right” way – just a matter of taste.

In terms of shooting, visible is harder in a way, because it can be challenging to get an even shade of white across the entire background. With pure white you don’t have to worry so much about evening it out, once it is overexposed it doesn’t much matter by how far. On the other hand, it makes judging the exposure by the histogram on your camera trickier – most of your image is one big blown highlight.

Recently I have been liking the pure white effect better. This lighting – which is typically used in fashion photography – is also a lot of fun to use with kids (it is not just fine art erotica around here). Here are some recent samples:

Here are some more behind the scenes images from a La Figa shoot. We did two different ingredients – apples (really really tiny ones), and Zucchini. Most of the lighting we have been doing lately has been very low key (in the technical sense of the phrase) – black or dark grey backgrounds, and very sparse shadowy lighting set-ups, usually with just a couple lights. This time we decided to mix it up, so I put together a very high key set-up. We used the white seamless paper, swept down to the floor, then up and over a table (actually two tables put together so it would be as wide as the 9 foot paper, to avoid creases).

There are four lights. Two softboxes just on the background, set to overexpose it to pure white. Usually when I shoot white paper I try to keep the paper visible – white, but not pure white, so this is a bit different. When the paper is visible you need to think about keeping it evenly lit, which can be a bit tricky. With it overexposed like this, you don’t really have to worry about it too much. The key light is a large rectangular softbox turned sideways and put about eight feet high in front. There will be a little bit of bounce coming back up from the paper as well. There is also a kicker/hair light up high and behind. Since one of our strobes is in the shop,  I used a Nikon SB-800 flash unit in SU-4 remote mode (so it slaves to any flash) here. This worked very well, and it had no trouble keeping up with the studio strobes. Since it is only a providing a little bit of highlight I wasn’t too concerned about whether the color temperatures matched.

Here are a few shots that show the set-up…

As usual, I am not going to show the final images we got, as those are being saved for publication in the book. However, here is a sample image that shows the results of this lighting set-up…

The next set-up – Zucchini Lingerie – was almost the same. The only difference was that we pulled the table out, and had two models standing on the paper. Here is Tiberio putting together the Zucchini Lingerie…

The first 2008 shoot I am going to blog about is my experience as one of the photographers working for Seeds of Compassion, during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Seattle in April. I shot eight different events over the five days – Dalai Lama events at the University of Washington, Key Arena, Seattle Center, and Qwest Field; the Dave Matthews / Tim Reynolds acoustic concert (with Death Cab for Cutie opening) at Key Arena; and various workshops and events around the Seattle center.

During most of the Dalai Lama events press photographers were generally locked down in one location, which was quite far from the action. I had a 70-200mm lens with a 1.7 extender, on a 1.5 crop sensor, which gave me an effective focal length of just over 500mm, but that was not nearly enough to get much good stuff. The exception was an event at Bagley Wright Theater where we crept down the aisles and got close enough to get some some good head shots of the Dalai Lama. But the fun of hanging out with the other photographers from AP/UPI, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, etc. made up for it.

Photographically, I think my best shots were from the workshops and the general scene on the Seattle Center grounds, where there were no security constraints.

I shot about 2000 frames over the give days, and I have posted a gallery of 123 of my favorites over on my “friends and family” website… http://imageevent.com/pmattf/misc/seedsofcompassion