DevilN Details

Shooting kids is a lot of work. The youngest I shot for this project was 1 and the oldest about 22 years old. But get this, even the 20 & 22 year olds were some of the most difficult to shoot. But for entirely different reasons than the 1 year old. With the toddler the biggest issue was just keeping up with him. He is one of these kids that moves very fast, and is interested in everything. So even though I had the mighty 24-70 f/2.8 Nikkor and the D700 I was still having trouble keeping the focus on him. Surprisingly it seemed that it was more difficult shooting the teenagers and young adults.

The biggest problem with the older kids was a combination of simple teen apathy and some lack of confidence/self-image issues. I found it most frustrating to spend time photographing someone, then asking which of their photos they like the best only to hear, “none of them”, or worse “I don’t care”. When this type of thing happened it was always towards the beginning of the shoot. Luckily things got better as time progressed. Though with the oldest two kids I had to actually re-shoot them before they actually got more into the project, put some effort into making pleasing photos, and then finally began to appreciate that some of the images I took of them were actually pretty nice. So, what did I take from all of this? For starters, just be prepared for indifference or even worse when dealing with some kids. But remain positive and try to figure out what is necessary for them to take an interest in the shoot. Because if they aren’t into it, making good photos is just a hard thing to do. During that first night with my most difficult subjects there was just nothing I could do to get them liven up and buy into this project. I was able to coax one good picture from one of them that night, but he hated it (his mother and I overruled him on that one and that photo made it into the final product).

Another thing that I learned from this is that you can’t depend on people to show up to a photo shoot properly dressed, groomed and coiffed. So I after that first shoot I made a point of telling parents what type of clothes I was expecting, suggesting that the parent be involved in prepping hair, and generally just forcing a pleasant presentation of their child. This all kinda feeds into the idea that you want the subject to have total buy-in for the photo shoot. So when working with kids it is probably worthwhile to talk with them before the shoot trying to get them to understand that good photos just don’t magically appear. This is especially true in a portrait setting. I guess people kind of expect that since sometimes good photos happen just naturally while out and about when people are interacting with one another with a photographer snapping here and there capturing candid moments, that the same thing will happen in a portrait setting. Well there will be no candid moments in when sitting in front of a backdrop surrounded by lights stands, and all by oneself. At least there won’t be unless you can get the subject to become totally relaxed and forget about the camera (which is pretty difficult when the photographer is standing there saying move half a step to the left, tilt you head back, smile a bit less, and look just over my left shoulder).

Next: More things to watch out for

After acquiring all of my new gear and reading up on portrait lighting I started experimenting on my wife and kids. At first everyone was pretty excited about modeling in front of the camera with all of the new equipment. But that only lasted for about 45 minutes. Then it became more of a chore to sit there in front of the camera while Daddy was continually fiddling with lights, exposure, and positioning of the flashes. The things I was looking into were generally what was the exposure range I’d need for my light setup, and to see the look of the shadowed areas on my subjects faces. Honestly there were somethings that I just never really figured out, even during the whole 6 month time frame of this project.

But here are a few things that I discovered:

• My f-stops ranged from f/1.8 to f/8 but most of the time they were limited to the range f/3.2 – f/5.6.
• The shutter speeds ranged from 1/50 to 1/200th seconds.
• Most images were shot on my 24-70mm f/2.8, with several on my 85mm f/1.8 and a few with my 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lenses.
• Most images were shot at 320 ISO, with a few at 200 ISO (base ISO on the D700).
• The number of flashes used was from 1 to 5. I had 3 SB-800s one SB-600 and also used the built in flash on my D700.
• For this project I used 2 cameras, my own D700 and also my father’s D3x.
• Cheap backdrops are quite a pain in the butt, mostly because they’re thin and see through, and hold on to their wrinkles.
• Shoot through umbrellas are really great.
• Nikon CLS is your friend.

Before I started with this project I had only used off camera flash a handful of times. And when I had done so the results were less than stellar because A. I didn’t put much thought into it, and B. I didn’t have proper flash stands. The combination of the stands and shoot through umbrellas really made the light much more pleasing as it illuminated the subject, not so harsh with such deep shadows as you normally get with a bare flashgun.

I also did a bit of experimentation with light modifiers. One thing that I had wanted to try was using a cookie to cast an interesting shadow on my backdrops. A cookie is something that goes between the light source and what is being illuminated. For instance if you were to place some window blinds between your light and its subject then you would get horizontal shadows cast upon it. I never really had much success with cookies in this project (we didn’t have much stuff around the house that lent itself to that type of usage, or I wasn’t being quite imaginative enough). One trick that I did have some success with was in making various snoots to keep the light confined to a controlled shape.

My need for a snoot first arose when I was trying to light one of my backdrops with the desire to keep the illumination such that it would only be slightly larger than the person I was photographing. I was actually quick on my feet during this process because the need came up in the middle of a shoot, and I didn’t already have something planned out for this. Thinking of what was in the house it occurred to me that we have plenty of little plastic tubs that food ships in (like tupperware containers that hold 2 cups of liquid). So I grabbed one of these from the cupboard and just put it over the flash that was pointing at the backdrop. In this first usage the flash was about 2 feet from the backdrop and the circle of light it cast was a fairly well defined circle. I used this quick and dirty snoot for a number of shots, but eventually moved up to a more sophisticated (cereal boxes, straws, white glue and gaffers tape) later in the project.

Next time: Problems and things to watch out for.

Before this project I never really spent much time learning about flash photography techniques. With this project I had envisioned that every image would employ multiple flashguns. At first I wasn’t quite sure what type of lighting setup I would need, or could afford. One of my photographer friends had been using a constant lighting setup made up of rather inexpensive flourescent energy saver coil bulbs, in a dish. After talking with him I was made aware of the rather sever shortcomings of that type of setup. I began digging around on the internet for more information about lighting. I made a post on the dpreview lighting forum asking for advice about how to proceed. And along with the usual chaff and negativity stemming from the internet, I found a couple of jewels.

One person pointed out that I already had the beginnings of a decent lighting setup due to the fact that I own two Nikon CLS flash units (SB800 & SB600).  The other was that someone pointed me to a really cool blog, called Strobist. At the Strobist blog I found a ton of information, tutorials, discussions, advertisements and such. It turns out that for the type of work I was doing, the Nikon CLS system preforms really well when indoors in a room that isn’t too large. So I borrowed two more SB800s from my friends, and bought a pretty cool lighting setup from Midwest Photo Exchange. The kit I bought had two flash light stands, two adjustable heads, two shoot through umbrellas, gaffers tape, ties, and flash filters. Since this project was all in black and white I didn’t need the filters, but they may be useful in the future. I also found a really cheap set of stands and two el-cheapo muslin backdrops on ebay. These were no thicker than a sheet, but are 10×12 feet, and actually can make for interesting backdrops if you make sure they have some illumination. The last piece of gear was a book “Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers” from Amazon.

So all in all I spent about $400 on gear for this project (not including speedlights and cameras).

Next up, experimentation and learning.

Well a bit over a year ago I kinda began a gradual slowdown of my photography. Life, work, and cycling all combined to leave me little time and energy to devote to my photography. But at the beginning of the year (2009) I decided that I would embark upon my biggest project. I envisioned that it would take at least 6 months to complete. In this new project I’m branching into an area of photography that I’ve never really made a concerted effort into before. Unfortunately I can’t go into too much detail about it right now. However the project is only about 2 weeks away from completion, so afterward I expect that I will go into greater depths discussing what I’ve learned and accomplished.

In the past year I’ve upgraded my camera to a Nikon D700 and got 2 new absolutely fantastic lenses. The first is the Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 wide angle zoom. This lens is a pretty amazing piece of work, and really delivers when it comes to image quality. It is quite sharp, and the corners look pretty great on my full frame camera. The other is the Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 zoom lens. I’m also more than pleased with the image quality from this lens (when I’ve nailed the focus). I’m often quite surprised at the level of detail I’m seeing while editing my images in Photoshop that are taken with this lens. It is a bit of a bummer that the 24-70 doesn’t have VR, but I’ve been managing pretty well without it.

I took a mountain biking trip to the Grand Canyon this summer, and it was the best cycling experience that I’ve had so far. It was very difficult from a physical perspective because we were on the North Rim between 7000-9000 ft altitude. There was no way to prepare my lungs for that kind of thin air. So we were pretty exhausted at the end of every day. I did manage to make some pretty nice images while I was there. But so far haven’t really taken the time to put them together in any type of useful web presentation.

Next up I’ll talk more about some of the new techniques I’ve employed for my big project.