A Bitchen Time

Ok, so I got back from my two-week vacation to Germany Saturday night. Jill and I went over and spent two weeks with my old German buddy Alex and his girlfriend Stefanie... it was two weeks of awesome food, beer and wine. One of the biggest highlights was the professional soccer game we went to watch... I just thought us Americans got wound up about our football here in the states.... that was a crazy good time and I am not even into soccer.

Anyway we saw a whole lot including my old home town of five years and the old base where I went to school. It was really good to get back there after sixteen years... that place has so much to do with who I am today. I really credit me being where I am today profession-wise to my five years living over there. Germany is where my love for photography was really born and encouraged due to a coworker of my father's (thank's again Don Farra) while there and all the traveling my parents and I did.

One of the first photography lessons I remember getting was thru Don.... a lesson I never truly appreciated or understood until I got into photography on a professional level. I got my first SLR along with a 2.8 28mm and 2.8 100mm prime lens as well as a dedicated flash for Christmas from my parents while there in fourth grade. Don gave it all to them and told them to give it to me due to him seeing my interest and ability in photography at the time. After a while of shooting with these two prime lenses I got the itch for a zoom lens... something that would give the exact composition I wanted. I started asking my parents for one, only to have Don shoot down the idea right in front of me when he told them I did not need one. When I ask why, he replied by telling me that working with prime lenses would give me greater composition skills in the long run... forcing me to create a good composition with the focal lengths I had available to me. As I remember... at the time all this response did was tick me off. Today I am so glad he did this... I believe it did make me better and think of this all the time when I don't have exactly what I WANT, not NEED, for a job.

The photo of me that I have posted here was taken in a very old town called Bernkastel-Kues under a sign on the wall that read "Bitchen", which is a reference to huge beer in the area called Bitburger -- or Bit -- for short. The "chen" means small in a cute way in German. I am not sure if they realized the American surfer slang use of the exact same word... but I saw a good opportunity for a good shot, so I set my camera up for it and explained how I wanted it composed then handed it to Jill.
Got out under it and here ya have it... a portrait of me... Bitchen.

Light Power

Hey y'all,

I recently posted this on the Flickr Strobist discussion forum in an effort to help out those that may have not realized the point I am trying to get across. Check it out:

Please note the word "here" when I refer to a photo. Click on "here" for a link to the photo being referred to.


Light Power

I have recently been asked a few times about what setting I had my lights at power-wise. The following is a response to one of such inquires. In relation to the shot that can be found here.

“I was using a Alien Bee 400 mono-light dialed all the way down. I have no idea how many watt seconds or what percentage of full that is. I just dial it in for the look I want. The power of the light is not so much the issue seeing that it could vary from camera sensor to camera sensor, light modifier to light modifier etc.

Learn to think out what you want the shot to look like lighting wise and then apply what you know or have learned about basic lighting principles in the shot to create that look.

In this case I wanted the light to fall off quickly and have a shallow depth of field at the same time. This meant I needed to have the light right up on her face for the light fall off, and shoot at F2.8 for the shallow depth of field. In order to get the background to go dark I shot it at 1/250 of second... the max sync speed for my camera to kill the ambient light in the room. So to get all this to work meant shooting at a low ISO and very low power on the strobe to keep from blowing out her face. Make sense?

Once you have started thinking like this, the technical stuff just comes more natural to you and is something that you just do... leaving the rest of your brain open for your interaction with your subject and/or client. I hope all this helps.”

I thought it would be good to share this response with everybody due to me remembering how I felt when I realized this in school. For the first three quarters I would literally stay in a studio and work on a still-life shot for as much as 48 hours straight with only little breaks here and there. Lighting and re-lighting the same thing over and over again because I just was not sure of what I was looking for. I learned a lot from doing this… but it really was not healthy due to the lack of sleep and eating that went along with it. I was just spinning my wheels due to no sense of direction.

It all changed one night when I was doing the shot found here.

I had no Absolut ad to actually compare (i.e. reverse engineer) my lighting to as a reference at the time so I just sat down for about ten minutes and thought out in my mind how to get that look. I came up with something in my head that made sense to get it and got up and took the one light and made it happen. Looked thru the camera and there it was. It was such a relief to not spend hours and hours fumbling around on something for once.

A couple of days later I had an idea for another assignment that was my own unique vision, not something I was copying like the Absolut ad style. Once again I reasoned how to set my lights to get what I had in my head and then just did it. Looked through the camera and there it was. I was done in about 45 minutes (not including the set building and design), which is pretty quick considering I was shooting with a 4x5 view camera. Once again… what a relief it was to have it come together so quick. That shot can be found here.

My point behind all this and reason for sharing it with you is that sometimes the hardest thing to overcome lighting-wise is having a clear idea of what you want. Sometimes you may have a “happy accident” and stumble upon something you really like by experimenting… and there is nothing wrong with that. But having a clear idea of what you want and knowing how to create it in a timely manner can be a huge plus…especially when working with people that have a little less patience than a bunch of apples or an Absolut bottle.

My final point…. the kind of light, whether it is a mono-light, a 283, a SB800, a reflector, a desk lamp, a window, etc. is not so much the issue. The basic principles David teaches thru his site can be applied to lighting in general regardless of the source. Getting too hung up on lighting details such as strobe power can prevent you from seeing and or understanding the big picture.


I hope all this is of some help to some of you out there. I know it was a huge discovery for me in school and I just thought it was worth sharing with all of you.




That's all I got for today folks. I will work on my blogging skills and figure out how to display multiple photos throughout a post.... I just really did not feel like trying to figure out the HTML for it tonight. Who came up with HTML anyway?

Keith

I Got Featured On Strobist

Earlier today, I noticed my Flickr account was getting blasted with comments. After doing some peeking, I realized I had been featured on a very popular photography blog called Strobist , which has a cult-like following. It is run by a well-known photojournalist named David Hobby and is one of my daily must-reads for keeping my lighting skills up to par and for continuous inspiration from the talented photographers featured there.

Several months ago, David Hobby quit his full-time gig as a photojournalist to devote more time to his family and to teaching his immense lighting knowledge to the masses through the Strobist blog. He is a master at using small shoe-mount strobes and has a less-is-more philosophy when it comes to equipment. He has a way of teaching people to use minimal equipment to get good lighting results – even with homemade equipment. The only revenues he receives are from advertisers on the blog and a donations section. I have huge respect for him for taking the risk to quit his job to be with his family, and to share his knowledge for free, full-time. Check out www.Strobist.com and the Strobist Flickr Group… there is much to be learned from both.

David, thanks so much for noticing my work and writing the feature – it’s a great honor!

The feature on my work can be found here.

The Strobist Flicker group can be found here.

The photos featured look like this:





Both of these were created with the Strobist mind set. There was no electricity in the building I shot them in, and the nearest outlet was a few hundred feet away. Rather than running 300 hundred feet or so of extension cord and getting it covered with soot in the process... well I decided that a couple of Vivitar 283's would get the job done. Needless to say, I was pleased with the end result. This particular shoot was the last of 30 something photoshoots (see more here ) I did in order to represent multiple programs offered at Gwinnett Technical College. What a way to end it all... so nice when images just fall into place as these two did.

Learn to light at Strobist y'all, and support the cause by throwing David a donation while your at it.

Be Good,

Keith