Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander
Last Friday I went down to London for Kelby Training’s “On location lighting workshop” with the legendary National Geographic and Life photographer, Joe McNally. Having been to David Hobby’s fantastic workshop in Leeds, where there were about 30-40 attendees, I was quite shocked to see an auditorium packed with more than 500 eager photographers. It was a somewhat less intimate affair, but equally as entertaining and informative.
I had been planning this weekend for some time, so I booked myself into a hotel and arranged three separate on location model shoots for the 24 hours after the workshop to try and put into practice some of the tips and tricks that I had gleamed.
For the first shoot I had intended on trying to shoot in Regents or Hyde Parks, but after a ridiculous email conversation with the Royal Parks people, I quickly decided to knock that idea on the head. The gist of the final email was “if you are aiming for your images to be published/promoted in the future, then we must treat you as a professional and therefore charge you £400 and insist on £5 million worth of public liability insurance”!
So I decided to go for Hampstead Heath instead. I’d done some extensive research online and found that there’s a really cool looking pergola over on the western edge of the park that looked like a real possible for a sunset shoot. It’s raised about 10 feet above the ground and runs in an east/west & north/south direction. We got there eventually about 8pm, but only managed about 15 minutes shooting time before the sun dropped down behind the tree line. We then left here and moved to a little hillock round the corner which still had the descending sun lighting it through the trees. The vibe here wasn’t all that comfortable – there were lots of single blokes milling around looking rather sheepish and it wasn’t until later that I found out that this was the “gay cruising” area of the park!
Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander
In spite of all that, Roseanne was great, and most definitely game, and I got a few keepers. Somehow I’d managed to heavily underexposed most of the images, and I’m not sure why. I can only think that it can have been for two reasons; just the other day I’d been shooting in bright sunlight so had turned the brightness on the LCD on the back of the camera right up, and for most of the shots of Roseanne, I had positioned her in the sunlight and I’d been in the shade which I guess made the pictures look brighter than they actually were.
As a result of travelling down by train, I came equipped as lightly as possible. So in the way of lighting gear, I just brought 3 strobes, a couple of stands and 2 reversible brollies and decided to leave the kitchen sink behind. I did bring my Pocket Wizards, but inspired by McNally’s amazing use of Nikon’s CLS system, I decided to try and shoot TTL all weekend. The top two images were lit with an SB900 on a shoot thru either side of Roseanne and feathered a little. In fact for the second image, I left 2/3s of the reversible cover on the umbrella camera right to prevent too much fall off onto the background. For the bottom image, I just used one strobe and shoot through camera left to fill in the shadows a little left by the falling sun over my right shoulder.
More to come…..
Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander
Location:Hampstead Heath, London
As part of the A-level I am currently embarked on, I am working on a project based around the theme "Boundaries". In light of the recent goings on with completely innocent photographers being tarnished with the "terrorist brush" (see numerous articles on the BJP for example – here, here or here), I have chosen to focus on the suspicious nature of people, and how often their snapshot vision of a scene is interpreted in a completely incorrect manner.
So I decided that to try and highlight this flaw, I was going to shoot a series of potential crimes in progress, in various locations, with different models and lighting. I have garnered a rather alarming looking list of possible offences, and I am trying to construct scenes in my head and then on paper for how I would like the result to look.
I’ve been preparing the first two for too long, and finally managed to get off my sorry ass on Monday night and shoot them. It was to be my first real shoot with models and my new off-camera lighting set up. I’ve been playing with it with several weeks now, but it was finally time to put it to proper use.
I’ve had this particular location in mind for a shoot for some time now. It’s an alleyway / car park right in the heart of Stockport. You would never know it was there. At one end there is a long alleyway and I wanted to stage it so that the girl coming through the alleyway could have been about to be assaulted by the bloke hiding round the corner, or he could have been her boyfriend waiting to meet her from work.
For the car shot, I wanted to give it a similarily ambigous feel. Someone could have been about to try and take the vehicle, or it could have been a friend coming to say Hello.
This shot hasn’t come out quite as well as I had anticipated as I dont’t feel that there is a sufficient level of ambiguity in the resulting photographs for it to meet my requirements for the project.
Strobist: Both images were shot with 2 SB900s. For the first shot of the girl down the alleyway, I positioned a strobe behind the wall in the middle, about 2 foot off the ground zoomed to 200mm with a 3 inch homemade coroplast grid to pick out the girl. The second unit was positioned camera right, also with a grid, zoomed to about 100mm if memory serves. Quite challenging with the lighting as there were 3 security lights in the frame and they were on a 5 minute timer. Though by knocking my shutter speed right down to 1/60 sec, and pumping up my ISO to 800, I found this to be sufficient to cut out most of the ambient light. These were triggered with my fantastic new PocketWizard Multimaxs which true to their word, have never let me down. Looking at the first series now, I could probably have used a slightly longer grid as there is quite a bit of spill around the girl onto the door frame and surrounding walls which I’m not all that pleased with.
I’ve learnt such a lot lately from studying David Hobby’s Strobist DVD set that I mentioned in an earlier post. This truly is an awesome tutorial and I’d highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about off-camera flash.
As the models had offered their time in exchange for prints, I felt that once I’d got my ideas in the bag, it was only fair that I offer to shoot a few portraits for their own portfolios. These were shot with one SB900 and a shoot through umbrella, quite close in for the head shots, but a little further away for the full length shots. I’ll post some of these images over the next couple of days.
At the weekend I took a trip down to Wiltshire for a “Creative Lighting” workshop hosted by Terry Hewlett (www.terryhewlett.com). It had been postponed twice already due to inclement weather so I was really looking forward to finally getting on with it. There was just myself and one other photographer, along with Terry, the instructor, and a model, the lovely Sarah. [more]
We shot primarily with the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra Kit using Skyports and a host of soft boxes, umbrellas, grids etc
I shot the vast majority with the Nikon 18-200mm VR though I did get the Sigma 10-20mm out for the occasional wide angle shot. I did get a chance to borrow the 70-200 F2.8 from the other guy on the workshop though unfortunately using outdoor lighting and having to stop down the lens to balance the ambient, I didn’t really get the opportunity to see the lovely bokeh that this lens is reputed to produce at its shallowest.
We shot in 3 completely different types of location which presented us with completely contrasting sets of lighting conditions and enabled us to try several differing lighting set ups and arrangements at each location.
All in all it was an excellent workshop & I’d highly recommend it to any photographer who wants to get a better understanding of outdoor portrait lighting. It has however presented me with a little dilemma as I am now even more undecided, if it were possible, as to whether to get myself a bunch of SB900s or to go with a portable studio lighting setup like the Elinchroms or the Westcotts. Obviously a portable studio setup would be far more powerful, yet the strobes have portability on their side. Both options have their pros and cons.
The other bonus I got from the workshop was that it has given me a whole host of ideas for topics and locations that hadn’t otherwise occurred to me. The plan now is to get myself some lights, a couple of reliable models, get some serious practice in and try and develop a style of my own
For the inquisitive amongst you, the above image was processed in Nik Software’s SilverEfex. I converted it to TMax 100, reduced the brightness a little, added a couple of control points to raise the contrast and brightness on the dress and the model’s face and vignetted a tad.
