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There's Always Something to Bounce Light Off Of

Apr 21, 2008

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This chapter is from the book 

Moment It Clicks, The: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters

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It’s Gotta Speak for Itself

“You are not going to be in the room when people look at your pictures. Your picture has to speak for itself.”

I always tell my students, and I really try and hammer the point home, that you are not going to be in the room when people look at your pictures. The picture has to speak for itself. No matter what your experience of that day, no matter what you went through to get that photo, it doesn’t make a bit of difference to someone who’s looking at that photo, unless the photo carries the experience.

For a shot to really work, it’s got to be successful pictorially, informationally, and emotionally. Face it, we’re emotional creatures—we come back with these pictures we took, and we’re like the six-year-old in kindergarten running up to the teacher with our scribbling and saying, “Look what I did! Look what I did!” Just because we’re excited about it, doesn’t mean it’s not scribbling.

So when you’re in the field—think like a photo editor. The best quality a photo editor brings to the table is dispassion. It sounds cruel, but they don’t give a rat’s @$$ if you had a bad day, or the boat capsized, or people were mean to you. All they care about is the picture: does it speak or does it not? If you think like a photo editor, your pictures will get better because you won’t go easy on yourself. You have to be your own toughest critic.

This portrait of Leonard Bernstein composing at the piano has always been one of my favorites. No explanations are needed. The room feels like music.

How to Get This Type of Shot

This is where “just go click” comes into play. Get the angle, lock down the camera on a tripod. In other words, get your point of view. Once you have a look at the scene, you’ll see the window light is doing an awful lot of the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is amp it up a bit, tweak it, push it, pull it. First step was to open up the room a bit. The window light was nice, but it was backlight, and lot of the furniture was going dark. So I threw a little light back at the scene with a weak bounce (about one stop under the room exposure) off the ceiling to camera left.

Then I had to open up the camera-side of Lenny’s face. I did this with a weak umbrella, placed off to camera right. You can see the shimmer of it in the window in the upper right of the frame. But the secret to lighting Lenny was to key his face and mimic the light of the music lamp on his piano. I helped myself out by taking that little tungsten work light and pushing backwards so it hits the sheet music, effectively making the music a fill card. You can see how hot it’s getting, right on the edge.

Then I took another strobe head and put a super-tight honeycomb spot grid (mentioned before in this chapter) on it, and a half-cut of CTO (warming gel, also described elsewhere) and stashed it out of sight, way to camera right behind the piano, looking at Lenny. A little pop out of that and I was able to get control back of the blown highlight on the sheet music.

The result is that the room is lit without looking lit. In lighting situations like this, all you really have to do is get out of your own way.

Leonard Bernstein

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