Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye in the Daily Critique.
Today’s image was submitted by Larry who’s an advanced photographer from Houston Texas. The back story on this, one is that Larry gave himself an assignment to shoot a series of portraits mainly of workers and Larry says this is one of his favorites from the series so far and I can understand why. It’s a stunning portrait. And Larry shot this with an Nikon D3, it’s a full frame sensor used a 70 to 200 F28 zoom and worked along into zoom a 150 millimeters step down to F56. Shot this sort of 68th of a second at ISO 200.
I’m going to talk a little bit about just that Metadata for one second here. One of the things that I would say, it might be a decent take away from today’s critique, it’s just paying attention to that lens. That’s a heavy lens in both Nikon and Canon, an expensive lens but it’s a really great lens in my opinion for this concept formal head shots or head and shoulder portraits were slightly environmental portraits and I love the long end of this kind of a lens that have 250 millimeters or even longer going up to 200. That allows you at wider open apertures to get a flow focus to help your subject separate from the background difference between sharp and other focus. And the other thing about this longer focal lengths is it can really help to give the feeling of the features of the face being flattened out a little bit and particularly with adults, that can be a way to make someone look more pleasing than not in the portrait.
And the other thing about a focal length that this long is it gives you quite a bit a working distance from your subject and working distance is something that can have a huge sort of unconscious or subconscious effect on people that are models. If you have a shorter lens and you’re trying to come in and do this kind of environment thing maybe a 15 millimeter lens and you’re getting really close, just being inside of someone’s sort of area of comfort and start to have an effect on how the shoot goes. So, I love this focal length.
Larry has been kind enough to share quite a bit of lighting information with us here. Larry used a multitude of lights here. He mentioned the Strobist is a place that he went to learn a lot about lighting and I can agree more almost everybody who’s here and already knows about Strobist. But if you don‘t put Strobist into the Google and you want to learn about lighting with the little flash units that you can get with your SLR that go on top of the camera or they can go off of the camera is a great place to go and learn about working with small flash units. Larry has one of those units. There’s actually shining through on umbrella. He’s got three front lights, those are lights in front of the portrait subject and you know, we typically think of a photographic umbrella and then having a light here with a head and a reflector. And the light comes out and it bounces off with the umbrella and becomes a much bigger light source but a pretty specular hard edge light source coming off to the pretty intense reflector on the inside of the umbrella.
Lots of umbrellas are layered. You can get the reflective material off. That leaves a translucent layer so that the light actually shoots right through the umbrella and umbrella doubles as a soft box, that’s nice for two reasons. You get a bigger softer light source in your little flash unit. It also warms the light up when you shine it through this translucent white material. And if you’re shooting it Day Light like Larry is here on the center that can take your key light and make it appear warm, maybe like into the day with one light on your portrait subject and I can help your portrait subject to separate from a background. There’s a cooler quality of light and the shade behind your portrait subject or you light it cooler back there. Three other lights up here again, little an icon flash units with a snoots. A snoot is a lighting control that narrows the beam of the light down. It focuses the light opposite sort of shooting through the umbrella and getting a big broad light source. He’s got a snoot light hitting the face and another snoot light that’s hitting the chest. I’m not quite sure where these lights are. I just know they’re in front of the fire fighter and then he has another lighting control somewhere over here. I bet you this one is over here just because of it looks like this is the direction I feel he’s got a reflector that’s pretty catching one or more of these lights and adding some fill light. And then he’s got one of the light source that is hitting the background here.
Let’s talk about just the lighting for a second. Larry in his comment section, he says what do you think of the lighting, I’ve tried to make it look like it was natural. So, let’s just talk about that part of it for a minute while we’re on this kick.
Allow the lighting here, it looks very natural back here. This looks like into the Day Light, they could become to a garage, door at the firehouse. This lighting looks a little bit more like a photographic lighting but I think it works really well in this context. I’m saying that because this light on the face is probably from the snooted flash. It’s pretty specular. And what do I mean by specular, there’s a lot of little reflections of the light source in here, you see it there and there and there and you see it in the catch lights, you see it right in there. One thing that can be a down or about these kinds of flash units is the smaller our light source, are relative to our subject size, the more sort of local contrast and specularity that we’re going to drive, but that can work really well too.
One of the things I like about the specular feeling of the light here even though it’s not totally natural, it has a little bit of kind of an edge metallic feeling that goes along with all these metal on the side of the fire truck. It’s also getting a lot of light into the eyes and it’s creating a metallic feeling in our eyes and that combined with the gesture, combined with who the firefighter is in the in the story. I want to talk about a civilian hero. Anybody who wants to be fire fighter in my book is near the very top of my list in terms of just brave in providing an outrageous service to the rest of those. Fire fighters generally don’t make that much money. It’s one of the most dangerous jobs, if not the most dangerous civilian job out there that’s service oriented. And so this is just such a powerful archetype of a heavy, heavy character in the story and the sort of stilly feeling to the scan because of the specularity of the light, the stilly kind of great blue eyes here and they’re really coming forward because Larry got a light in there. The point it catch lights, the very intense dot on the level right out was gaze, all of that is working really well. So, I’m not so concerned about this feeling natural in here. I think it’s really beautiful how natural this feels in the background.
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