Making an Idea come to Life

As I write this blog, I'm busy listening to the BBC Proms in the Albert Hall via the internet with music from the MGM studios including including The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, High Society, Gigi and Singin' in the Rain. The remarkable thing about today's music, is as the programme notes put it

...although the original orchestral parts were lost when the studio destroyed its music library to make way for a car park, [conductor John] Wilson has succeeded in reconstructing the scores by painstakingly transcribing each soundtrack by ear.

I can't imagine doing that, because transcribing 4 seconds of music amounts of days of work, but at the same time, Wilson's act made him far more intimate with the music that he would otherwise have been.

This leads me to wonder how many photographers stop to actually think about what they did to create a particular photograph, or do they accept a great picture as a fluke and hope it happens again soon? I've heard some people say that you have to shoot as many photos as you can (and you can do that with digital) and somewhere in that you'll have yourself a masterpiece. Perhaps. I know first-hand that some people have a very hard time relaxing for portraits, and I have to try all sorts of gimmicks to get a photo that shows something wonderful. Sometimes this is ever more difficult when I have to photograph people who I know well, and don't respond to my tricks. Perhaps I need a baby's rattle! Not a bad idea actually.

A photographer who painstakingly plans his shoots, and posts his lighting sketches is Joe McNally. Let's face it, planning a shoot tends to take away 'some' of the spontaneity, but more importantly, it reduces the chance of failure, helps organize your thinking, focuses your mind so that you can see the final product before you have ever started to capture a single frame.

Two months ago I was asked to shoot priest who had just graduated from seminary and had been ordained, but wanted to remember his time at the seminary. I happen to know that like any place of academic training, these guys have to worry about getting good grades, while at the same time learning how to spend time on their knees and becoming godly men. Somehow, most us pray when it comes time for exams, and then forget about the bargains we made when we pass. These guys can't! So what to do? Well, first off, I usually shoot with big lights, soft boxes and monolights and tripods. We were going to shoot in two places: outside in the hallway and in the chapel itself. First problem. How do I create the feeling that the "seminarian" is on his way to the chapel to pray at the END of the day at 11 AM and the sun is shining in all it's summer glory? Second problem. The chapel has awful lighting, for the camera at least.

The day before the shoot I visited the location at the approximate time of day that I would be shooting the next day. That gave me an idea of where the sun would be, and then got out a piece of paper and pen and sketched a brief diagram.

My rationale was this. I wanted to "pretend" that the sun was setting, so blasted light with 2 flash units 45 deg. behind him with full CTO gel on each flash head both on full power. This would give me a feeling that I had a setting sun somewhere. Next, I put 1/4 CTO gel on a flash head to his right to light up the side of his face. Finally I had a flash head without any gels coming from behind the camera. The camera settings, on the other hand, had to compensate for both the sun and the flash. Create darkness! Drop the ISO to 50, keep the aperture at something usable around f/8 or so, speed up time so that all the camera would see would be the flash settings which I fired off using nifty new devices from Pocket Wizard. The result...

Apologies for a longer than usual blog. I have the diagram for this photo somewhere and will try to find it. My next blog will show how I did the inside of the chapel. That's it for now folks!