Hot Light Shoot at Zach Scott Theater. With Espy.

So.  I've been talking about hot lights lately and I decided to grab my Canon G9 and take it with me to do a time lapse video showing a headshot session I did with an actor named Espy for the 2009-2010 season brochure.  I didn't put any sound in.  It lasts about a minute and covers about 18 minutes of shooting.  

The scrim to the left of the frame is a white 72 by 72 inch two stop silk.  The light on the extreme left is a Profoto Protungsten fixture with a 1,000 watt lamp.  I try to keep Espy angled into the lamp but I also have a convenient white fill to the right.  It's a white/black reversible panel on a Chimera frame.  The background is a custom gray canvas 9 feet wide.  It's lit with a Desisti 300 watt spotlight.  The spot of light is there for separation.  And to create a halo around the actor.

The people who keep walking into the back of the scene near me and the camera are the marketing director, the theater's creative director, the make up person and the art director.  We shot three people yesterday, three today and we'll shoot another 12 over the weekend.

I'm using hot lights so I can shoot as fast as I want to without worry about recycle time.  We're also using the same set to do videos for web promotion after I shoot each person.  Tomorrow I'll post a final shot from this shoot.  One of our goals was to get very shallow depth of field.  I think, with a 105mm f2 were right there.

Hope this works and I hope it's fun!  Here's a photo of Espy as an example from our shoot!

Playing With Hot Lights. Next Year's Hip Trend.

Love flashes.  They're really cool.  But the hot light for me right now is the hot light.  I love to shoot portraits.  That's what I do.  But I hate being dependent on flash for my lighting.  You don't really see what you get when you are looking through the camera and you have to wait around for the damn things to recycle. Then there is the whole depth of field thing you have to deal with.  Always looks good when you look through lens.  And who ever uses that "depth of field" button?  The heck with all that.  I've started shooting my portraits with several tungsten halogen lights and I'm really happy.  For a number of reasons.

1.  In a studio or other controlled environment I see exactly what I get.  Really.

2.  With a D700 I can shoot at 800 ISO and get exposures like 1/400th at f4.  That means I can shoot at 8 frames a second if I want to/ need to. Wow.  8 frames a second for as many shots as I want without ever worrying about recycle time.

3.  With a 1,000 watt light shining though one layer of scrim material you have all the light your camera ever wanted for lightning fast focus.  On the money focus with no hesitation.

4.  Imagine being able to shift shutter speeds until you find just the aperture you always dreamed of for your shoot.  With perfect focus every time.

5.  Keep your pizza next to the 1K and it will stay warm.  

So, I'm doing the season brochure for my favorite theater (Zachary Scott Theater) and we're doing portraits of actors.  Here's the lighting set up:

One Profoto ProTungsten fixture with a 1,000 watt FEL lamp.  (The discontinued Profoto tungsten light takes all the regular modifiers and is fan cooled.)  One Magnum reflector set to full flood.  All this is aimed through a six foot by six foot white two stop silk.  The silk is set about three feet from the actor.  Yummy directional softlight.  Add a little bit of fill from a Chimera 4x4 foot reflector panel and you've got the main light locked.

The gray canvas background is thirty feet back from the subject and is lit by a Desisti 300 watt spotlight with the barndoors clamped down a bit.  That's the whole ball of wax.  One person set up in 30 minutes or less.

Radical thought:  I used my D700 in the high quality Jpeg setting because I was so certain that what I saw on the meter, in the finder and on the screen was just right.  I preset the color balance at 3150K and looking on my calibrated monitor back at the studio I was right on the money.  Why jpeg?  Because the new Nikon bodies automatically fine tune every lens you put on the front, eliminating CA, vignetting and sharpness issues.  With the new color settings everything is just about perfect right out of camera.  Why correct raw files if you've already landed not only in the ballpark but right across the plate?

I shot fifteen hundred files tonight and we've got more to shoot tomorrow.  I threw away five that didn't work out.  I'll let the client make the more subtle edits....

If you haven't shot portraits with a set of tungsten lights you are certainly missing out on a cheap thrill.  I'm not sure I ever want to go back to strobe.  You might not either.

Marketing note:  If everyone else is chasing the same look doesn't it make sense to find your own niche?

To sleep.  Perchance to dream.  Of tungsten lights.....

Life is good. Photography is fun again.

I was looking ahead at the month of May dreading another slow month with clients cancelling projects or postponing them till next month when I decided to do something about it.  I declared May the "month of personal art" and sent an invite to all the people on my Facebook account asking them to come to the studio and have their portrait made.  

The project has been fun.  I'm meeting new people by referrals and I'm sitting down and talking to old friends who are stopping by to participate.  Belinda is happy to have a photo of Ben and our dog, Tulip.

I photographed a father and son earlier today and it may be the most beautiful shot I've ever taken of a small kiddo.  I can hardly wait for the dad (also a photographer) to see the gallery.  And I'm excited that I'm so excited about taking photos again.

I've been struggling to get my fourth book done and it started to seem like one of those projects that would just go on forever.  Now I feel a bit of joy about the project and it looks so much better to me.

I had so much fun at my son's swim meet on friday and I'll post some of those shots over on smugmug in the next few days.  I am the team's photographer and that gives me a good excuse to roam around with a neckful of my favorite cameras and blaze away.  The funnest pix are from the little "six and unders".  My son is an assistant coach this year and helps teach them to race. Can't imagine a funner thing for a dad to photograph!!!!

Since it's all for fun I feel free to bring along my favorite old art cameras.  On friday I shot with the Kodak DCS 760 and an Olympus e-1 with a bit of Canon G10 thrown in for good measure. The Olympus is twice as good as I remember it.  I'm thinking I'll get a longer zoom and make it the primary camera for the swim season.  The raw files are delicious and most parents just want digital files.  Nobody seems to want prints anymore which is great with me.

The G10 with face detection rocks for wide angle, quick group shots.  Everyone should have one of these cameras.  I really want to write a book about the new small camera phenomenon. Something like, "Getting Professional Results with Your Point and Shoot Camera!"  I think that's where a lot of photography is going.  And for good reason.

Speaking of books, David Hobby over at Strobist did his magic.  He reviewed my second book, Studio Techniques, and drove sales off the charts over at Amazon.com.  Last week the book was the #1 book in the photographic lighting category.  Yahoo!  That's two in a row.

I'm not sure that everyone gets that the second book is not meant to be a product extension of the small flash trend.  It's very much about traditional lighting techniques and studio stuff. Check out the reviews.

Finally, I am jazzed about starting a new project for Zachary Scott Theater.  We're spending four day this week doing their season brochure in one of my favorite styles.  Should be a blast. This will be the first project I've done that will have a videographer along shooting the shooting.  I'll try to figure out how to incorporate that into a blog next week.

The other image above is an example of how I light white backgrounds.  The whole explanation is in the studio book.

Keep shooting.  Keep loving it.  Life is good.