Stevie at The Half Moon, Putney
The Half Moon is one of my favourite venues in London. Since 1963 it’s boasted a rich history of live music and has gained one hell of a reputation in the process. Over the years I’ve got to know some of the lovely staff, a couple of whom I’m honoured to say I’ve even shared the stage with once or twice. Stevie here has been one of the resident soundguys for a a long time. He very kindly sat for these portraits a couple of weeks back.
To give the room the right feel I wanted to blend my own light with the stage light. I got Stevie to hit the banner on the rear wall with a spotlight that would serve to light it and the curtain behind it a little. I wanted just enough light to fall off the banner to give the curtain a little shape. With this set we lit Stevie’s body with another spot, allowing its hard edge to fall in frame. Once these ambient lights were taken care of I set up an strobe in an umbrella to throw some soft light onto 2/3rds of Stevie’s face, then used another gridded strobe to light a little of the other side and provide some seperation from the background.
The process took about 30 minutes and I’m pretty happy with the results. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have featured the shiny new chequered dance floor they’ve just put in. Who knows? Maybe another day…Red, I’m coming for you next…
Not that I set out with this intent but I seem to have a bit of A Scanner Darkly thing going on right now. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes…
Shooting on the Fly With Our Friends Records
Nothing gets you thinking on your feet like shooting three people in four locations in forty five minutes.
We went out with the lads from Our Friends Records a couple of weeks back to shoot some frames for their forthcoming website overhaul. The team were celebrating the first birthday of one of their events so we only had a small window of time before they had to be at the venue to greet their fancy dressed, pirate themed, cutlas waving public.
We worked fast, putting lights on stands and carrying them from location to location rather than packing them down each time. This made the gear more cumbersome but saved a lot of time in the long run. Thankfully many hands make light work, especially when two of those hands belong to our friendly powerhouse Richard who kindly assisted. A couple of months back, Richard managed to singlehandedly pull a rowing boat out of a lake to make a shot work for me. I reckon he could’ve have snapped it in half too if I’d asked him nicely…
Watch out for Our Friends Records. In a music industry currently mired with difficulties it’s nice to see a grass roots label supporting their scene for the simple love of it. Happy Birthday OFR!
So, Digital or Film?
Some photographers get pretty militant on this subject and I guess I can see why. In the days when film was the only option, the best shooters spent years learning photographic theory and grappling with light’s many quirks because they had to. Besides a light metre, the closest thing they’d have to an LCD screen for assessing their exposures was an encyclopaedic knowledge of the frames they’d taken in similar situations before it. Fast forward a few years and a new wave of cameras arrive allowing you to shoot a frame and evaluate it instantly. Cool huh? Maybe so, but a long established photographer could be forgiven for feeling that much of the knowledge they’d grafted to attain was now being bypassed by a computer processor.
Those that know me will know I rarely get militant about anything. I figure I was lucky to have spent my teen years watching the gradual shift from film to digital occur. My Dad taught me how to shoot pictures on a film camera. It took many botched attempts but eventually I was taking frames that didn’t make the guy at my local Kodak Express smirk as he handed me my prints. A couple of years later my parents bought our first digital camera. It was the size of a household brick and could store around 20 tiny images. The image quality was terrible, skin tones were grey and the inbuilt ‘sharpen’ option was so rough it made everything look like a mosaic. Being a teenage boy at the time my natural reaction was of course to overlook all of this and see only an insanely cool toy. I like to think both digital technology and my appreciation of good images have matured a little over time…
Personally speaking, I don’t think shooting on digital should be an excuse for not knowing your theory. If you shoot a good picture I reckon it’s important to know why it works and to be able to recreate it if needs be. I often try to shoot both if I can, especially in the studio when it’s easy to have a body loaded with a roll of film to hand. The frames above are some I shot recently in such a scenario, same lights, same shutter, same aperture, even the same lens. I’ve included some samples of the same shots at full size so you can see the grainy quality to the film compared to digital. That grain right there is the reason I’d NEVER stop shooting film.
Quick! To The Cardboard Tardis!
Some more work with Steve this week, this time with a slightly more high-tech endgame than our previous lo-fi adventures. The order of the day here was to shoot the groundwork for a sci-fi style image, leaving as little editing to be done at the Photoshop stage as possible. This meant, as it should do in my humble opinion, nailing the lighting in the camera.
The key light in this image is the flash on the floor to camera right. Its low angle dramatically illuminates Steve’s face from beneath, while a shoot-through umbrella attached to the flash serves to soften the shadows created by the light’s position. Check out the lighting plan to see the setup in more detail.
Once all this was in place the rest of the shoot comprised of a seemingly endless cycle of Steve leaping onto a less-than-adequate crash mat and me hollering ”Perfect! That was the one! Do it again!”
While the final editing process is perhaps a subject for another post, the finished image is displayed above. If you’re not sure which is which, it’s the one with the massive planet in it.
