Straight shot & lit shot
To many photographers, even some professionals, lighting is a mystery. If you are a professional who works predominantly in areas such as sports or nature photography, you may not need to know anything about artificial lighting. Many people have wildly successful career without even touching a flash meter. What I have learned over years, however, is that the more flexible your skills are, the more work you will find, and while I like nothing better than working with natural light, there are times when I need to take control of the lighting in order to get a useable image.
If you are a location photographer you will probably already know everything I am about say, but if you have never tried lighting a space, you might be interested in an example of a shot where the lighting, almost single-handedly makes the shot work. Lighting can be as simple or as complex as you make it. Once you overcome the gear anxiety, you will find that the problem normally reduces to putting the right amount of light where you want it. Everything else is discretionary and open to your creativity. In this example, a medical school needed photos of one of its microscopy labs for their view book. Although most science labs often look great in photographs, few people suspect that the labs rarely look so inviting in person. The simple truth is that the people who set up the labs rarely give much thought to aesthetics. Sadly for the photographer, they are more concerned with the practical matters of science rather than the visual impact the space will have. I took a straight shot of the space to illustrate some of the challenges this particular case presented:
- Overhead fluorescent lights. (I'll be shooting slides)
- Small space with all the interesting stuff in the corners.
- There is a lot of non-photogenic stuff. The big yellow tank, lots of paper, binders etc.
As a photographer, I am always asking what my client needs to communicate with each photograph. Clearly, a photo that communicates exactly how this room looks is not what they are after. In spite of its appearance, groundbreaking research happens in this space and that is exactly what I wanted this photo to communicate. Except in rare cases, a simpler photograph is stronger, and because the Zeiss microscope was the focal point of the lab, I decided to build the photograph around it. I shot from the far end shooting towards the corner to remove any distracting elements and also to make the lighting simpler.
A small space is generally easier to light than a large space and because I had several more setups that day, time was at a premium. When I found a suitable camera position (the choices were limited in this space) I realized that the composition alone was not going to make an interesting enough photo; I wanted an eye-catching shot. I turned off the overhead lights to see what light sources were already in the shot. The light from the microscope was nice. Although not especially bright I knew I could make it seem like it was illuminating the elements of the shot by placing a small flash (SB-28) in back of the microscope aimed up at the scientist's forehead. I also decided it wouldn't hurt to let a little of this light source be seen directly to suggest some interesting equipment behind the microscope. I placed the flash so a small portion of the head is visible in the shot through the equipment on the desk. A meter reading from this single flash would be the foundation of my exposure; the rest of the lighting would just be fill. Because I wasn't interested in showing the lab as it really looked, I added a blue gel to a Profoto head positioned on the floor to the right of the camera. I hoped this would hint at a large and interesting area of the room behind the camera; something just out of sight—perhaps a bank of computer monitors or some exotic equipment casting a glow onto the scientist and microscope. The single fill light would not illuminate the wall and monitor behind the microscope. To keep it from going black, I added one more Profoto head attached to the cabinet on my left with a Bogen super-clamp. This light was aimed at the back wall with honeycomb grid to control the spill, and a deep red gel to balance the blue light from the flash head on the floor.
To determine the exposure I first found the aperture that would give the correct exposure for the small flash behind the microscope. The Profoto heads were then set to give one stop less than this. The shutter speed was chosen to correctly expose the video monitor. Because the monitor was much dimmer than the light from the microscope I would not be able to expose both of them correctly with a single exposure. This isn't a difficult problem to solve with a double exposure, however I decided in this case it was not necessary. Because the microscope light was so tiny, I just let it burn in completely. This makes it look bigger, and helps solidify the illusion that it is illuminating part of the scientist's face.
©2001 Mark Meyer