Greetings from the studio.  Here is eNewsletter #6.  Let me wish
 you and your family all the best this holiday season.
    
               
      How I set up this photograph

enlarged photo from website

The gentleman pictured here is my big brother David who, with his wife Viv, are the wiz-kids behind Desserts by David Glass. Their company produces some of the most scrumptious chocolate cakes and cheese cakes imaginable.  David had approached me with an idea for a promotional photo.  He wanted to be shown just having ripped open his jacket and shirt Superman-style, thus revealing a t-shirt bearing his company's name.  I have been privy all my life to my brother's quirky and clever inspirations, and I knew immediately this would make a great shot.  We set to work figuring out the details.

David is solidly built, so he was the perfect model for this concept.  We both agreed that the shot needed a dramatic look.  We therefore began with David standing in front of a black curtain, and experimented with different positionings and expressions, which we would vary during the shoot.  His tie was adjusted to avoid being lost in the darkness of the jacket.  And the placement of his hands combined with how much of the t-shirt would be exposed were carefully decided.

A black background can vividly isolate the photograph's subject, but only if separation exists between that background and subject.  In this case, two strobes were placed behind David, one on the left and the other on the right.  They were angled to just highlight his head, neck, jacket, tie, and hands.  Another strobe was positioned to the camera's left and illuminated his profiled face as well as his body.  But we needed one more light to make the photo work.

For David, the key to this image was the shirt's logo.  It had to pop.  To do this, we fitted one of the regular strobes with a special device having a lens and four shutters.  This meant we now could create a tight beam of light in a very specific geometric pattern.  We adjusted the shutters into a small rectangle and aimed it directly at the logo.  And, boy, did it pop.


                                            The Duck Family

enlarged photo from website	enlarged photo from website

A personal photo project I thoroughly enjoyed was my Duck People series.  It had begun with a bunch of portrait concepts that had been floating around in my head.  I thought it might be neat to put some of them onto film.  But I also wanted all these very different portraits to appear as a single series.  If some object, I thought, could be placed in each setup, all the photos would be tied together.  So, I wandered from store to store, finally ending up in Northampton, Massachusetts, until I found the perfect prop... a rubber duck.

I approached friends and acquaintances as subjects for the project.  Virtually all were interested, with only one person, a young woman, flatly turning me down.  She had worked recently with a photographer friend who had kept her posing for hours, and in almost full body paint.  After that experience, she vowed to steer clear of photographers forever.   

As would be expected, each shoot had its own dynamics.  The most interesting sessions were those where the subjects actively participated by suggesting and demonstrating their own poses.  Sometimes this was a hindrance, but often their ideas helped to produce some wonderful results.

The two people pictured above are father and daughter.  I originally had approached Bob about being a subject.  He agreed, and we selected his living room for the shoot. I  placed Bob and the duck several feet from each other, then under lit Bob and over lit the duck.  When we finished shooting, we got talking about other possibilities for the series.

It wasn't long before we were laughing about how inane a rubber duck caught in someone's tennis racquet might appear.  I realized though that this could work as a picture and that his daughter would be the perfect subject.  Bob then jumped up and quickly returned with an old broken-string racquet.  A few days later, we were back in Bob's living room, but this time with a blue background, lit off-axis with a blue-gelled strobe.  I had the young lady try expressions ranging from embarrassment to annoyance to shock.  We ended up with some terrific poses. 

So, what reasons are there to use one shutter speed/aperture combination over another?  Well, if you wanted clean and sharp photos of kids playing soccer, you would use a fast shutter speed.  But if you were trying for a more artful blur of the action, then you might try a slower shutter speed.  The same is true for photographing a waterfall.  A fast shutter speed will stop the water flowing, but a slow shutter speed (with the camera on a tripod) will produce, many people feel, a more lyrical interpretation.  And if you needed to shoot a still object in very low light, a large aperture and/or a slow shutter speed (again, with the camera on a tripod) could be the way to go.

Another issue, "depth-of-field", creeps in when considering which aperture to use.  It has to do with how much of the picture is in focus in front of and behind the subject on which you are focusing.  For example, let us assume your subject is a person sitting in a kitchen.  There are objects on a counter top in front of him, and pots and pans on a rack behind him, all in view to the camera.  A great depth-of-field (small aperture) would mean that the subject and everything in front of and behind him are in focus.  A shallow depth-of-field (large aperture) would mean that only the subject is in focus, not the objects in front of or behind him. 

Then, do you go with a large or small or something-in-between aperture?  Well, it depends.  In this type of photo, throwing the foreground and background slightly out-of-focus reduces distractions and adds emphasis to the subject.  However, if the subject is a famous chef sitting in his own kitchen, you might want his tools to be in good focus too.  There is no one correct answer for this.