Painting With Light
In the deepest realms of Peace Park on the MU campus, a fire-breathing Grad Student Monster lurks, scaring children and helpless undergrads who dare pass the brick bridge under his watchful eyes. They turn back at once; none shall pass.
Our photograph is definitely in the realm of “imaginary concept” more than anything else. It’s supposed to illustrate some evil creature (Jonathan) that scares and chases away innocent girls when they try and pass over his bridge. Someone also brought of the idea of grad students scaring away undergrads…but that could have been a joke, I’m not sure. To achieve the effect of forced perspective, Jonathan’s face was mere inches from the camera; the bridge itself was probably 30 feet away.
Technical info:
- Camera: Nikon D700 on tripod
- Lens: Nikon 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6
- Exposure: 84 seconds, f/16, ISO 200
- 2 Pocket Wizard MultiMax to remotely trigger bulb shutter
- 2 Nikon SB-600 speedlights
- 1 Nikon SB-800 speedlight
- 1 Canon EX-430 speedlight
- Various gels
- Flashlights
Technique
First, we set Jonathan near the camera to act as a “human gobo” to shield light from hitting the right side of the sensor, to eliminate any possible ghosting. The initial lighting phase involved strobing Ashley and Andie on the bridge. I popped four flashes of a strobe at full power, with no gel, to provide the main front light on the girls. I needed full power because I had to stand out of the frame when popping the flash. One flash was made by ducking under the bridge and aiming upwards. After I was finished, Dan fired several pops of another strobe gelled red on the girls for accented lighting to match the red “fire” coming out of Jonathan’s mouth.
After we were done strobing the girls, Jonathan immediately covered the lens with a piece of cardboard to block light while we repositioned for other roles. In succession, Dan held a red gelled flashlight near Jonathan’s mouth to simulate the fire, I fired a yellow gelled strobe on Jonathan’s face, Ashley used a blue-gelled flashlight to paint the water and creek, and Andie fired an ungelled strobe to illuminate the bridge and grass.
Reflection
I was skeptical of working in Peace Park, because even at night, there appeared to be a TON of light pollution both from lamps in the park and the city itself. First, I came up with an idea to eliminate light from the lamps in the park. We were all wearing coats, so using long sticks, we draped the coats over the large glass lamps closest to the bridge we were photographing. Definitely worth giving up warmth for darkness. This was incredibly helpful and cut down a lot of light. We used an aperture of f/16 to further eliminate available light. I experimented with f/22, but even with multiple flashes of light, the speedlights did not produce enough power to compensate. Additionally, because Andie and Ashley had to stand still for so long, any additional time or unnecessary strobes could have led to blurriness or ghosting. In addition to modifying the physical available light, we used the cinefoil on some of the strobe units to prevent spill, and also on the flashlight Dan used to better concentrate the beam of light behind Jonathan’s face.
There was a lot of problem solving, but we worked around them and found solutions. The biggest problem was the placement of Jonathan. At first, Jonathan was up on the bridge strobing the girls, and I was controlling the camera and masking. In earlier exposures, the bridge ended up being partly visible through his body, not exactly what we were going for. But by switching me and Jonathan, this was solved.
I would have preferred to have had a few more takes to get everything perfected, specifically I wanted to improve the light on the trees in the background and better mask the strobes from hitting the leaves as I don’t like how some are frozen and some appear blurred. As it is now, the image almost looks 3D in a way.