Paco Romero Photography

I am offering my second lighting workshop in Plano at the end of February.  The details are available here.

There are many workshops out there.  There are excellent workshops on studio lighting for portraiture, on using portable flashes, and, of course, on doing weddings and seniors.  My lighting workshop is a bit different in that it’s more focused on the principles of lighting, across both natural and man-made lights,  with practical application to multiple situations, both in the studio and on location.   Light is light, regardless of whether it’s the sun, house lamps, powerful strobes,  ceiling flourescent tubes, or work lights, but each has different attributes - but a proactive photographer that knows how to see and control light will be able to apply a small set of principles to almost any situation to get the results he or she wants.

An idea came to mind while my daughter was practicing her piano. I envisioned a cozy little space where she’s reading quietly, with a color palette that overlapped cool and warm colors. I wanted to show her as a little person that was almost ready to have her own space.

The problem is that there is no space like that in the house-walls are mostly off white, the furniture in her room is off-white… not exactly what I had in mind. So I challenged myself to construct this cozy, intimate space for her, and then bring her in and make the portrait.

One more thing I wanted to do was to experiment with props in the foreground - I was really impressed with how Mark Robert Halper uses the foreground plane as a creative element - this image is a good example. So I used her blue lava lamp to bring the cool color palette and also the foreground element. I moved her night stand to bring the lava lamp closer to the camera.

In order to achieve the cozy space idea I took a hand-woven orange patterned blanket we just bought in Peru and threw it over her bed’s headboard. Christina was also going to sit on this blanket, which would bring the warm colors to the composition.

The lighting was straightforward. I placed an SB-800 flash with a 20 degree grid on a light stand to camera right, in a near-butterfly position. Because I wasn’t using a modeling light, I instructed my little model to spot correct placement of the grid on her face, and to help me position the light. In order to get the blue very blue, and the orange more saturated, I decided to put 2 cuts of full CTO on the flash. When I adjusted white balance in post, I went for a warm tone that made the blue bluer.

And the only thing left was camera placement to have the lava lamp well present but without dominating the entire frame. It took a few trials - I used a tripod even though I was shooting at 1/160 or so. The lens was 85mm f/1.4.

My little one was an excellent model, patient with light placement. I like the results - hope she does too when she sees her portrait in the morning. I think I got pretty close to the image I previsualized.

Click on the thumbnails below to see a larger image:

Reading moment

Lighting diagram

Here is an image from today. The key light is produced by a gridded beauty dish, which produces this beautiful shadow around her neck and doesn’t spill light all over the model. The other interesting aspect is the use of rim lights on each side, as I wanted to have some control of where the rim highlights would be. So lots of lights, but the effect is pretty simple, and hopefully does not appear over-lit.

Lovely Siri and her attitude

This evening I spent some time photographing an old-style 10 inch Bardwell-McAlister fresnel light. I am doing some old Hollywood glamour work with it and wanted to photograph it for a promotional card and also because it’s beautiful in its old fashioned way. This instrument was converted into a 2000 ws flash head by Norman years ago.

Here is how I photographed the fresnel. First, I turned the fresnel’s modeling light on to maximum power. Then I used two SB800 flashes to illuminate the sides of the fresnel. I had the flashes gelled with full CTO to match the color of the modeling light, just in case I wanted to use the color versions of these images. Since the main purpose was to create black and white images, white balance doesn’t really matter.

On the first image I used an exposure of 1/2 second at f/8. Only one SB800 portable flash is used here, with a 10 degree grid, pointing to the back of the lamp. The fresnel produced the pattern of light on a black 4×8 foam core board. I like the light escaping from the top, bottom and back. I didn’t use any fill on this image.

On this second image I did use two flashes plus the light coming from the fresnel. There is a flash without any modifier about three feet in front of the fresnel, centered on the lens, and pointing to it. This flash illuminates the front of the head. There is another flash with a 10 degree grid positioned behind the head and throwing the rim light you see to camera right. I liked the cinematic effect of having that light rimmed and not pointing directly to the side of the fresnel. Exposure was 1/50s at f/8.

The third image is more conventional and I used two flashes throwing harsh light as for the second one. You can tell where they are placed but looking a the shadows projected on the body of the lamp by the hardware sticking out. The exposure was 1/13 sec at f/8.

It was fun illuminating a light.

On Saturday I taught a seminar on lighting at my home studio. At the end of the day I did this exercise to show how a photographer can totally change the mood of an image using lighting, and also how the same background can be lit differently to support the mood we want.

Picture #1 - white background illuminated with two bounce umbrellas, one on each side. The model is being lit by a very large softbox to camera left, with the fill being a large white reflector to camera light. The ratio between key and fill was 2/3 of a f-stop. Note how the white background, the open, diffuse lighting and the dress all convey an upbeat mood.

Picture #2 – same WHITE background, but with no light on it. I propped a 4×8 black foam core board on top of two folding doors to prevent the light from bouncing from the white ceiling and giving me a medium gray tone above her head – I wanted a dark, low key image with a certain monumentality created by the position of the camera and the wide ange of the lens. Almost mystical. The key light was a beauty dish with a 40 degree grid on it very close to her face. The fill was a strobe with a 7 in reflector right next to the camera, in front of her – to open the shadows on the black garment. There was also another strobe behind her, low, pointing up to her back, to create a little separation between her and the background.

The exercise shows how to turn a white background into black - simply remove light from falling on it. In order for the beauty dish to not throw light onto the background, I had to position it very close to the model so that I would expose correctly for the light falling on her face, while at the same time, the light falloff was very rapid and hence light didn’t reach the white.

I was asked at a photography forum how to choose and use ambient light for photography - how to make good images with the light that exists on location.  One thing to keep in mind is that “ambient light” and “light control” are not incompatible. As a photographer you can be reactive and use the light as you find it, which is easy, or be proactive and use ambient as the raw material, but not the finished light for your photographs. On the images above I use some light as I found it, and I also controlled it, see below.

• Natural light can be colored, just like flash light when it’s reflected by a non-white surface - so that’s the first thing to worry about. If the enviroronment is reflecting colored light, getting the white balance right is going to be critical. I always use a gray card as a reference.
• Northern light has a very beautiful quality - so pay attention to the orientation of the window you’re using, and pick northern light if you can.
• It’s important to understand the relationship between the value of the background and that of your main subject. By value I mean the brightness. If you place a diffusor between the subject and the source of illumination, you’ll have a subject with a lower value than the background, which means that when you adjust the exposure to be correct on the subject, the background will be lighter. This is great for high key portraits, but not so good if you’re looking for a low key mood. The opposite is true is you use a reflector to raise the value of the subject but not the background.
• Flat natural light can be a problem - while diffused light will be better than high noon, it can also produce blueish, dead skin tone. There is also the issue of not having hair highlights with flat lighting. There are two solutions to these problems. First, get the white balance right by using a gray card. Second, you can pump some light onto the hair using a mirror. You can even diffuse mirror light usng a diffusor like a light panel. And of course sometimes it’s best to mix ambient and flash. For example if you cannot reflect sunlight on the hair, you can use a portable flash.
• You have to be aware of a sensor’s ability to capture a range of values, or its dynamic range. Ambient light make look good to your eyes, but the dynamic range of most cameras will not be more than 6 f-stops, which means that you’ll get blown out highlights or really dark areas, depending on how you expose, if the dynamic range is greater than a few f-stops. The solution is to use a long lens if you can to reduce the amount of ambient in the background, or supplement ambient with flash.
• Most of what I know about controlling light I have learned thru Dean Collins’s teachings. There are some really good DVDs out there if you’re really interested.
• Ultimately light control is the same whether the light is ambient or created. The tools can be the same, and the ideas are the same. There is no reason why you can’t use butterfly lighting, short lighting, or Rembrandt lighting with natural light. You need to train yourself to see the right as the digital sensor sees it. So a good approach is to use ambient light, but control it as you would studio light. Sometimes you get light and you don’t need to control it.

Edit: I forgot, sometimes I use a 1/4 or 1/2 CTO gel on a portable flash used for fill outdoors. This allows me to compensate for blue color casts under trees, and produces a warm, healthy skin tone. I posted an example of that here.

Edit 2: The three first images would have benefited from using a small, portable plastic mirrr bouncing window light back on her hair. I had someone there that could have held the mirror in place for me. Oh well, I will remember it next time. I keep a log of all my mistakes, and I am very proud of them

One more thing about using ambient light combined with flash - it’s important to decide which is the key light, and which is fill. Then set the exposure for the key light, and set the intensity of fill to be less than the key. Here are a couple of examples.

Case 1 - Sun is key light, flash is fill. This is the most common case in bright days - rely on the camera/flash built-in fill flash capabilities, or do it manually. The advantage of using an advanced flash system like Nikon’s CLS is that you can increase the shutter speed to control depth of field with an open aperture. If you want to do this manually, measure ambient light to decide how bright you want the background, and then measure again with the fill flash set to manual, and set the exposure accordingly. For example.

Ambient light measures at f/16 and 1/125, typical of a sunny day.
Set the flash to 1/2 power for example, and place it close to the subject - let’s assume you get f/16, combined exposure of flash and ambient.
If you want the background to be less dominant, change the shutter speed to 1/250 to darken it, and keep the aperture at f/16.

It’s a good idea to place a warming gel on the flash to achieve more natural skin tones, especially if the day is cloudy or you’r shooting under trees. Note also that if you’re shooting manually, you can’t go over the maximum sync speed provided by your camera/flash, normally 1/250, so apertures are going to be small and you can’t really control the depth of field unless you use neutral density filters.

Case 2-Flash is key, ambient is fill. This case is a bit different, as the flash will produce most of the illumination on the subject, and ambient will illuminate the background. The aperture controls the amount of light falling on the subject, and the shutter speed controls the exposure on the background. Again, you can rely on automatic camera/flash controls, or you can do it manually. For manual operation, measure the ambient first to get an idea of what shutter speed you need, for a certain aperture. Then set the flash to give you that same aperture. For example:

Ambient measures f/5.6 and 1/30 - say a restaurant.
Set the flash to 1/2 power and measure exposure, let’s say it’s f/8. You want shallow DoF, so lower the flash power to 1/4 to get an exposure of f/5.6, then set the shutter speed to 1/30 to capture ambient light.

Case 3 - overpowering the sun. This is the technique where your flash is main, and the sun is fill, but the sun is very bright, brighter than the light produced by a small flash. For example f/16 and 1/125 sunlight, and you want to underexpose by two f-stops, for a dramatic dark blue sky. This means that you need to shoot at f/32 1/125 or f/22 1/250. Let’ say you want three f-stop underexposure on the sun, so you’ll need to shoot at f/32 and 1/250. Now you’ll have to illuminate your main subject with enough flash power to produce f/32 light. This is a lot of light, and you probably need 1000 watt-sec or more, depending on how close the flash is, what light modifiers you use, etc. While you may want to rely on Nikon CLS to do this, remember that the intensity of the flash at 1/2000 is really not that much, but you may be able to do it if the flash is very close to the subject and the aperture quite open.

That’s is, no more technical stuff for a while!

I am a strong believer in sharing knowledge with colleages.  Some photographers may have good reasons to be very protective of the techniques and approaches they use, but I really appreciate it when good photographers share freely.  And I like to do the same, to the extent I can.

Two photographers that share what they know and have something valuable to teach are David Tejada from Denver and Zach Arias from Atlanta. 

David Tejada is a corporate photographer that uses small flashes to create some really amazing images.  I have learned quite a bit from him, including equipment to carry on location, and how to use small flashes for great results.   Check out his videos on YouTube.

Zach Arias is funny, smart and a great teacher.   I’ve learned from him how to shoot against a white background with minum postprocessing.  Zach had developed a pretty good DVD with his teachings, and he also have tutorials and videos on his website.

Thank you guys for sharing what you know and enbling other photographers!

Next week, on March 17th, my family and I are flying to Rome, Italy for Spring break. We’re all excited about this - Stella and the kids have never been there, and I was there only once when I was 20 or so, traveling solo. I loved Rome and want to see it again.

So the question is, what equipment should I take with me on the trip, given that this is a family vacation and not a photography project? So I need to ask myself two questions: (1) what do I plan to photograph? and (2) what are my equipment requirements for that type of photography?

I plan to photograph life in Rome. I am not too interested in typical postcard images with the Colloseum at dusk, but I want to capture the essence of living in Rome - the people, the streets, the experience. I want to be able to show someone what it feels like to be there, not just what the place looks like. This is not easy when I am not traveling alone and focused on my photography.

So what equipment requirements does this type of photography places on me, in addition to the constraints of traveling with two small children? Here is my list:

• I need to travel light, with as little weight as possible
• I want to be non-instrusive, so big cameras and lenses are not the ticket
• I want to be able to use available light to really capture the feel of being there.  This means no flash and fast lenses.
• I want to avoid being mugged and my camera stolen
• I want outstanding images

So here is my plan:

• The camera will be a single body, the D700.  I am not planning to take a backup body, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.   The body will have no MB-20, I will just carry extra batteries.
• I plan to take three prime lenses, two small and a larger one:  Nikkor 20mm f/2.8,  50mm f/1.8 and 85mm f/1.4. 
• I will take a Sekonic L358 flash meter
• All this equipment will go into two cases:  a tiny Domke F5XB  black bag, with the Domke label removed, and a Thinktank Lens Changer 25 for my 85mm.  The Domke is really tiny and enough for the body with the 20mm lens on it and the 50mm inside.   Here are pics of the two bags.

A few months ago I bought a Nikon D700, and now I use it almost exclusively for my work.  While the D300 continues to be a fantastic camera, the image quality, especially the high ISO capabilities of the D700 are fantastic.  And then there is the full frame, which gives me the depth of field I really want when doing portraiture.  The shallow depth of field  provided by high quality portraiture lenses like the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 lens at wide apertures is just perfect for those natural light portraits.   I have attached below two examples of what the D700 can do.  The first image was done with f/2 and the 85mm lens.   The second is a shot at ISO 6400 in a dark church in Chichicatenango, Guatemala.   The image was able to capture the magic and ancestral mood and atmosphere of the place.  I just love this camera with Nikkor lenses!

Portrait with D700, 85mm at f/2

Women in St. Thomas Church, Chichicastenango

I started using Lightroom 2 a couple of months ago and decided to use it to regenerate the galleries for my website.  The images at my site have been stale for a while and I needed to upload new ones.  Also, I wanted to add some architectural images, because I don’t plan on renewing my Livebooks website.  While I like Livebooks, I cannot justify the cost, and I like to have full access to my hosted website.   So I used Lightroom Web galleries and was able to get new images up in no time.  I really need to create side-by-side composities of my vertical images to create a more visually appealing format, and I will be doing that shortly.

I also rehosted this log from Wordpress.com to my own website.  It was really easy and quick - while I still don’t have exactly the same look and feel as my website, I have picked a very simple theme that I can modify later.  It’s hard to believe how simple it was to move my blog to my own website, including all the postings I had.  Very nice!