Work In Progress
By Conan Whitehouse
28 May 2008
They're giving me total creative freedom... It's great to be working with a client who trusts you enough to incorporate experimental work into the job. It's a collaborative effort in that we both wear the risk that things might not turn out. As well as sharing the success when a concept works.
The style I have been trying to get happening for the shoots, involves isolating a long exposure of a background scene with the subject exposed with flash. I'm hoping to incorporate more painting with light in the future shoots and see the current frames as a work in progress or as an experiment. It's also helpful to be working this way as I will be working with the same subjects in later shoots. Working on experimental shots allows me to check out the best looks and angles for the models as well.
The main technique for isolating the foreground and background lighting involves looking for a location where a subject can stand with virtually no light hitting them. This diminishes the motion blur or ghosting which will occur if the subject is lit by a continuous light during the long exposure. It's changing the way I look at photography as I am now looking for shadow rather than light to compose my shots. I'm working on what lighting setup to use which will bring out the best when shooting two or more subjects, but so far I've had ok results with an off camera flashgun and umbrella with another un-diffused flashgun on the opposing side of the sub. Both are fired using radio triggers.
Rather than attaching the transmitter for the triggers to the camera I handhold it, which allows me to focus using an infra red transmitter on my canon's hotshoe.
In the future I want to work in some more technical painting with light, using more continuous and moving light sources, or even having the subject on a moving platform with the background blurred but still a long exposure night scene.
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