In this episode it's a photo challenge with Daniel Norton.
AdoramaTV presents 'Exploring Photography' with Mark Wallace
Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of 'Exploring Photography', I'm Mark Wallace.
Well, in this episode we're going to be doing another photo challenge in the spirit of Gavin Hoey.
Now, I'm not going to be doing this by myself, I'm actually going to be joined
by Daniel Norton, come on out here. So we're actually in your studio in New York City.
Now, this is the challenge.
Years ago I shot this photo and it is this really beautiful backlit model and
I shot that with a single light, this is a Profoto Fresnel, we actually have one
right here. This is the Pro Fresnel spot. Now what this does is it gives you nice, even
hard light and the thing is when I shot that photo, we had lens flare. I shot it
with a Canon. I think it was a 1D S Mark II, this is years ago, and I had a
16-35mm lens with no lens hood. I have tried my best to
duplicate that shot in a lot of workshops and I've never been able to do
it and so I'm not sure I can do it now because we're using different cameras.
We're actually both going to be using our Leikas. I've got my M Typ 240, you've got...that's an M8.
And what lens? Tell us about this lens.
This is...actually, when Konica was making
Rangefinders and the like amount, back in the film days they made this 50mm lens.
OK so you're shooting with the 50 I'm going to try a 35 and the reason I'm trying a 35 because I remember when
I shot this originally I was really close and a little bit wide and I think my
35 gives me the best, or worst however way you want to look at it, lens flare of my Leica lenses. Now
I don't know if this is going to work out. We have a fantastic model that is
joining us and her name is Anaiz Roman. Come on out here and there she is. Now what
we're going to do is we're actually going to backlight. I'm going to put you over here.
This light right here is going to be really, really high and
then we're going to
have this light coming down and illuminating the back of your head and
they will probably use some bounce or something to give a little bit of
illumination to the front of her face. I'll have to remember the shot exactly but
we're going to play around with that, we're going to see what we get.
I think, I predict that we're not going to get the shot exactly it'd be sort of
a shame if we got it exactly right. But we will play around with it so the rules
are one light you can use a bounce. There's as much post-production as you
want. You can change color temperature, you can do all that kind of stuff but
only one light and a bounce. That's it, that's the challenge. OK, let's see what we get.
Right I have started my shoot. Initially I was not getting the results that I was
hoping to get because I was remembering, as I set this stuff up, that when I
originally made this image, I shot it in a huge studio. It was about 6,000 square
feet with gigantic, tall ceilings and so there's just lots of black space. Now in
the studio, if you look over here, there's white everywhere. There's white walls, there's
white ceilings. Everything is white and so if I move my camera around to get any
kind of new angle I am not getting the dark background that I really want and I
wasn't getting any lens flare but we just had sort of a happy accident. So
here, I'll re-enact it for you. So we're shooting in here is Anaiz right there. I'm
shooting really close because that's how I shot the original image and you can
see from this image I'm getting a little bit of lens flare, just right at the top
but nothing like I got in the shot that I'm trying to recreate, and so just to be
funny as we were setting up to shoot the video. I went like this and clicked and all of a sudden, oh my gosh
look, there's lens flare everywhere in this picture and so I thought I need to
shoot from a different angle and so I got down here and I started shooting from
this angle and guess what? Bam! Lens flare, lens flare, lens flare. But we still
have that white in the backround so now what I'm going to try to do is shoot from
this angle but move those panels around, sort of get that dark background, or I might
have to go into post-production to make that background darker, but now I know
what to do. I'm going to try it and see if I can match that shot. So I'm just moving these V-Flats
to give me something that I can work with in post-production and so I'm just getting a dark-ish
background. I'm going to have to go into Photoshop and fix this stuff because in
the studio we just don't have enough open space to make this work.
OK, so I'm going to try something a little bit different. I tried a few times to get
a nice flare across my lens but this lens is just really, really hard to flare.
So it's not going to really look the same but what I'm going to do is, by the way this is
what causes a lot of flare for people so if you're having flare and you want to get rid of it you see this
thing on the front of my lens? UV filter. t's dirty. It's going to cause a flare if light hits it, right, so I'm going
to use this to create more of an airy kind of flare than the little dots but it will still flare
and I think that counts. We'll find out- judges- so the other thing is obviously we're using a
very directional light source. I got to make sure I'm in the light so I'm going to just
look at it until I feel blinded and then I'll come over here and, ok, so it looks like my flair
I'm going to want to fill in a little bit so I don't go completely dark in the shadows.
That way I can crunch it down in post. Oh, interesting. OK so the direction of the
flare, it will be dependent on where it is on my filter, so I'm going to turn the
filter, I think this way.
OK, so I think the flare itself looks pretty good so now I'm just going to bring Sethin over here
to hold the very fancy reflector just so I can bring up my shadow just a little bit. Just come this way...
Perfect. Thank you. Here we go and boom. So you can see the flares going this way I want it to go in
the other direction, so much going to turn the filter opposite and
the radio
as a final on Monday in like decided exactly
smaller
environment so I think the lesson from that is if you want to duplicate a shot
you going to do everything we can to duplicate the exact like the exact exact
camera the exact lens know I can stop and I think it's something that is I
personally have given up on trying to duplicate shots get a shot let it
inspire you to create something that is similar or to start with something and
then make something your own and so I did get a shot I did some heavy
post-production because of these cracks and all that kind of black and the stuff
that we had thrown into Photoshop here's what I got and I think it's ok at best I
would say it's ok not spectacular but I didn't peak in when you were shooting
did you put some snot right before the same reason because I knew that my linda
is not going to flare the way that the image was and I couldn't actually at the
Clarion all I took it a little bit of oil from my skin and put on my view
filter because having been out in the Sun many times there is no different
just when it hits the lens it as almost more of a sports out
know how to turn out I think my pretty cool again it was more inspired by your
shot then really trying to make it exactly as I just knew it wasn't going
to happen alright well there you have it a photo challenge that again didn't
really challenge of trying to get what we were after we couldn't so we shifted
gears and got something totally different which is how it should go we
have to say thank you to the amazing model come on out there we go, Aniaz
never go so thank you so much for being our model and letting us like position
you into all kinds of stuff she was very very patient thanks Daniel for doing
this thanks Gavin Hoey for inspiring the photo challenge don't forget to
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that we don't miss a single episode with Daniel or me or governor all the people
that are out there shooting also check out the Adorama Learning Center because
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thanks again for joining us we'll see you again next time
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