My 1st assistant photographer, Aaron Spain booked the studio for a shoot with local musician and minor legend, Dan McMahon this week. Aaron’s trying to build his portfolio out, and Dan is looking for, well some new looks. You can see what they’ve got cooking by clicking on the B&W photo below:
Dan McMahon from Aaron Spain's session with the musician.
As I played the role of assistant this time, and got to watch all the behind the scenes stuff, I realized how much easier it was to watch a shoot progress and then fall into every photographer’s trap: “I know how I would shoot that guy now…” But, a word to the wise about this sentiment: don’t be cocky, just learn. Always be learning. It makes you sharper. So, after watching Aaron & Dan work together for awhile, I knew what I wanted to try:
Rupert's shot of Dan McMahon with single, giant 78" octagonal style window light. Bingo! - just what I was looking for...
Thanks to Aaron for the grace in letting me poach off his studio session. And, thanks to Dan for being such a good sport with the hat tricks!
Systematic, repeatable measurement & calibration is the key.
I have a good friend, Stan Jirman who’s an engineer at Apple. He’s also a hell of a photographer. And, he’s got the Swiss penchant for precision that makes him almost a poster boy from the Land of Perfection. There’s nothing I’ve ever seen him do that didn’t require his thorough, scrutinizing attention to detail – especially when it comes to digital imaging. Now, he’s taught me a lot about the world of digital imaging. From JPEG to RAW, S-Curves to Linear, WhiBals to Color Checkers, 8bit, 10bit, 16bit – Stan’s been there with me every step of the way through the past decade of the digital transition. This guy simply knows his stuff.
So, imagine my surprise the day I announced my excitement that I had finally found light metering Nirvana with the acquisition of a new Sekonic L-758DR flash meter for the purposes of actually profiling my camera sensor’s dynamic range – just to have him pronounce it to be a bunch of “measurbation”. This, from a guy who’s taught me to measure & profile everything!
This is where Stan & I diverge in photography. In his defense, he simply doesn’t use studio strobes much. So, really he probably would never need this thing. I mean, this is a guy that still uses Center Weighted Average metering on his SLR’s, and I would argue knows how to effectively use it too. I would actually bet that Stan can look at a scene, meter it, set his camera and know what he’s willing to lose on the high & low ends, and get it. I think the results of his work speak for themselves. I on the other hand, gave up average metering about 1986 with the advent of the Canon T-90 and its multi-spot metering capabilities. I was on a quest to learn & apply the Zone System to roll film shooting, and especially on Kodachrome, my stock of choice at the time.
By the late ’80s I was playing with studio strobes on a regular basis, and at the time the only way to effectively spot meter studio strobes was to buy a Minolta Flash Meter IV and 5º spot finder attachment for the low, low price of about $650. That’s $650 in 1988 dollars too, I might add. And, the drag of that Minolta was that you had to remove the incident dome to attach the spot meter finder, and then switch back again – all without damaging the SPD (silicon photo diode) sensor. Plus, when you did this, your measurements from one mode, say incident wouldn’t always stay memorized when you switched to spot readings. This Sekonic changes all that, and it’s a dream to use.
Multi-spot + Incident readings memorized along the analog scale.
After two bleary-eyed nights of figuring out just what the Sekonic software was (wasn’t) doing, I was able to create some profiles for my Canon 1Ds MkII CMOS sensor. As you can see on the photo above, I’ve just taken six different meter readings of a scene, and set the diffused value to just over f/8.0 and the current reading of f/11.8 is blinking on the analog scale. The small triangles pointing up at the analog scale’s whole number f-stops indicate the entire dynamic range of the camera’s sensor, including both clipping & extinguish points that I correlated to sane Lightroom workflows. Now, all the HDR kiddies out there will tell you that they get 15 stops of DR out of their setups. Whatever. Now I know what I really get: 5.7EV any day of the week, and 7.3EV if I really push it and cheat a bit. Period. And, what’s the best part? I can measure that range, tweak the lights, and get those results repeatably without ever even chimping at the back of the camera. Gone are the days of reconciling the meter readings to the camera’s histogram – hell I don’t even find myself looking at the histogram much anymore, I trust this meter that much.
Measurbate. You won’t go blind doing it either.
We were very excited & pleased that Doug & Holli Connell from Engine Studio chose to virtualize their operation to shoot a bigger production for the Rockford Chamber of Commerce here at our studio in the Bliss building. We found it interesting & ironic that one of the longest standing members of the chamber was in fact AT&T – our immediate neighbors for the last 95 years. Here’s one of their execs being interviewed:
AT&T exec. being interviewed on camera in our studio.
And, here’s the Engine Studio crew – Sara, Holli & Doug:
Sara, Holli & Doug standing in on their own set.
We were glad to share our space, and look forward to working with the Engine gang again. If you need access to a full working photo/video studio for a day –or even a week– just e-mail us for rates & availability here.