We were asked to photograph at a fundraising event last night for the Coronado Performing Arts Center to give participating couples a memento of their evening in this historic theater in the heart of Rockford’s RiverDistrict. The tough part of this shoot was that we were hoping to show people in the setting of the theater itself, but the theater is massive, and everyone was on stage looking out to the house. To give you just an idea of how big this place is, and how great it looks from the audience point-of-view, here is a shot I took from the balcony that night:
A long shot view at 18mm of the theater from the balcony. Note that this is a 30 second exposure at f/11 at ISO100, so the lighting level is much lower than it appears.
Now, we were limited by a few things here. First off, the best view is from the seats looking towards the stage. But, we were limited to shooting from the stage where everyone was gathered for dinner, drinks & entertainment. Lastly, not only is this place huge, but it was lit very dramatically, and very low, so exposure was going to be a real challenge. Here’s a test composition of our assistant Aaron Spain, standing in where I though we could get couples posed with the theater behind them:
Here's our test exposure shot for ambient light at the Coronando Theater. Even at ISO400, we were only getting 1/2s @ f/8
As with everything in photography, it’s all about trade-offs. As you can see from the photo above, in-camera metering indicated that we needed 1/2s @f/8 at ISO400. And the theater itself still looked like a cave. Oy. Enter real studio lighting on location. Armed with a couple of Bowens packs – a QuaDX 3000 and the battery powered Explorer 1500, plus a few heads, we were able to quickly light both the subject area, as well as augment the ambient light in the theater to be as natural looking as possible. I actually think we did a pretty good job with it:
A cute young couple posing for a snap with the Coronado theater as a background.
Now, I could have shot these at say f/2.8-f/4 to gain 2-3 stops in the ambient range or shutter speed, but then we would have run into several other trade-offs. Depth-of-field would have been diminished, and subsequently the theater would have appeared more blurry and abstract. The Bowens Softlite beauty dish reflector we had boomed over the P.A. system was already about 3 meters away, and even at the lowest power setting of 30w/s I had to add a -2 stop ND gel to it to get it down to f/8. As a point of reference, the two background lights we used were pumping out 3,000w/s just to get the background of the theater to register on the camera sensor.
Other than the fact that we were a bit constrained by the place we were allowed to shoot from, I do wish we had been able to get the guests up on the band stand as opposed to in front of it. It would have been less distracting, raised them in relation to the high theater background, providing for a stronger composition.
The other trade-off of the exposure combination of f/8 for the flash, and 1/2s for the ambient was subject movement. Some folks just didn’t hold still, and so we got a few blurry shots. Of course, flash freezes their movement, but the longer exposure to pick up the ambient background was also lighting the subjects.
A long time ago when I was starting out in this little Midwest city showing my work around, a lot of the comments were “it’s so dark & moody”, “are you sure this isn’t too dark?”, “why such deep shadows?” and the like. Well, it did win me some pretty handsome jobs, but I was almost getting a complex out of it. Then I happened to meet a guy who asked if I liked old B&W movies much. “Yeah”, I said “why do you ask?” He replied: “Well, your photography really reminds me of early German Expressionism and Film Noir.” This guy had hand written a list of over 900 movies, directors, cinematographers, and actors from notable older noir movies, and let me photocopy the list. Ever since then, I’ve tried to keep watching ones I haven’t seen, but have been hooked on what feels like my style ever since. Ah, there’s nothing new under the sun…or a good Fresnel.
A simple, classic, two light film noir setup
So, we’ve been kicking around the idea of trying to do more thematic shoots for consumer work around the studio. The idea here would be to bring a more commercial flair to the consumer work we offer too. With Valentine’s Day upon us, we thought we’d give the process some time to see if we could pull off two completely different looks with one couple in under an hour. So, we called our friends Amy & Todd to see if they’d be game for modeling for us on short notice, and they were. We wanted to be able to offer shooting bright, campy, kitschy shots as well as shots with very dramatic, romantic lighting. I think we got it:
Kitschy & cheezy all the way.
Admittedly, that’s pretty darn cheezy, and the point of the shoot was to be able to offer a completely different look in the same session. So, I raised the background scrim, swung the boom mounted umbrella out of the way, raised the background light, removed its gel, and struck up the DeSisti 2k Fresnel:
Deep, dramatic lighting of the same couple just minutes later.