My brother, Conor, turns 22 today so I thought I’d take the opportunity to post this photograph I took of him back when he was still young (i.e. 21). Conor is a talented piano and french horn player, and as part of a big win in Feis Ceoil last year he had won the opportunity to give a piano recital in the National Concert Hall. He also had a few other concerts coming up, and so for all of these recitals he needed a promotional photograph.
That is how we came to be standing in what is known as the Music Room in my parent’s house in Murragh, with Conor dressed in his concert gear, and me with my camera looking for an angle to get a good photograph. It was about 4pm on a mid-summer day, and the room has two large windows on adjacent sides. I didn’t have any flashes with me, so this was going to be an available light photograph. The bright sunlight outside and the lack of flash inside meant that putting Conor against a window wasn’t going to work – either he would be underexposed or the background would be overexposed. Complicating matters were a set of curtains which would be too distracting for the background, and a baby grand piano in the middle of the room, which limited the angles a bit further.
After trying different shots, the best angle was with one window to camera right, the other behind the camera. The window to the right would provide side light for Conor’s face, while the one behind the camera would provide a little bit of fill light to bring up some detail in the areas in shadow from the main light. So I had in effect a two-light setup – although I couldn’t really control the light from either.
Actually, that’s not strictly true. If I had needed more side light, I could have moved Conor closer to the window, and moved him away if I needed less. But that didn’t present itself as an option because we decided to include the piano in the shot as a framing element, and moving Conor would have been easy – moving the piano wasn’t an option.
In the final shot, the highlight on the right of his face ends up a little too bright for my liking, though I’ve reduced it somewhat in post production. The piano has just enough detail to make it interesting, the reflection adds a nice compositional element, and I think in this scenario the bland background works reasonably well ensuring there’s nothing to compete with the piano, or indeed the subject.
Sometime I might try to reshoot this shot using flash to give me more control over the light – I suspect I would get a better picture.
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