About half the photographs I took at the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin last Wednesday were around the start area, where performers and bands were getting ready ahead of the parade. There were rich pickings photographically even before people were getting ready as a walkabout revealed surreal sights like puppets and animal heads lying against the wall, waiting to be put into use later in the day. And while the puppets themselves made for a good portrait, photographing them was also a good rehearsal for shots to be taken later, under a little more pressure.
The photograph above uses a mixture of ambient light and flash, hopefully in a way that is reasonably subtle. At the time of the morning that I took it, the sun was well hidden behind clouds and so the ambient light was flat and shadowless. I wanted to add a little oomph with the use of off camera flash, and employing the same technique I used for my self-portrait the previous weekend, add a little colour with the use of a gel also.
The lighting is as you see on the right. A single flash (an SB-800) in this case, held in my left hand, and on the flash I mounted a small softbox – a Lumiquest III, which is so small (about 12″ across) that it’s really only of use as a light softener when used in close. And it is used in close here. I’m shooting at the widest my lens will go – 24mm – and have the camera very close to the puppets. Thankfully, they are tolerant and patient subjects, not minding either how close I put the camera to their oversized noses, nor how many test shots I take to get the flash/ambient balance just as I want it.
The flash is gelled with a tungsten gel (CTO) and the camera is set to tungsten white balance. That tungsten white balance in what is cloudy day light is what turns the grey brick wall blue, and because the flash is primarily only falling on the faces of the puppets, and gelled to match the white balance, their faces look natural (and not blue) in the resultant image.
Part of the thinking behind taking this photograph was because I liked the look of the puppets lying by the side of the road. Partly I wanted to use them as models for this type of lighting setup so that I could begin to refine it for use later – particularly how much I wanted to underexpose the ambient exposure by to allow the flash to lift the subject – here the ambient is underexposed by a stop and a third, and the flash is set to 1/16 power – as I was at a wide aperture of f/4 (determined by the ambient exposure), with a flash that was in close, I didn’t need lots of power.
The exercise paid off when it came to grabbing a quick portrait of Amy and Shauna, who you see below, later as they were putting the finishing touches to their costume. Much of what I had experimented with using the puppets was put into action here – the lighting is the same except for three things – the flash is in my other hand, so coming from the other side of the camera. I am much further back from the subjects and zooming the flash (and my lens) accordingly to frame tightly. And the power of my flash is bumped up to full power as my aperture, in the brighter light that the 11am sun brought, is narrower (though I had two stops of shutter speed that I could have played with). I still have the gel on the flash, the tungsten white balance in the camera, and the underexposed ambient. And the softbox is still there, though less effective because it is further away from the subjects, and so smaller, which makes it a harder light source.
In fact, because I was further back, and using the flash on the right of the camera, but holding it in my left hand (crossed under the lens) the position of it proved to be much more on-axis than I intended – I should have stuck with it extended out to my left, and can’t imagine now why I didn’t.
The settings for this shot were f/9 @ 1/60s, ISO 200, 24-70mm lens at 70mm, Nikon D700
Two similar shots, similar setups, and the second quickly created thanks largely to the lessons learned while creating the first.
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