Last week I had the pleasure of photographing a very photogenic 6-year-old girl called Aoife at her home in Clontarf. Even allowing for the time it took me to setup my portable studio before hand and pack everything away afterwards, we ended up having an hour for photographs, which meant plenty of time to try a few different set ups. I started, as I often do, by photographing Aoife on white seamless paper for some high key images, and they worked well. However on my way into the house I had spotted the wooden staircase with a rich red carpet running up the middle and I knew it would make for a great backdrop.
Aoife was a dream model, not just because she photographs so well, but because, even at just 6 years of age, she could do an incredible array of poses. When you photograph children often there’s a need to coax them a little bit into poses that photograph well, and the more you need to coax, the more unnatural the child can look (because to them, you’re trying to get them into a position that doesn’t feel natural). You get this with adults too, but there’s more scope to explain to an adult what it is you’re trying to create. With a child, it’s sometimes harder to communicate this.
I quickly realized when photographing Aoife that it was better to let her work out her own poses than to direct her, and when we started taking photographs on the stair case, she really started to get into the swing of this modelling business and would have given those girls on Britain’s Next Top Model a run for their money.
Every shot I took – literally every frame – she changed the pose, and not only that but the expression that went along with it. She was able to do happy, sad, pensive, scared, surprised, amazed.
And so that explains, a little bit at least, how we came to shoot the sequence of three frames you see above. In this case, prompted by the range of expressions she was throwing at the camera, I asked her to block her eyes, then block her ears and then block her mouth. She probably had no idea why, but she pulled it off and gave me a triptych of images that I think is kinda fun and quirky at the same time – See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
It’s possibly a love-it-or-hate-it sequence of shots, and probably not something that Aoife’s mother would be hanging on the wall, but it was something that naturally led out of how the photoshoot was going, and I thought it would be fun to try and see how it might work out.
I had some questions as to the order in which the photos should go – i.e. is it See, Hear, Speak or Hear, See, Speak or some other variant. After a straw poll on twitter and a quick Google, I decided what is above was most likely correct.
In terms of the lighting, it’s very simple. For a start the scene is all lit by flash. At 1/250s, f/5.6, ISO 200 there was virtually no ambient light. There are two lights – one more subtle than the other.
The main light is a 30″ softbox just out of frame at camera right, pretty much hanging over the banister of the stairs, and that is lighting the subject, and also throwing some light up the stairs, which falls off nicely as it gets further from the light source.
The second light, the more subtle one, is sitting on the landing upstairs and is a bare SB-600 dialled right down to 1/64th power and it is zoomed out and firing at the wall at the top of the stairs. It gives enough light to define the top of the stair case and frames the top of the image, but not too much (I hope) to be distracting. Without it the top of the frame was too dark in my opinion.
After we finished taking some fun shots on the stairs there was time for a couple more quick setups out in the back garden where I got to mix a little ambient light with the softbox light, and the final frame of the day was an available light shot of Aoife with her next door neighbour’s dog, who was looking at the shoot through the fence. He didn’t take too kindly to the camera, or possibly just to me, so there was just time for a single frame of the two of them together, but thankfully I got the shot.
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