David Hobby, Strobist meister, has an interesting post about for whom the photos toll. Or, more directly: Are the photos for the subject, the viewers or the photographers who make them?

"Magazines (WIRED comes to mind) do not exist only to be filled with namby-pamby, flattering photos of people. (How boring would that be?) And yet, if your first goal is to please the person sitting for your photo, that is exactly where you might be headed," he states.

So for whom do you make your photos? Let's hear it.  

Posted by Christopher Assaf at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

One of the nicest people I have met recently, or at least when I photographed him a month ago, is Johnny Long. He has a job which I have never encountered in my many years of traveling about -- he is a professional hacker, a paid researcher who infiltrates systems to improve their security. That framework resides within his faith as a Christian. Thus he started hackersforcharity.com.

"SUNDAY STORY ... POSSIBLE CENTERPIECE ... WE NEED SHOTS OF HIM AT HOME, WITH COMPUTER, HIS WIFE." Not the best to present information -- important story or not, I try to make photographs worthy of being the lead element of the story on the page. Also, it is best to just get the gist of the story and what it is about and why it is being done.

But another "guy and his computer" photograph? As lead? Yikes-o-rama.

So while driving to his home the idea hit me to use gels, something stark and brooding, like deep blue, to symbolize "technical" and "hacker." Red, as evil and menacing, might convey something he is not. Yellow, or straw, representing goodness, as if "the light" is shining on him.

(Nikon D2X, Nikon 85mm f/1.8, 1/50th sec. @ f/3.5, ISO 100, 2 Nikon SB-800 flashes off camera)

The hardest part, other than finding his home, was figuring out how to balance the flash settings with the computer screen. The information on the screen did not have to be in focus or any value as its only purpose was to show it is a computer.

The shutter speed had to be low enough to allow the ambient glow of the screen to be legible. If I used a shutter of 1/250th second, the predicated speed of the camera, it would have been black. 

The Nikon SB-800s were on stands to either side and fired using Pocket Wizard remotes. Each was zoomed to 105mm. I wanted some of the blue to fall on the screen but wanted the yellow to stay confined. Therefor a black-foil snoot on the yellow-gelled unit contained any stray light.    

Continue reading "Lighting the hacker" »

Posted by Christopher Assaf at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

The word came down yesterday of the need for a "sexy" photograph of a new Microsoft keyboard for a business section review by Mike Himowitz. The idea was to centerpiece the story, so I had to pull something out the top of my usually vacuous head. Thus I trudged to the studio on the first floor absent an idea of what to do; except maybe throw a gel of some color into the lighting mix. Lightning, at least a small bolt, would need to strike at some point.

In the studio, nicely neat after its last use (nice surprise No. 1), I started rummaging to find something to use as a base for the keyboard. There was not enough of the smaller white seamless, so that was right out. But then: BING! It hit me -- white acrylic spread across two saw horses with a light underneath. WooHoo! Saved. The effect would create the modern, clean feel I figured necessary for the expensive piece of hardware.

The small light stands in the studio were not low enough to allow the light space under the acrylic. So I improvised using a sand bag, the Profoto compact monolight attached to a stud screwed into one of the short stands legs.

With that fix in place, I could move to the light with a gel, also a Profoto monolight. The choice was quickly made to use purple. The blue seemed to be too dark and the red too menacing. Yellow did not seem like a color associated with technology. Purple just "felt" right. The gel would also help keep the results from looking like an Apple product ad. The color was a necessary element to differentiate, somewhat, from the classic ad campaign image Apple has created over the years with their imaginative products.

I put the fill, with the color gel and the reflector set to its narrowest angle, on a stand to the left and rear of the expected camera position. It was almost directly behind at 11 o'clock. It ended up at about 1/4 power setting.

After a lot of testing, to get some semblance of proper exposure, I decided to use a scrim over the key light to lower the exposure some -- it was dialed down as low as it could go and the reflector at its widest -- and spread the light more evenly under the table. It is a piece of decorative paper once used in a food session.

Continue reading "Keyboard drama (BING!)" »

Posted by Christopher Assaf at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)