ProPhoto365

Day 23

It’s been a strange week for me in my full time job and I’ve not been able to progress the portrait commission. I’ll hopefully get that sorted this coming week though.

In the meantime I thought I’d talk a little about my course I was on a week back at the Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers convention in Hammersmith. As is the way with many courses at professional trade shows they are often not well documented as to what they will be about and what you will learn from attending them. So I chose to just do one that was being led by people whose photography I like, in this case Damian McGillicudy and the Yerbury’s. The course seemed to have a lot of professional studio owners and photographers on it and I was struck at how few seemed to understand how studio or off camera lighting worked, ie differences in light with different modifiers or distances from subject. I was also stuck by how different the lecturers approach to the technicalities were but how in common they were in communication with their models.

Damian for instance had a bit of a rant about folk who do not use light meters when setting up their lighting. Trevor Yerbury insisted he never used a light meter and saw no reason to. From my perspective though I could see they are both correct. Trevor Yerbury shoots almost entirely with available daylight or, at a push, one strobe/flash. In that situation a flash meter does seem rather over the top. The histogram on your digital camera can tell you what you need to know about the exposure in those situations. McGillicudy uses multiple strobes, often with gels and modifiers and balances exposures for effect. In that situation being able to measure each light source individually to set relative levels quickly and efficiently seems a very sensible idea. So sensible in fact I went and bought a Sekonic meter the next day. When playing with it I found that I regularly underexposed many images when I was using multiple flash units. Not a good idea if you want some latitude when you’re doing post processing.

The interaction with their models was interesting though. Each one had distinct ideas as to the initial style of pose they asked their model to create. Then they would both just ask for slight alterations to tilt of head, position of hands etc until they had created the look they wanted. Often these would be quite small alterations to the models figure but the end result would be worth it. Neither one had a scattergun approach to photography. They were methodical and diligent in their pursuit. That was pretty interesting for me to see.

The Yerbury’s have now posted up a few images on their blog. Quite amazing what you can do with one light.