Ken Knoll Photography

Word-of-mouth marketing works! This nice guy here is a friend of a friend. He was planning to send out applications starting next week, so he needed a nice portrait – pronto, por favor! He wasn’t too happy with the portrait that a professional photographer had taken of him the day before. Following the advice of that friend he stumbled upon this blog and really liked what I did for those guys. Fortunately, I had all my equipment at the university that day (I’ll tell you why very soon), so we arranged a spontaneous shooting at the nearby university building.

For this shoot, I was going to try different setups. As you know, I like to add a little structure or a pattern to the background to spice things up a little. Yet, due to the comments I received about the last pictures, I decided to do one shot with a more classic background. For that, I had the model stand in front of a plain dark gray wall (actually, a door), aimed one flash on the background to add a little gradient and lit him with my selfmade umbrella softbox from top left and bounced some light back with a reflector from the right. Again, I added a cardboard-gridded flash on camera right, from behind his face to add a little highlight on his jawline. This is the picture that he liked the most and that he will use to send out his applications.

The other shot is more like my “classic” style – a nice pattern of some stairs, softbox top right, reflector from the left. Even if he’s not going to use it, it’s great to have a variety to chose from. And that’s what makes me different to most professional photographers: Even though the whole shoot took about 30 minutes, I had about 90 pictures in the can, meaning that at least a few of them had the right expression – it’s just a matter of statistics.

Here are some portraits that I did for Jerry, who asked me to take some “nice” pictures of him after he saw my new World Cup portraits and liked the “look”. Well, of course I said yes: I would never want to miss out on a chance to get some more practice, especially when I can add a little light ? la David Hobby and test some new equipment.

The day was beautiful, which means it was beautiful to everyone who either doesn’t take pictures with small flashes or to owners of some serious high-power flashes. Why? Well, I guess my model for the day kinda liked the bokeh of my 50mm lens (the only agreeable lens that I own), so I was definitely going for low aperture values. Of course, I coulda just placed him in a shaded area and snap some quick and easy portraits with the ambient light (which is basically what I do with the World Cup portraits). Too easy – I wanted to add light. Overpower sunlight. Have control over the lighting – just because. Being a studious reader of Strobist (who, ironically, posted a new story dealing with this issue a couple of days later) I knew that there are several ways to stop down the environment so that your small, weak flashes can actually overpower the ambient.

So I was prepared. I took a crappy slow lens (35-135 f/4-5.6), screwed the polarizing filter on to kill another few stops (when at the right angle to the sun), set the ISO down to 50 and picked a nice location with lots of trees that should give some shade. However, once we were at the location and I finally metered the ambient through the lens, I realized that the number-one measure to avoid the issue (go to a shaded area) worked so well that I didn’t need anything else. Switched back to the 50, and I could even go for apertures around f/5 with times around 1/200s (can’t sync any faster than that with my camera) and had the flash on 1/2 power. This way I achieved my goal number one for the day: control the light.

My second goal for the day was to test my new DIY umbrella softbox. As you might know, I’ve worked with cheapo umbrellas so far and I’ve been pretty happy with them. It’s really easy with them to get light onto the subject. However, it’s really hard keeping light off anything else, which is not a problem in big spaces, but it sure is one in small rooms. To put it in Joe McNally’s words: The hardest thing about lighting is NOT lighting. The standard solution in the biz is, of course, the softbox. Soft, yet directional light that doesn’t go everywhere. Being on a budget (as usual), I decided to DIY one. I found this beautiful tutorial which gave me exactly what I was looking for: I want everything to fit in my gear bag, so it had to be foldable like an umbrella – just like the Westcott Apollo, yet, $150 less cost. Got me a reflective umbrella for the cheap, did the magic and there it was, my ticket to directional light. I was pretty happy with my preliminary tests that I did with this handsome model I had flown in for the night, but of course, this baby was waiting for real action.

Well, the third goal I had in mind was to get the light up high, away from the classic 45?-camera right. Also, I wanted to test several positions to find out how to feather the light (i.e., turn away the softbox center from the subject so that not the hottest area, but the soft edge hits the subject). So I had the box up high camera left – and I was a little unhappy with the results. Too much on the hair, not enough in the face. So I threw in a small gold reflector camera-right (held by my lighting assistant for the day) to get some nice, warm tones. Also, I put a half cut of CTO on the flash and balanced for daylight. The reflector saved this setup and I was very happy with the soft light and that little sparkle in the eyes. I allowed some of the ambient light to mix with my main light – this way I didn’t need a lot of bang from the softbox, just about enough to create some nice skin tones. Being able to improvise definitely seems to be a crucial skill.

For my personal portfolio, I wanted some “moody” and more dramatic shots after we were done with the two other light setups. Normally, I like my subjects to give me (or my camera) a big smile – you know, my standard “nice” portraits. With this shot I was going for something with more “character”, like the Johnny Cash shot from Michael Grecco. So I put a cardboard grid on my flash and had him look right into the light that I placed 4 ft away. I like the tight hotspot and the nice falloff. I might become a grid fan – when used on the “right” face, it’s a nice look. It’s certainly not a classic beauty light, but, fortunately, some faces can definitely take it. Overall, a great learning experience!