Ken Knoll Photography

Hey folks,

I had such a great time shooting with Kevin! He is, hands down, one of the coolest guys I personally know. You know, one of those guys that you immediately feel at ease with. I met him in my gym last year and he became my trainer. Ever since he’s chasing me through the studio, but I just never get to curse him ’cause he’s just too nice a guy! I learned that, among the many other talents he has, he’s also a musician. Of course I had to take some nice pictures of him. Actually, as my facebook friends might have seen, a couple of weeks back I had already helped him out with some shots of his work (see my Commercial gallery – since there’ll be more work following this up this project, I might blog about it soon).

This time, I wanted to do something for my personal portfolio. So I went with something simple and classy. Just one light in most cases so I could focus on the subject and the mood rather than on the complex lighting. I put it to a quite extreme angle so that every slight turn of the head resulted in a different look. Also, I felt that it matched the mood. I played some music and we were having a good time shooting and grooving. What really made the shots for me was the microphone – it’s a Shure 55, a classic model back from the time when Elvis was rockin’. I borrowed it from the super awesome, friendly and competent guys at Musikhaus Crusius in Darmstadt -thanks so much, I really appreciate it!

Sit back and enjoy – do you feel the music?

Before I hop in the tech stuff I promised in my last posts, I want to share some pictures that I took last weekend testing my new softbox – it’s 28′ by 28′ and I love it. Super smooth, yet directed light thanks to a recessed front.

Unfortunately, due to the spontaneity of the test shoot, I had forgotten to take spare batteries, so I only flashed a couple of frames. I switched to available light (wow, that stuff still works!) and took some more quick portraits. I still only have my trusty 50 on my camera, so like in my last shooting I tried to find alternative perspectives and move around more while shooting. “Do the reshoot now”, as Joe McNally always says.

There is this saying that somewhat goes like the shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot. In my case, since I fortunately don’t have kids yet, that applies to my family: I never had the time to take nice pictures of them. My brother has been asking me to take some pictures of him for way too long – so for his 28th birthday I finally agreed to take some nice portraits of him.

I will save the techie stuff about these pictures for another post so I can focus on the thought process behind the portraits here – so stay tuned for the next post, tech folks!

I need to elaborate on my brother a bit to give you an idea about the kind of pictures we had in mind. He’s without a doubt the most creative guy I know of – coming up with new ideas is as natural to him as breathing. He’s an entrepreneur – of course. The ideas that rumble through his head are often business related, so he’s constantly starting new businesses. I think, right now he’s working on at least three different startup ideas. On top of that, he’s got a job many people would kill for. Oh, also he’s a great friend and a good listener. Ok now, convey all that in a couple of portraits…

For the first set, I scouted a location that was supposed to reflect the business side. Also, it should be modern, chic and stylish. To be honest, I had never spent as much time on getting a location – including phone calls to the right persons and making friends with the security personal. But I think it was well worth it.

I had written up a small shooting script with the ideas I wanted to realize. So I pretty much knew what I was going to shoot beforehand and I could focus on more important things like my model. We started off with a couple of portraits on a bridge inside an office building. Pictures he could use for his new job (they want pictures of their employees for their magazine) or as editorial material in articles or blogs.

My personal goal for this shooting, however, was not to only do my standard 3/4 headshot routine, but to choose different angles and play around with space, perspective and sight lines. So I got down on the floor (and cleaned up the dirt with my t-shirt) and took some whole-body shots as well. I really loved this bridge and I’m happy with the way he interacts with the location – kind of like: Hey, I’m CEO, but I’m down to earth. Doing business without ties, literally.

After the bridge shots, we went to a small staircase with wonderful glass stairs that were lit up by neon tubes – I’m saving some of those shots (which were among my personal favorites) up so I can illustrate the tech stuff in the next post. The mood in these pictures was the same, some more serious, some friendly shots with a chic background.

More pictures in part 2 of this post.

Finishing up on the office building location I wanted to do some lost-in-space-kind-of pictures. So I had him sit down on the couch with his laptop. The idea here was to show that his professional life pretty much revolves around the web and geek stuff. The bird’s eye view picture we did afterwards was a lot of fun – I kinda had to yell my commands downstairs. My idea for this shot was to show him not as a loner, but as somebody who is unique. I let the floor go dark (happy with the way this came out!) by putting only one light on him (more about this in the following tech post).

On our way back, he surprised me with a great photo idea – surprising not only because the visual concept is really cool, but also because it does require some courage to set up a photo shoot in the middle of the city with a thousand people walking by every minute. I set my camera on an improvised tripod (I normally don’t bring one to my shootings because I prefer the non-static shots) and we let it roll. A couple of pops from a flash during the exposure helped to make him stand out from the moving crowd – no photoshop in here!

Finishing up we had a coffee in a cozy coffee bar. There were candles on the table, a red leather couch and a brick wall – so I went with that mood, lit him with just one light (like in 99% of all cases) and took some pictures while we were enjoying our coffees. A two-minute deal.

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this shooting – and how happy I was when I looked on that small screen on the back of my camera. Sometimes you just know when you have nailed a shot. I’m extremely happy with the pictures and I had a great time processing them (even though it took a couple of weeks).

Ever had that feeling that, if you had said nothing at all, things might have turned out better? Or even, if you had said less, you could have achieved a better outcome? Well, I have. I like to talk, and as they say, talk is fight, right? No. It shouldn’t be, at least from my perspective. The reason is simple. When you talk, you can’t listen at the same time, and without listening, you cannot learn. One of the many goals I have for this year is to learn more – listen more. And for that, I probably need to shut up more. Also, shutting up more makes sure that saying something that, with more consideration would have never been uttered, stays where it should. Obviously, shut up may sound a little harsh, but I think it conveys the idea rather clearly. All powerful mantras are simple, n’est-ce pas?

Well, as a friendly reminder (and, not to forget, for the fun of doing it) I decided to transform these two wise words into a photograph. Featuring myself as the model. Here’s my trial-and-error thought and work process of creating this image: I had a backlit situation in mind, so I set up two lights in the back aiming at the camera. Nice rim on the cheeks, positioning corrected. Got rid of the snoots after some test shots – the flare looks stupid with the snoot and zooming in the heads to 85mm did a good-enough job to control the beam spread. Alright, now, the background should still look dark, I want those two lights come out of dark like car headlights in the night. However, my face needs some light. OK, softbox camera up right to my face. Damn – I don’t have a boom, so the light falls on the background (which is the bamboo room divider in my smallish room). When I take back some of the power, the background stays dark. But my face, too. Idea: Handheld reflector from above – catch some of that background light and direct it to my face. That worked. A little too well, though – the background caught some light again. So far, 12 minutes spent on the shoot – that’s enough. Photoshop will have to fix the rest. And I’ll buy that boom. Soon.

Every once in a while, my colleagues from the company that I currently work for ask me to bring my camera to take some snaps of some event that takes place at our site, mostly speeches, presentations, get-togethers, you get the idea. Even though I am not a big fan of documentary style pictures, I jump on the occasion whenever I can. The downside is, and I guess I am hurting nobody’s feelings here, that these pictures are not really the kind of pictures that I normally like to take. The not-as-beautiful office location is dimly lit, the use of flash mostly not welcome due to the distraction, sometimes even the shutter sound of my 5D is already perceived as a major annoyance. It’s not that everybody’s waiting for the photog to show up and let him do his thing, it’s more like I sneak in, squeeze a few frames until I get annoyed glances and sneak back out five seconds later. And most pictures reflect that. But they document the event for other colleagues. So, whatever, I’m making somebody happy.

However, after the last event I felt like making myself happy as well. So I came back to my desk with just my camera and two bare speedlights and I felt like composing some pictures just for myself and the fun of it. Since my co-workers weren’t gonna move away from their computers I had all the freedom I needed to prop whatever piece of equipment around them. Since I didnt have stands or light modifiers I looked around for alternatives. What’s a good softbox for the key light? Bingo, bounce some light against the flip chart. Hair light? Put the other bare speedlight on the book shelf. Flare? Admittedly, I got lucky here. The sun was setting right at this time and cast a wonderful color into the office room. Popped two, three test frames to balance against the sunlight and, to quote David Hobby again, Robert was my father’s brother. Lucky for me, my co-workers were playing along nicely (even though it must have felt weird to have that flip chart stand 1ft away from their nose….). Oh, how I love this kind of distraction.

It’s the first weekend in a long while that is completely free of any obligations and todos – I handed in a major paper at my university and my upcoming final thesis is not going to start before september. What a great feeling! I was planning on doing some location scouting in the region. I heard that there is a real sand dune in the middle of a small town nearby (I honestly don’t have the slightest clue as to why or how it ever got there), so I was going to check it out. And, while I’m there, do some nice, quick and easy portraits.

Not alotta gear, just my small diy softbox with a half cut of cto to add some spice to the nice available light. The dune itself turned out to be smaller than I expected, and well, with less sand. Well, restrictions are often a good thing, ’cause they force you to be creative and work with what’s there. Speaking of which, I had the 50mm walk-zoom lens on the camera, which I almost use exclusively on my camera since I can’t afford any other lens right now – another layer of creativity jogging restriction.

So I worked with some perspectives that I don’t normally use that often (model sitting, me standing) to try out something new, we had a little fun with throwing sand and freezing it mid-air (which is surprisingly easy) and walked around on the dune to find new perspectives and backgrounds. One thing that I’m really excited about is that David Hobby, who said that you start to get the kinda-scary ability to guess exposure and power levels pretty close to the optimum, is absolutely right: It normally takes me about one to three test-images until I’m perfectly happy with the light – no flash meter, no scientific method needed.

It really is that easy: Measure the environment, decide at which level relative to your light it should be, guess the power level on the flash (depending on distance, light color, light shaper) and pop some test frames. And once you’re good to go, you can just fire away – or switch roles and let the photographer be the model.

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!