Painting With Light

It was a sultry night of karaoke jazz in the University of Missouri photography studio in Columbia, Missouri on Monday, October 22, 2007. Josh Bickel, who played the trumpet in his high school band, “always wanted to play the saxophone”.

Critique

I enjoyed this assignment. As always, the hardest thing for me is coming up with good content, and then getting that idea out of my head and technically right on camera. Basically, we just played around with the light, getting used to our light sources and how much output they had. It was fun to see what came up on the camera, but frustrating too because to paint the sax, I had to be dead on the bell and perfect at painting every time: Would the light be in the frame of the camera, look natural, and be ascetically pleasing as far as how much light was burned in. (Groping around in the dark was the biggest challenge, I think.) But the more takes we did, the more we began to get the hang of the effects that could be done with light.

I was trying to get a picture that showed some sort of motion, to portray the emotional side of jazz. After looking at my outtakes on my computer, I realized that I had a pink gel on my flash (from our previous shoot of me on point shoes). I didn’t think about how that would look on Josh’s skin.

For my select, Josh started at the left side of the frame. I popped the flash once on the left side of the room about 10 feet away. Then he moved to the middle right of the frame and bent down. I popped the flash again at the same distance. And then came over and painted light with a reading light (with a pink gel) around the bell, creating swirls going out. I think my only gripe about my select is the pink gel muddied his skin and brown sweater. I should have taken off the gel. Also, I wish that the backdrop were a little blacker on the left side of the picture between the two saxes. The picture also feels a little under exposed to me. I had dialed down the flash to 1/16 because I felt the light output was too bright. But I think 1/8 or ¼ probably would’ve been better. My select was shot at an ISO of 500 and F8. Shutter put on bulb.