Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Since the recent release of my new Long Exposure Portraits tutorial from RGG EDU, I’ve been inundated with messages and questions relating to the light painting section.
Questions like: ‘What’s the best light painting tool to use? ‘Where can I get them?’ ‘Which ones did you use in your video?
Long exposure photography is tricky, especially in the studio when you’re trying to combine multiple light sources within a single frame that have very different brightnesses and colour temperatures etc.
So although I believe this article will be very useful to many of you, there will most certainly be others that perhaps have little to no experience with long exposure photography and as such this article might seem to brush over certain long exposure lighting ideas.
Embarrassingly a few years ago I was very vocal about how disappointed I was about some of the Nikon lenses. I’ve been using Nikon cameras and lenses for decades and although I was very pleased with the image quality and colour rendition their cameras produced, I strongly considered jumping the Nikon ship in search of crisper, cleaner looking lenses. In fact I was so close to leaving Nikon a couple of years ago that I went through the process of hiring and testing other brands to see if other manufacturers could deliver what Nikon could not.
For those of us that have dealt with colour in any way digitally in the last decade, we are unfortunately all too familiar with the dreaded colour banding issues. If you’re not sure what colour banding is, then it’s the visual ‘stepping’ of colour that happens in digital files.
It happens a lot and it can happen for any number of reasons. The most common scapegoats for colour banding are usually poor colour depth in our cameras, aggressive compression algorithms with online sites and any number of other technical failings. Although all of these are often part of the problem, I see one other major culprit of severe colour banding and that’s lighting.
This will thankfully be a quick little technique on how to fix an issue that can be incredibly infuriating. This discolouration issue I’m referring to arrises when you’re using the dodge and burn retouching technique and the frustrating part is that it only presents itself once you’ve finished doing all the retouching.
Colour grading tends to specifically refer to the colouring of video and in photography, we often refer to this as colour toning, but whatever you’re happier calling it, this process of making a conscious decision to apply a specific colour-look to an image in post-production is an incredibly powerful tool.
I know it’s extremely trendy right now to say that ‘one light is all you need’, and although in certain situations this is true, a of the time extra lights will likely look better, or at the very least make your life easier.
Now before you rush to the comments section to proclaim the purity and simplicity of a black and white headshot being lit by a single light as being the very essence of great photography, I’ll just add that I agree. Sometimes, complicated lighting and over-lit portraits can certainly get in the way of a subject but conversely, a more visually interesting shot can also be achieved with the addition of more lights to draw in and engage a viewer.
Like many things in life, there’s no right or wrong way to learn photographic lighting… but I do believe there are easy ways and hard ways to not only understand it, but more importantly get better at it.
I think every creative discipline evolves, but photography sees more significant jumps in its evolution due to it being so uniquely tied to technology. Every frame we capture is taken with a camera and that camera technology is evolving on a daily basis. Every frame we then have to develop is primarily produced through software and that too evolves on a daily basis. The tools that we use to create our work are constantly changing but I feel that the way we learn some of the techniques associated with these tools do not.
I treat my camera like I treat a car, it has one core job and that’s what I use it for with very little interest or need for the peripheral add-ons and shiny new features that may also be part of that product. A car gets you from point A to B and everything else is fairly superfluous, sure there are often quality-of-life features but when it comes down to it, we buy a car for transport not seat warmers and illuminated mirrors in the sun visor. A camera, like a car, is a tool.
Shiny skin in photos is becoming more and more popular all the time and whether it’s for sports, beachwear or even regular fashion, that metallic skin sheen is being seen everywhere. Long gone are the days where we’re desperately trying to matt-down skin to avoid the shine, now makeup artists are regularly being asked to produce the ‘dewy’ skin look.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
Find my work on My website or follow me on Facebook or My page
