Who is Marc Blake?
Marc Blake is one of Westcott’s true Ambassadors. Marc is a video producer, a photographer, a writer, musician, marketing consultant, a luthier and one of the most creative and prolific individuals we know. For those of you who remember the 70′s Platinum Recording Artists and Top Ten Hit Pop Band “Pablo Cruise” – “Whatcha Gonna Do When She Says Good-Bye,” “Love Will Find a Way,” “I Go to Rio,” “Cool Love,” well; Marc is the band’s “Cruise Director” – designs and produces merchandise for the group. You can check out one of his many websites at MarcBlake.com
One Strobelite Photo Session
Two Minutes to Shoot the Job
Three Times the Photographic Fun!
I spend a lot of time studying the work of other photographers. I’m drawn to the work of these pros whose images appear in fashion magazines and other, typically high-end, advertising publications.
I’m equally attracted to the work being done by those stuck in the world of fine art photography. “I want to be stuck there when I grow up,” I often think to myself.
Most of the work I do is generated from projects needed by my clients, but I do like to play in that “fine art” world.
I think it’s really important to understand techniques that can help you achieve your goals – photographically. I have no formal training. Therefore, I’ve always been compelled to increase my skill sets through a series of self-taught efforts. This is what works for me. This is what drove me to see what I could do with one PhotoBasics Strobelite and no modifiers. That’s what this article is (probably) about.
Going back to the fashion photography and other glamour work, what I see being produced today is evidence of what CAN be done with one light in many instances. Although it’s worth noting that this one light (source) is almost ALWAYS married into a beauty dish – white to minimize texture, silver to add punch and enhance texture for the subject. That subject might be jewelry, clothes, skin, hair or something else.
When I brought the idea of a campaign for the Westcott Top Endorsed Professionals to FJ Westcott, they liked it. They implemented the program and graciously named me is their first inductee. That meant a lot to me and I really appreciated the recognition by a company as “happening” as Westcott.
They also sent some of us (Top Endorsed Pros) their Strobelite Three Light Kit with a simple instruction that read something like, “Dear Top Pros, See what you can do with our new lighting system. Thank you!”
I took one of the lights out of the kit – using nothing but its silver reflector and attached it to a light stand. I raise the self-powered strobe lamp head to a level 6 feet high, angled down toward my subject. The light stand was nearly dead center on the subject. It was about 3 feet away on the x-axis (horizontal plane). In other words, the light stand was three feet in front of the model.
I did have a problem though that I’d needed to overcome. I had no model!
The Strobelite Three Light Kit was robust enough (gear-wise) to afford me use of the other 2 lights aimed at each side of my backdrop (a white/black collapsible background on a collapsible background stand). The background was positioned about 6 feet behind the subject. You know… the model… that didn’t exist!
It was pertinent that no light from the background illuminated the subject.
Working with clients and almost always on location, it is necessary that I get my gear set up, do my shoot, then strike my set very quickly. I’m always conscientious of how long it takes to set up my gear for a project. For example: I did a workshop at a school last month teaching 9 year olds photography. I told the class to start counting. In 57 seconds, I opened a Westcott 7′ Parabolic Umbrella, mounted it on an umbrella adapter sitting on a light stand. Inserted a Speedlight and was shooting my first images. That’s a fast setup. It took 8 seconds longer to break it down.
By the way, those 9 year old students are all shooting for Rolling Stone, Time, National Geographic and Vanity Fair now. (and I’m still teaching 9 year olds!)
Being aware of setup time, It only took a couple minutes to set up the studio configuration with nothing but a main light for my subject. All I needed now was the subject. Although I do have a foam head sticking up on a light stand that I use for a stand-in, I wanted the real deal this time. I wanted a live body, a real model.
Fortunately, my moderately-sized 20′ x 30′ studio is in my home and we had the grandkids over to spend the weekend. So I opened the studio door and yelled down the hall, “Hey Binka Binks, I need you!” Well, this was not the first time that Binks heard my cries for help. She responded, “Photos, Marc?” I answered, “Yessssss.” Binks replied, “I’m coming.” I detected no attitude. We were good.
I identified her mark by pointing to a spot on the studio floor and directed her to stand this way, turned her head that way, then adjusted her chin up, down, left and right with vocal instructions.
It’s always wise to meter your lighting before getting started. That just makes plenty of sense for any photographer trying to do a proper “professional” job. I didn’t.
But something just told me that the PhotoBasics (branded) Strobelites were going to pump out a ton of illumination. So I just started cranking things down until I got to f/16 and decided that will be a good place to start.
I took my first shot and said, “Are you kidding me?”
Binks said, “Kidding you? I didn’t even say anything, Marc!”
She shook her head and gave me that “look” than I’m used to getting from my wife and daughter most of the time. In all fairness, I suppose those looks are well deserved considering I turned our home’s great room into a photo studio.
That first shot was one-stop too hot (that means too bright if you don’t know all the “pro” buzz words yet) and I cranked my aperture to f/22 to compensate for all that light coming off the strobe. Now I could have lowered the light stand and turned the power down on the strobe head with its built-in power level adjusting feature. Sometimes, you just have to think about these options and it was obvious that if I was going to be too lazy to use a light meter, I sure as heck wasn’t going to bring the stand down to make an adjustment of the power level on the strobe head. So with f/22 dialed in, I racked out my 28-300mm Nikkor lens to variations of about 100 to 170mm and began shooting.
You can see in this contact sheet how image 1 is overexposed by one-stop.
Now that I had the exposure dialed in I noticed that my shadows were a little stronger than I wanted. I grabbed one of my 14″ Westcott illuminators which, folded, slips into its zippered six-inch sleeve. I do hope you all keep their white, silver and gold version of these cool little light modifiers handy to grab when you’re on location! Since I was zoomed in tight I asked Binks to bend her elbow and hold this mini-reflector in her right-hand up near her face. Watching the shadow side of her face, I instructed her to twist her hand up, down, left and right with more of my vocal instructions. Her moves were subtle. Once I identified the perfect magic spot that bounced just enough of the strobe head’s bright modeling light taking the edge off the darker side of her face I said, “Right there. Hold it there!”
Look at the first 3 or 4 shots on the contact sheet and notice how that heavy shadow magically disappears on the rest of the series.
Two minutes later, I was sitting at my computer importing the raw files into Adobe Lightroom. As they arrived, it didn’t take me long to identify the “money shots.”
Binks left the studio, never looking back, which made me wonder what she was so busy with in the other room causing her to not care to see the results of the session. I knew it would be some kind of creative project going on in there because “it” always is.
While Lightroom was importing the photos and rendering them for standard preview I decided to go in the other room and see what was going on.
“Are you kidding me?” (Professional photographers say that a lot). “You’re building a city, Binks.”
“Ya,” she answered nonchalantly as if I wasn’t even in the room.
I decided that since real cities are lit in the daytime by one light source (even though it’s 93,000,000 miles away) that I could use one strobe light to do the same thing. I grabbed my main from the studio, brought it in the room and aimed it toward the ceiling to create a giant white bounce light in order to illuminate Binksville, USA. Try to find that on Google maps!
The light was gorgeous! I’ve been “the photographer” on a number of TV sets and the light is always gorgeous. This felt the same way. Check out the quality of light on these raw unmodified snapshots.
Side Note: I know what I’ll be using for Thanksgiving dinner this year (and bouncing off the ceiling).
As excited as I was to see these gorgeous one light source scenes, I hurried back to my post production office anxious to work with the one-light portraits.
I mentioned earlier that I had already spotted my favorites from my two-minute session. I brought the first image into Photoshop.
Notice the subtle shadows from the eyelashes with the high (almost) centered light source. Notice also, the butterfly pattern shadow under the nose. With a tiny bit of adjustment this could easily be a “Hollywood glamour” style.
Knowing that I would only annoy my wife and daughter by turning Binks into one of my typically overly produced porcelain skin doll-like extremely white-eyed images, I decided that I would only do a little bit of sharpening in the eyes with the unsharp mask, some subtle color correction and call it a day for this image.
Now that I had done the honorable thing with my family obliged due diligence in post, I was free! It was time for the artist in me to take control. Nothing could stop me now. It was time to run with the wind like a wild mustang soaring on the plains of Montana. So, in Photoshop, I started playing with the background by creating a bit of a painterly effect. I followed that by using a series of about $673,000 worth of plug-in filters made by various software manufacturers to tweak this image to this copperized portrait. So, 1000′s and 1000′s of layers later I submit the following.
… and now with no dignity left whatsoever I can conclude this session of show and “tale” with this bit of heavily prejudiced opinion on lighting techniques.
We hang on every word of every pro with every technique and configuration of every piece of gear you can get your hands on. Well, I do anyway. I really don’t know what you do. I do know that when Gale Tattersall lights the set of TV’s hit show “House” he does create magic with the often VERY elaborate light sets. I also know that he can bring out the eyes on Hugh Laurie with the masterful touch of the best in the industry. So, if you’re going to have attitude and give me a “look,” FINE! I guess there is something to be said for complex lighting setups. So study away and buy all that darn gear. [I did]
All I am saying is give one light a chance. Everybody’s talking about modifiers, illumination, hibernation, integration, reflectors, flags, scrims and jims, softboxes, gobos… All I am saying is give one light a chance.
… and if you do, there will be a catch light, let it be. Hey you, don’t make it drab. Take a Strobelite and make it better. Remember to raise it over their head, than like I said, your pics will be brighter Brighter, BRIGHTER, B R I G H T E R … AHHHHHHH … na na na na, Hey you!
So there you have it, as I lay before you in word with the tongue of a master and the skill of a hack. However, there are two very important things that you can learn from this article:
- There can be a generous amount of bliss with the photographic simplicity using one light source.
- Tomorrow I’ll likely completely change my mind on everything I said in this article and go back to the more elaborate set ups as illustrated in the image below.
I welcome your questions and comments. I don’t really mean that but it was the right thing to say.
Feel free to reach out to me by sending e-mail to: m@marcblake.com
