A Little News

Once in a while I get an assignment that really allows some flexibility with light. I got a lifestyles assignment this past week that fit the bill exactly. The story is on a young man who wrote and starred in a low-budget, feature length motion picture. The movie was about a guy who was tormented by visions of a murdered girl but the problem is you never know for sure if the guy is really tormented by an apparition or if his over the top drug habit is causing his psychosis. My assignment was to get some photos while he was being interviewed; however, I saw an opportunity to make something a little different and a little more dramatic than an interview photo.

The reporter, Danielle Komis Palmer (the lovely bride of my colleague Jonathan Palmer), and I met the guy in the downtown area where they shot one of the scenes. The situation was not promising because it was an alley in the middle of the day. At night it would have been a great location. After asking a few questions we found that part of the movie was shot in his grandmother’s home a few miles away so we moved there. There was a hallway in the house that played a role the movie so we had our location. I recruited our reporter to stand in as the ghost of the girl and we have all the makings of a nightmare.

The only real technical problem now is I have a very limited number of gels in my possession. I chose red over either green, blue or yellow to use on the background light. I placed this light at the end of the hall facing the camera to provide a backlight for my ghost. You can’t have folks recognizing your reporter you know! I only used one other light and that was placed on a stand just about two feet from the subject and snooted with about an 8 inch snoot. This light was aimed to just catch his face. I tried it bare and gelled but I knew our printing press could not reproduce the gelled light so I went with an unfiltered source here. The two lights were fired with Pocket Wizards. The final touch is actually a happy accident. I did my test shot a 1/320th second instead of the camera max sync speed of 1/250th second. The faster shutter blacked out the top of the frame and I liked it enough to just leave it that way. I thought it added a brooding quality to the image.

The only trouble, if you want to call it trouble, was the guy had just gotten his hair cut. From the trailer I saw I knew he had really long hair and I could see those eyes staring out from behind strands of hair. Alas, he had gotten a hair cut just a couple of days before the shoot. After I nailed down the psychotic portrait, I shot a few normal interview type photos to round out the coverage but I didn’t think we would need them. Andrea Brunty, our Living Today editor, did a very nice job displaying the portrait with a six column photo. She extended the dark and red areas the full depth of the page and inlaid the article and additional art in that frame for a very nice package.

You can call this assignment an exercise in creative lighting. These things don’t come along too often but I love to do them whenever they do. The famous American landscape photographer Ansel Adams had a technique he called previsualization. This allowed him to see the finished print in his mind before he ever exposed the frame. When he had a good previsualization, he applied the appropriate technique to reach the final image that he saw in his mind. That is a good exercise for you to do too. Approach a situation like this one with a final image in mind and then pursue it until you either find it can’t be done or you find a better approach. See in your mind and make it happen. That is really cool. I must admit that what I first see in my mind is seldom exactly what I end up with but the process allows me to exercise maximum creativity and it forces me to think through the process from beginning to end before I ever shoot a frame. Obviously this works only when you are setting up a shot. For your normal photojournalism, you have to go with the flow a whole lot more.

Of the three photos with this post, the first one is the one we ran in the paper. I tried some Photoshop effects on the others and the last one shows the blue gel I used on the face. Bizarre effect with the PS stuff but still probably beyond the reproduction limits of the press. There you have the psychotic portrait although some may debate who was more psychotic, the photographer or the subject!

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily and Gary Cosby Jr. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.