A Little News

If you ever want a good challenge in life just teach someone else a principle and see how quickly you have to live it yourself. After writing a post last week about not cheating yourself on any assignment, no matter how meaningless it may seem to you, I had the chance to employ my own good advice a couple of days ago. There are a couple of things that our newspaper is positively fixated on and crepe myrtles are one of those things. I have shot more photos of crepe myrtles than I care to remember, much less count. I am not sure why we are so in love with this bush, or tree, or shrub or whatever it is, but we certainly pay an enormous amount of attention to it. Now if I were a maple tree, for instance, I think I would write a letter to the editor to complain that the crepe myrtle was dominating the news coverage but, alas, I am a mere human and not a maple tree.

I got an assignment on Thursday to shoot a picture of a well trimmed crepe myrtle in one of the city’s parks at sunset. They wanted a beautiful picture of one of the bushes to go with a story about how to properly trim them. Apparently there is such a thing as crepe murdering which happens when someone gets a bit carried away with the shears. I have never actually heard of charges being filed but, you never know. We do seem to love our crepe myrtles here. I digress. My photo assignment was to shoot a pretty picture of one of the bushes that had been properly pruned. Thursday was a gray, rainy day. Friday too was a gray rainy day. I planned to wait until Saturday to shoot the picture but it turns out the editors wanted to see something by late Friday to plan Sunday’s page. Now I am stuck with a bad day with bad light and when I get to the location, there is no place to shoot one of the bushes against a sunset sky even if there had been a sunset sky to shoot against.

This would have been a real easy assignment to just do a drive by on and and hand in a proof. However, remembering that I had been preaching to you guys about not cheating yourself, I found myself trapped by my own instruction. Having no other options, I pulled out all three strobes that I have and decided upon an artistic approach with the lighting. Sometimes, light can really save your bacon when you have no other options. I decided on a side light/back light set up with the back light at a low angle to get it behind some other plants to screen the lens from flare. I worked three or four different set ups altering my basic lighting scheme a little to accommodate the various angles I had to shoot from. I actually came away with a photo that I was fairly proud of and had three usable options to turn in for publication.

Technically, I set my strobes on full power for most of the shots. I kept one strobe down on 1/2 power to vary my lighting ratios and I also varied the strobe to subject distance to help break up the ratios as well. I used a -1 compensation on the available light to help the bushes pop from the background which was not helping me at all. I actually left the assignment satisfied that I had given it my very best effort and that was worth the whole process of doing the job. What shooting something like this does is actually hone my skills when I have to set up outdoor lighting on an assignment down the road. If you remember what coach Brown said in the earlier post you may not see the results this season but in the years to come you hard work will pay off. Now if I can just get some pub for those maple trees……

About the photos: These are two of the variations I was most pleased with. On the first shot, I had one strobe to the camera left at full power and two strobes to the camera right. The strobe closest to the camera was toned down a bit to 1/2 power and the strobe to camera right farther from the camera was on full power and aimed more toward the background. On the shot with the red bench, the foreground light was toned down to about 1/8th power while the two strobes illuminating the bushes were both on full power.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my, especially about the crepe myrtles versus the maple trees, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.