Night

This is going to be a shorter blog as I am in a hurry to get to the desert to shoot and think about putting together some newer web pages later in the month or early February. What I want to discuss here is techniques, or creative decisions made in the studio, and how similar visual results can be created on location. Accordingly, we are going to compare two photos, and discuss how these images were created. Though the visual outcomes are similar, the path to these outcomes could not be more divergent.

The first photo I want us to look at is the image of the underside of a mushroom that opens this blog above. In this photo, the white underside of the mushroom was placed on a darker slab of stone. Accordingly, the contrast level of the photo was built into the image before even deciding on the light quality I wanted. After that, the only creative decisions I had to make were lens, composition, depth of field, and then either position of my lights to skim the mushroom, or wait for the late afternoon sun. In this case, I waited on the late afternoon sun, figuring I could always light it with strobes, if I was not happy with the results. As it turned out, the sun worked just fine, and this photo looks like a mushroom mysteriously illuminated by moonlight at night.

Moonrise by Ansel Adams

The second photo I want to discuss here is from an editorial project where I was hired to photograph different plants that are emblematic of regions of the US on location. The art direction on the project was to be graphically minimal, but tonally pretty open, so I shot all of the needed plants in both color, and black and white. The idea was to create "still lives on location" as opposed to landscapes. While shooting in the deserts of southeastern California and southern Arizona, I quickly noted that the contrast range between the ocotillo and saguaro cactus with the sky was pretty flat in the early/mid morning conditions I was shooting in, especially in black and white. Accordingly, I began to experiment with how to turn a 9AM sky into midnight, basing my initial approach on the use of of polarizers or red filters in daylight conditions based upon the landscapes of Ansel Adams. In general, polarizers darken a clear blue sky about a stop and a half, while a dark red filter drops the sky down about three stops.

As it turned out, I actually liked the results best when simultaneously using both the polarizing filter and deep red. The skies were reduced to close to total blackness while the plants were rendered exactly how they looked to the naked eye. Using this approach, I was able to create a night like look on location that was extremely similar to the still life photo taken in the studio under controlled conditions.