Shooting Without A Net

This month marks our first full year as Robertson ImageCraft. We spent the bulk of 2009 meeting and taking pictures of some really nice people, learning and refining our photography skills and, generally, becoming photographers. It’s been an interesting ride so far and we look forward to the challenges and experiences that 2010 holds.

There is one picture (actually, a series of pictures) that kinda started this whole thing. You see, Stacey and I have seven kids and you can imagine how difficult it is to get all of us at a “professional photographer’s” at the same time. One kid is all grown up with her own life now, two are busy high school students and the rest have their own crazy schedules with sports, choirs and music lessons. It’s a little nuts around here sometimes. Anyway, we decided to set up a makeshift studio in our garage and utilize a little photographer’s trick called “North Light.

North Light is just that – light that comes from the North. Mid-day, virtually any North facing window or doorway becomes a soft, smooth, almost shadowless light source, perfect for portraits. Since our garage door faces North, it seemed perfect. We hung a black backdrop on the East wall and, one by one, sat the kids down to grab a portrait with our little point-and-shoot digital camera. Everything went fine until I started shooting my oldest daughter. As I was clicking away, she made a funny face. We stopped, looked and laughed, and then we brought everyone back in for a funny face shot.

The finished image has generated more comments and compliments than anything we’ve done in the three years since. It’s hardly a masterwork, but it is unique, well lit and very “us”. Since that time, we’ve bought “real” equipment, “real” lights, have something more like a “real” studio and I don’t think we’ve shot in the garage again.

Enter Darrel Campbell

You may not know my friend Darrel Campbell, but he’s a screenwriter, director and producer. Starz Family is playing his “Redemption of the Ghost” this month and “The Pistol” is something of a cult favorite in basketball circles. He was in town the other day and called to see if we had time to shoot some headshots for a book cover or something. I said yes, but only had about an hour before the afternoon kid run. That meant I needed a quickie setup. It was a sunny day and I immediately thought of the garage shoot, so up went the black backdrop. I grabbed a small reflector for backlight and was thinking how cool it would be to do some “pure” photography again. Yeah, whatever.

I think we got about 10 keepers out of the several dozen we shot. Not because of him, but because I basically forgot how to shoot with natural light. To me, shooting with strobes and speedlites is easy – it freezes the moment and makes it simple to create razor-sharp images. It’s what we’ve been doing almost exclusively for many months now, but they have a certain “look”. I was going for a more natural look and I guess that was a problem. You see, when shooting with North Light, the iris is wide open and the shutter speed is very low. If you don’t hold the camera rock-steady, it’s easy to create blurry images. And I did… many of them.

On the bright side (pun intended), we did get a handful of very nice headshots and I promise to practice this technique before anyone else calls for a headshot session.