It is important to be flexible and hunt for opportunities where others see constraints.
When Vicki and I got together last week to do a series of fashion and portrait shots we had no stylist, no make-up artist, and no hair stylist. There is rather negative attitude held by some that in order to take engaging photos you need a full entourage of specialists. I have to disagree. All it means is that you have to be realistic, and understand what is possible with the resources at hand.
Clearly high-end beauty shots were out of reach - you need a skilled make-up artist for those. There was no point us trying anything that required precision hair styling either. So we threw ourselves the other way entirely, doing things that would deliberately mess the hair and work the entire body. We used the constraints as a creative tool.
Motion freeze employs a combination of fast shutter speeds and strobes to capture a rarified moment in time. Almost everyone has seen pictures of balloons been punctured by bullets and water drops splashing upon hard surfaces. I wanted to try something in the same spirit with Vicki.
Freezing movement is not quite as straight forward as simply cracking out the strobes. Indeed, there is a common belief that flash is near instantaneous, and that when a pulse fires, it reaches maximum intensity immediately. Sadly this is not the case. Each pulse lasts a finite amount of time. Its duration varies with intensity. Brighter pulses last longer than weaker ones, and the bulb requires a certain amount of time to reach full intensity.
For regular portraiture and fashion shots, this is not a problem - the model poses quietly and all is well. As soon as she starts leaping in the air and spinning around though, the realities of the finite strobe pulse begin to manifest themselves.
Short of investing in very expensive, top of the range strobes - which can easily cost north of £10k - there are other options. The easiest way to shorten the pulse is to simply lower the power. Yet the ramifications are many. Does one compensate by opening up the iris, narrowing the depth of field? Or does one use a higher ISO setting, thereby increasing noise? Should a wider angle be employed to claw back some depth of field? The lower the strobe intensity, the more prevalent the ambient light; can this too be kept under control?
Fundamentally, the less light one has to work with, the greater the compromises.
More photos from the shoot are included in my post on shadow and silhouette.
Thanks to Adam Orzechowski for technical advice.
