I've got to be one of the luckiest persons on earth! Way back in June, I received a wonderful email from Nikon asking me if I would be interested in being involved with a project. I had was thrilled to have received that email, the project entailed me being video taped shooting 3 different scenarios for the Learn & Explore online training at Nikon USA website.
My first contact with Nikon came back about 14 years ago. I was in NY visiting clients and decided to make an appointment to show my work to Nikon. From that meeting 14 years ago, I've had minimal contact with Nikon. I was once featured on their website with a article about my work. Two years ago, I took part in a video interview with fellow photographer Steve Vaccariello while visiting Photo Plus in NY.
This project involved 3 separate photographic techniques; bounce, day for night and artificial sunlight.
The first photograph I'll discuss here will be the Saxophone player. This photo was taken on a street corner in NY in the middle of the afternoon in open shade. I was given several choices of doorways to select from, the production team of John Sepe was absolutely super. I selected these doors because of the color and the fact that they would be in open shade at 1:30 PM. I knew this because I use a software program (TPE) which tracks the sun movement.
In this first photo you can see the ambient exposure, this was what the camera metering thought was a correct exposure. As I tell my student when I teach, your camera is only a light meter, the exposure meter is between your ears. When I look at the indicated "correct" exposure the camera gives, I think to myself... this doesn't look like night.
I than drive down the exposure using both shutter speed and aperture to what I would consider an under exposed image looking more like night. I'm not moving my shutter speed above my native sync speed of 1/250 of a second, because I want full efficiency from my speedlights. If I move into high speed sync, I loose a tremendous amount of power from the speedlights.
Needless to say, I'm delighted to appear on Nikon's radar screen once again. This was a substantial project for me, one with high visibility for me and I hope it leads to more projects with them down the road.
5 comments:
Nice night-like results indeed, cool shot and nice tip for setup / settings, thanks for!
David, wonderful execution of technique as usual. I always enjoy your updates on lighting...wish there were more!
David, great information once again! I always enjoy your updates on lighting and the ideas they generate for my own work.
That last image in the post is superb, beautiful lighting and tones. Is it just the two flashes we can see in the set up shots or did you use some on-axis type fill?
No additional lighting was used. The fill is controlled by my shutter speed. Remember, shutter speed controls the ambient light. DT
Post a Comment