Chiseled Light - Fitness Photoshoot

The new year started off busy for my photography. I had 3 photoshoots within 3 weeks, two were pretty run of the mill portrait shoots. The last was a fitness photoshoot and this was the one I was really looking forward to, it would give me a chance to get more creative with my lighting. Sure you might argue that spending a few hours shooting a beautiful lady doesn't hurt either and you'd be right :)

Initially the woman contacted me through my website inquiring about how much I would charge. After thinking about it for awhile I decided to call her and tell her I would shoot it for free with the caveat that I have creative control and use of the images after (ie "time for cd" essentially). She told me she had started training really hard and even though she was a shy person she wanted to get some photos for herself while she was in peak shape. There is also a magazine called Oxygen in which people can submit photos along with a story of their journey which she was thinking of submitting some photos to. I knew right away that if I was going to do this shoot to the level I wanted to then it would be way above most sane people's budgets. My city isn't exactly flooded with jobs that interest me, a few years ago I decided that if it means shooting for free every once in a while so I can work on shoots I actually like doing then so be it.

Enough about the background, let's talk about the shoot. I had the option to shoot either at her gym or my friend's mixed martial arts gym "Way of the Dragon". Since I'd already shot there before and I knew the owner David Mah would be pretty flexible when it came to shooting times I opted to go there.

The gym is quite large with a lot of open space to work with so I decided I'd setup a roll of white seamless along one wall and then setup later in the middle so the light would fall off and give me a black background. The fitness model had also explained to me that for people who compete there are multiple classes (bodybuilding, figure, fitness, and bikini) and that she would fall into the fitness and bikini classes. In light of this we opted for two wardrobes, one being simple "Under Armour" style workout clothes and the other being a bikini. She had shown me reader submitted images in Oxygen magazine as an example of what she was after, these shots while OK were very even lighting and I didn't feel they were highlighting the toned muscles. I told her we'd start with those and make sure we got some she liked and then venture into more dramatic lighting.

Simple even lighting, two softbox umbrellas at 45° with 1:1 ratio

 We were quickly able to get a variety of shots that looked like they'd be quite at home with the photos she showed me from the magazine. She was quite photogenic so this was easy.

As I eased into more dramatic lighting I simply moved both softbox umbrellas so that each one was on either side of her and shooting directly at her. This starts to highlight the muscles much more clearly, having her turn her head to face one of the softboxes kept the nice soft light on her face.

 Side lighting starts to reveal definition, still at a 1:1 ratio

Next I opted to remove one of the softboxes (camera left) and replace it with a gridded snoot. This yields much more contrast, harsh light coming in from the left and soft light from the right. I cannot remember exact power levels but due to the modifiers it's apples and oranges anyway, since I already had the one softbox dialed in I simply had to tweak the gridded snoot to achieve the light I wanted.

 Gridded snoot on camera left, softbox camera right

As we shot I'd show her a few of the shots and explain what I was trying to accomplish with each lighting change. She was quite amazed at just how drastically a few minor changes could shape and change the resulting image.

Before switching backgrounds I wanted to try out some LED "orbs" I'd ordered from China last year. Initially I'd picked them up for a nude bodyscape shoot I'd had planned but ultimately did not happen due to a family crisis that came up a week before the shoot was scheduled. I had no idea how much light these would provide in front of the camera but I knew I'd be pushing the ISO pretty high. The resulting light was incredibly dim and horribly blue :) Cranking the ISO took care of the first issue, white-balance in Lightroom easily handled the second. Canon is known for poor low light focusing and this was no exception but we managed alright.

No flash, just cheap Chinese LED "orbs" from ebay and ISO 1600

 Before switching wardrobes we made use of some of the gym elements that we had at our disposal. When your subject is in a painful position you have to dial in your light quickly, luckily I only had to get her to do a few takes on the pull up bars :)

 Gridded snoot on camera left, softbox camera right

Next we switched to the middle of the gym and the wardrobe changed to the bikini. My softbox umbrellas were yielding too much spill so I setup my 28" Westcott Apollo which is recessed a bit. There was still a little spill that was lighting up support pillars just faintly but that was easily removed in post.

 No backdrop at all yields a nice deep black. Gridded snoot camera left, Westcott Softbox camera right.

We switched back to the white backdrop and she used some oil to really help add to the muscle definition. In hindsight we should have been using the oil from the start because it really helped. As I was editing I started to tire of the plain white background so I started to include variations with a bit of texture as well.

 Keeping with the harsh light of the gridded snoot on the left and the softbox on the right

One of the magazines she had brought along had an image of a girl posting against a brick wall that she quite liked. I laughed because I had shot a virtually identical shot last year during my downtown "guerrilla style" photoshoot. The gym had a cinderblock wall though with an interesting texture so for fun we recreated the shot from the magazine.

 Textured walls are great when side lit. Solo softbox umbrella camera right.

 The gym we were shooting in also had a boxing ring which I initially planned on making more use of. We'd already been shooting for 2 hours though and we were both getting tired so instead we decided to shoot a few jump rope shots with the ring as the backdrop. We managed to get the timing perfect for a few shots with her up in the air as the rope passed beneath her feet.

 Gridded snoot camera left, softbox camera right

All told I wound up with about 400 images which I then pared down to ~100 for editing. In hindsight doing two backdrops and two wardrobes resulted in just too many images I liked and wanted to see how they'd look finished. Normally I try to limit myself to 30 for editing. In total I spent about 40-50 hours editing and retouching the photos, perhaps in a future post I'll walk through my process and explain that a bit more. 

The model was quite happy with the resulting images and so was I. If she winds up sending some photos into Oxygen and she gets published I'll update this post!

Gear:

Canon 5DMKII

Yong Nuo 460 MKII (x2)

Cactus V5 wireless triggers

Steve Kaiser Softbox Umbrella (x2)

28" Westcott Apollo Softbox

Gridded snoot (homemade)

X100 Urban Guerrilla Photography

 A run down back alley provided a great backdrop with nice soft overhead lighting

Yup that's Guerrilla, not G-oh-rilla, as in Che not Kong. If you remember back to my last outing with the X100 I had originally planned to do this sort of shoot then. Due to a sudden cold snap the last time though outdoor shooting was scrapped and we headed to the local university. Well spring seems to be here now and I'd been meaning to work with this cool little camera slinging hipster I'd met on the plane to Halifax a few years ago. Clare agreed to step in front of the lens for me as we set out downtown to scout around and just shoot at any and all interesting locations we found. I had done something similar to this once before but we stuck to outdoor locations, with the X100 being so inconspicuous I could also sneak into cool buildings without my big dSLR setting off alarms that there is a pro photographer in the building.

Nobody batted an eye while we hung out in front of these elevators shooting away

The X100 proved to be great for doing this, not only did we not get hassled even once about taking photos we were given cookies :) That's right, while shooting in a stairwell of one of the cities higher end hotels a staff member carrying a tray was approaching us, "that's it" I thought here's where we're going to get kicked out but no instead he lowers the tray which turned out to be covered in cookies and offered us one.

Taken just minutes before free cookies

I must admit I'm still getting used to the X100, I'm constantly second guessing my focus, especially when shooting at f2. Most times my paranoia proves to be unjustified I just miss that reassuring feeling of the lens shifting and locking into focus that a bigger lens on an SLR body gives you. The other thing is how the camera doesn't automatically cross over into macro when the subject gets closer than a certain distance. I don't even need auto, I'd settle for a button that I can press without having to move the camera from my eye. When doing portraits I seem to be riding this line between macro range and normal range and I missed a few poses as my model relaxed and shifted as I had to enable or disable macro mode, with the moment lost I couldn't re-pose her to get the same look. The next shoot I do I'm going to try to put it in manual focus mode and just do the AF lock trick that Zack Arias mentions in his initial review of the X100. A few other pet peeves I realized were these: Why is there no option to enable Auto ISO from within the ISO menu? I've set my custom function button to bring up ISO yet in order to enable/disable auto ISO I have to scroll through menus. The other isn't so much a peeve as perhaps a design flaw, apparently if you have your camera in macro mode with manual focus enabled then turn the camera off you should not turn the camera back on with the lens cap in place because during the initialization the lens extends, hits the cap, then your camera gives an error telling you to turn the camera off then back on. This had me depositing bricks in my joe-boxers the other night when it happened. Luckily a power cycle cleared this but still its not something I want to repeat. Fuji should do two things, a) forget macro setting when camera is powered off b) return the lens to a known starting point when powered down c) sense via incoming light if a lens cap is on before performing the lens initialization d) not design a lens that extends past the outside of the bezel in the first place. I can live with these issues however and am still stoked on my X100, in a few years maybe I'll upgrade to the X300 or 400 and by then fingers crossed maybe full frame sensors will be more affordable and will be popping up in these.

I broke a few of my own rules during this shoot too, since this shoot was about experimenting as much as it was about finding new locations. Normally I tell everyone that they're crazy to shoot using an in-camera black and white mode, my argument is that you're just limiting what you can do afterwards so you should shoot in colour and convert in post. Going into this shoot I knew I'd be converting to black and white after anyway so I thought I'd try the black and white mode. Since I was doing portraits I chose the bw+g which is black and white with a green filter, this is supposed to give pleasing skin tones for portrait work. One thing I noticed about shooting this way is that it changes the way you compose the images, since you're seeing real time what it looks like in black and white. You're not shifting your angle to block out that nasty yellow building in the background or that puke green car because now they're just pleasing shades of grey. Its the same argument I made about Lensbabies, sure the effect can be done in post but when you're seeing the effect in real time it impacts how you're taking the shots and that matters just as much if not more sometimes.

The other rule I broke was shooting in jpg instead of RAW. I've read lots of X100 reviews where people couldn't say enough good things about the in camera jpg processing and how when shooting RAW and processing in Lightroom they couldn't seem to get as good results as straight from the camera jpgs. On this front I'm not so sure, there were a few times during post where I wished I had the latitude afforded to me that a RAW file would have provided. I was shooting in some dim locations and did wind up underexposing a few times (gotta be checking that histogram!).So a tip for X100 users, if you're shooting jpg make sure you're nailing the exposure (or even just slightly over exposing).

All in all the shoot was really fun and I found a few new locations that I can draw on if needed. There is still many alleys and even more buildings left unexplored so I think there may be quite a few more urban guerrilla shoots in store for this summer, stay tuned!

You just can't beat window light

Power of Primes

Late this summer I decided to take some of my photography earnings and invest in some new lenses. Since getting my 5D MK II I've become acutely aware of the need for good quality lenses, however, my pockets aren't deep enough to always seek out that illustrious "L" and the red ring that accompanies it. There is a way to cheat this a little though and that is through the power of primes. If you read the reviews on most prime lenses and see their output is often compared to L glass. Rather than being a jack of all trades but a master of none the prime lenses focus their efforts (accidental pun) on being great at just one focal length all while remaining decently affordable.

Knowing my main intent with these lenses would be portraiture I opted for the Canon EF 35mm f/2.0, the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4, and finally the Canon EF 85mm f1.8. The 85mm was initially what got me cruising the B&H site, I'd heard good things about this lens and knew the wide aperture would be great for melting the backgrounds away. I already owned the practically disposable "nifty fifty" but I wanted to upgrade more for build quality than the extra 0.4 of a stop that the 1.4 offered. The 35mm was more of an afterthought, I had emailed a friend needing some help to justify my purchase and while giving me the push I needed also suggested the 35mm.

My first order of business with the new primes was to test them out by doing some maternity portraits of a friend of mine. I decided to revisit a location I'd relied on heavily when I first started out doing portraiture, Kinsmen Park in Saskatoon. I grew up in a nearby neighbourhood and this park has a lot of interesting angles. Already being familiar with it let me focus on shooting rather than scouting for places to setup etc.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 - Shot at 1/640 @ f1.4

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 - Shot at 1/200 @ f2.2

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 - Shot at 1/500 @ f1.8

I tried shots with all 3 lenses but quickly found that the 35mm was not my favourite choice. Whether it was just my shooting style or the fact that being outside allowed for use of wider lenses I wound up just putting it back in my bag. I'm thinking that where the 35mm will really shine is in my basement studio where space is limited and I'll be shooting in close quarters.

A few weeks later I found myself back at this park with another friend's family to further put the lenses through their paces. This time the 50mm got more use than the 85 just because I was shooting 3 people instead of just 1. By this time the golden hues of autumn had taken hold and with apertures down around 1.8 the backgrounds became a sea of orange and yellows.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 - Shot at 1/200 @ f1.4

Various exposures

By the time I got around to doing one of my last summer shoots, again of friends, I was pretty comfortable with these lenses and was feeling confident that they were indeed a great investment. For this shoot I was pointing the lens at another photographer so I knew I had to be at the top of my game :) His wife was a week away from her due date and at times I was worried we might have to stop the shoot and just head to the nearest hospital. Luckily I was shooting at the University of Saskatchewan which has a hospital right on the grounds, though fortunately we made it through the shoot without anyone's water breaking.

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 - Shot at 1/200 @ f1.8

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 - Shot at 1/250 @ f1.8

I did wind up using the 35mm for a few shots during this shoot, the shot below wouldn't have been possible with the 50 or 85mm unless I had a lift of some kind.

Canon EF 35mm f/2.0 - Shot at 1/160 @ f2.0

Now I should point out a few things to anyone reading this, especially those newer to digital SLR cameras that might be shooting with cropped sensors. [I explain crop sensors in another post here] All of the entry and mid level cameras have sensors that are not equivalent to a full 35mm frame, most are 1.5 or 1.6 times smaller or "cropped" as they call them. If you use an EF lens on a cropped frame sensor two things will happen: 1) The effective "zoom" of the lens will increase by the crop factor and 2) the dept of field will increase a little. This means that a 35mm lens will behave more like a 50mm and a 50mm will behave more like an 80mm. Shooting at 1.8 on a crop sensor will result in a slightly less blurry background (aka less Bokeh) than if shot on a full frame sensor. Don't let this deter you however, the loss of Bokeh is fairly minimal and if you plan ahead the amount of zoom you get won't matter at all. There is the added bonus that if you ever upgrade to a full frame camera you'll be able to use these lenses whereas your EFs lenses will be useless.

I also want to mention that I bought my lenses online through B&H Photo at a significant savings compared to my local camera stores. I'm not affiliated with B&H at all and I'd actually rather have put money into my local economy but in the end even with shipping I saved a few hundred dollars by ordering through B&H. One aspect I was quite happy with was the shipping, being in Canada online shopping can be a real pain because people forget about brokerage and duty fess which can be ridiculous. Most of the time these insane fees can even be avoided if the US merchant would take the time to fill out an extra form when shipping. B&H apparently does take the time and uses Purolator to get you your stuff within a few days. On a $1200+ order I worked out the duty I paid and it wound up being exactly equivalent to the GST which is what its supposed to be, and the best part is there was no brokerage! I just wanted to point this out because gear is expensive and you shouldn't get gouged on shipping if you don't have to. Also hopefully some of the local stores in Saskatoon will see this and realize how insane it is that I can order stuff from New York and have it shipped while still saving 20% on their inflated prices.