Practicing portraiture. Stepping away from Leica-mania for a day or two. There is life beyond Summilux....

J. 

It was a noisy day here on Monday. Sitting in my studio, even with the air conditioning running, you could hear the blue jays mixing it up with the grackles. The phone kept ringing. The poorly tuned pick-up trucks that belong to the endless construction crews who are constantly tearing down older, prettier houses to build enormously ugly, 5,000 square foot white boxes with black trim, rumble up and down the street to fetch supplies or head to the next job. And as always during the daylight hours you can hear the dulcet tones of the gas-powered leaf blowers somewhere at a yard on this block or the next whipping the settled dirt and pollen from the ground back up into the air along with the fallen leaves. It only quiets down as the sun sets and the workers head back to their own neighborhoods and resident families settle in for the evening. 

The welcome noise on Monday was that of a friend knocking on the door, arriving, right on time, for a fun portrait session with no real goal, no deadline and no odd template requests. I was ready for an early afternoon of lighting, posing and camera craft. 

J. is a tall, beautiful and young woman I met at the swimming pool. Swimmers are wonderful.

I started setting up my little studio the night before. Well, that's not totally true. I really started cleaning up the place the night before. Every photographer I know who works regularly will be familiar with the drill. You have jobs back-to-back, or for several days in a row, and every time you come back to home base you unload your car into your office and drop the cases and camera bags on the floor thinking that the next day or the next you'll dig into them, disgorge the gear and place it all lovingly in whatever place you habitually plan to store it. 

But something always comes up. A fast breaking dinner party, or a rush job for the next client in line. A meeting with a manager. A date with one's spouse. And the gear piles up. Especially if, like me, you don't like to repeat yourself at work day after day. The way it goes around here is like a weird inventory dance. One day you decide you'll go minimal and shoot everything with available light and rangefinder cameras. The next day it's full-on electronic flash and the higher resolution mirrorless cameras. And some days it's right down the middle of the road. But the gear from yesterday sits, discarded and patiently waiting to be cleaned off, recharged and put away. Multiply by days... Until a friend calls and says, "Let's shoot some portraits!" And you say, "Sounds great, see you tomorrow." And then you look over, across the studio and notice you've got a huge pile of stuff that needs wrangling, sorting and storing. Stuff that has to be gotten out of the way so you can set up for a new photographic adventure in the same space. 

I got things under control by Sunday night. The batteries were charged and safely stored. You could see 98% of the floor in the studio. The extension cords were nicely wrapped and everything was mostly back to square one. We were ready to start over....yet again. 

Monday morning was the cut-off time for the endless dallying over how to light and what to shoot with. I'd done some flash work last week and knew I wanted to glide back over to working with continuous lighting. And I wanted to reach back into the style of lighting I loved back in the 1990s. Big, soft and mildly directional. 

I set up an old, 1950s era posing table. I love to use it because it gives the talent someplace to put their hands but it also serves the purpose of anchoring them into one spot in the space. I used a middle gray background lit by a big LED light covered with a plexiglas diffuser that just covers the front of the fixture. It spills light beautifully and evenly across the background. 

The main light I used was a giant, 77 inch white umbrella with a black backing to control the spill and thereby help to control the lighting contrast in the space. I added a front diffusion cover to the umbrella to soften it even more. I was looking for soft light with a relaxed fall off from one side of J's face to the other. 

The room I shoot in is not big. Not anywhere as big as the studio space I worked in back in the first half of the 1990s. And the entire space is painted a very neutral white. It's good for day-to-day office habitation but too much white bounce reduces overall contrast in a set up and needs to be controlled. That's when I call in the black panels. 4x4 panels of light absorbing black fabric. 

I use one on either side of my portrait subject. If I want to add fill light I want to control the fill light and not become victim of a random spill of excess photons. I also block off any light from the big umbrella that doesn't fall directly on my subject. That's mostly light from the top of the fixture that goes over the subject's head and flattens out the light on the background. 

Once the lighting is basically set the light meter comes out and I fine tune and fine tune until the background and the subject area are right where I want them. Incident light meters are wonderful for this kind of set-up. Everyone should have one in their bag if they like to light. You can do it with your camera but the meter is faster, easier, more fun. 

When I have the lighting where I want it I set up the camera. On Monday I was, for some reason, really excited about using the Fuji GFX 50Sii. It pairs perfectly with the adapted Pentax 645 lens...the 120mm f4.0 Macro that I bought for a song a month of two ago. Monday was the third time I've used this camera and lens combo recently and I'm finally starting to get really comfortable with it. The camera was set up on a tripod about eight feet in front of my subject and that seemed just about right. 

Shooting with continuous light is different than shooting with flash in that you have to be careful about subject motion. I wanted to shoot at 5.6 and a half and I needed to get a shutter speed of 1/80th or faster to control kinetic chance. That meant an ISO of 800. Not a problem for the GFX. The lower resolution, compared to the 100 megapixel versions, really does mean less apparent noise. And, of course, I shot raw ---- just in case I needed a bit of help in the noise department via A.I. DeNoise in Lightroom. Happily, I didn't need the extra assist. 

We did a quick shoot. About 150 frames over the course of forty five minutes. I made a few light changes along the way but nothing big. The conversation was pleasant. A lovely change from the incessant blatting of the leaf blowers and lawn mowers. J. is young and had other fish to fry in the afternoon so when we were both pretty sure we'd gotten good frames and good looks she smiled, thanked me (although I'm sure I had more fun photographing and should be thanking her...) and she was gone. 

I got to play with the files after that. There are a lot of good ones. Once she picks some favorites I'll spend some happy time working on and retouching the files. All good here in paradise. 

By the way--- my birthday falls in this month. My last as a younger person. I'm certain you'll want to reach out to each other and collect some cash for a really fabulous birthday present. I'm hinting around that a Hasselblad X2d and a 90mm Hasselblad lens might be just the ticket. Don't be too parsimonious; be sure to get the extra battery.....

Just a note: I do moderate comments in near real time --- for the most part. Be sure to leave yours. We'll get to it with dispatch!