Waxing Poetic and Lighting Cinematic

Recently I hauled the lights out into the inky darkness of night to fire off some test shots for an upcoming project. The idea behind the shot in question was to pay homage to a very dramatic moment that has been played on the silver screen (in countless films) for decades. But as I was setting up, it occured to me that I had often seen such night scenes over-lit. By this I mean that the darkness of night was often lit by millions of watts of blue-gelled HMI's, and somehow wound up looking like it happened in a football stadium. Not only would something like this be nearly impossible with small monolights - but I was not sure I really wanted to go in that direction after all.
When we go outside in real life, night is DARK. It is, after all, NIGHT. So the question of how to light this project suddenly became one of how to creatively draw attention to the subject - the narrative of the piece - but still keep it looking reality based. After mulling over the main idea for the whole thing, I was struck with a pretty awesome idea as to how to approach it. One that covered all the bases and will still look not only dramatic, but call to mind exactly the cinematic approach the image screams for.
So what is all this about, anyway? What is the shot that I am working on? Stay tuned...... This one should be pretty cool!

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Playing With Dramatic Light

I have this image that keeps recurring in my mind. It involves the cold blue feeling of a dark winter and the glowing orange of a firelight. So far it seems to keep eluding me, although I think this is largely because every attempt I have made to capture this "mood" has been done in a hurry, or in the rain, or some other situation that forced me to run through it rather than walk it out. This shot is one such version. I may need to go back with a slightly different lighting setup and try some more. Perhaps in a different location.

It's Not The Light, Its What You Do With It.

Standard soft-light shot with umbrella Snoot light for that film-noir look T his past weekend I had the opportunity to shoot with a very talented East Coast makeup artist, and an amazing model (!) S ince I knew that I would be working in a relatively small space, and did not want to set up lots of plugged in lights, I used a Vivitar 285-HV speed light and bounce umbrella. Once we got the images we were after, but before we wrapped the shot and struck the set, I dropped a snoot on the light, swiveled it around, and tried my version of a "noir / vintage album cover" look. These are just quick samples of both styles, pretty much as they look straight from the camera. The refined, polished, edited versions will be coming up later - but it is nice to see that even a small and often overlooked "old-school" flash unit can still create pretty impressive light!

A Picture is Worth How Much? (Part II)

After a long two year absence from this blog, I feel the need to write a post on some recent rumblings which - by the time you read this, may be either old news, or a never ending story. In essence it is a follow up to my last post of February 2014, in that it follows the same line of thought, but adds a new variable to the equation. Firstly, I took two years away from photography due to family responsibilities. While I could write a whole run-on blog post about being a care-giver for an elderly parent, it falls quite far afield of my purpose here, so I'll just say that the time away from the camera has allowed me to see my work for what it is (or was) more clearly, and to redefine what it needs to become and where I want to go with it in the days ahead. Call it a "forced introspection," it leads me to the point I want to make now. In my previous post I ruminated on how the preponderance of photographic images has led to a 'devaluation' of photography. ...

C. M. Franke | Photography

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