Facebook Page Back Online

Just a quick little blurb to let anyone who reads this blog (All five of you; you know who you are) know that the CMFranke Photography Facebook page is back online. It had been taken down in order to be streamlined; The initial iteration was loaded with too many random, oddly chosen photos and mismatched watermarks from my days of trying to settle on one branding logo. Well, now we are back up and running on FB, so come along and "Like" the page, and keep tuned to the latest and greatest. Woo Hoo! (and so forth)

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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!

Turning Day Into Night

Shooting at night is like having a clean slate. A very challenging clean slate. Why do I say it that way? Because as far as the camera is concerned, there is nothing there. We may know there are houses, cars, or trees in that moonlit space around us - but without adjusting the ISO to extremely high (and usually noisy) levels, the camera sees a blank, black canvas. In order to make it come alive, we need to paint with light. In the world of big budget films, this means using huge amounts of lumens and wattage to create either a large wash of psuedo-moonlight, or pools of selective light shining on specific parts of the scene. Either way, it means having lots of lighting - and lots of power - at your disposal. Maybe. And maybe not... There is an age old trick that has been used by Hollywood for decades, and is even seen in large-budgeted modern films such as Jaws (1976), Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) and Mad Max Fur...

C. M. Franke | Photography

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