SGirimont Photography Blog: The Stories Behind the Images

Father-Daughter Reception Dance

I love the effect you can get with this type of reception lighting.

Here we have Kelli, the subject of my last two blog posts, but this time dancing with her father at her wedding reception. I’ve positioned a remote-activated flash on a light stand in the far corner of the dance floor. I’ve got another flash on a bracket over my camera. Both flashes are gelled for full tungsten, and the camera is set on tungsten white balance, but the fact that the facility has dimmed their lights, means there’s still a nice amount of warmth in the shot (because dimming tungsten lights just makes them appear even warmer).

The flash just off camera on the bracket is connected with a TTL sync cable and is on TTL auto-exposure. The camera is on manual exposure (15th of a second at f/4.5. ISO 800) with the aperture and ISO set for an appropriate exposure from the remote flash, which I had metered previously.

The result is a nice cross lit scene, with the flash at the camera providing a nice general exposure and the flash in the background creating a rim light along the dancers and shadows on the floor. I’ve positioned myself to catch the shadows cast by the people in the background, which lead the eye down into the frame where the bride’s white gown leads you to the pair of dancers. In all, a very nice father-daughter moment and a great memory to keep. I chose this image to appear as a two-page spread in their book and it looks wonderful.

I will admit that I had no idea where everyone was going to be standing during the dancing when I set my lighting up. It was luck that this scene presented itself, but it was preparation that permitted me to be ready for it and catch it.

Maymont Waterfall Portrait

Now that my clients have received their book and images, I can finally show off some of the images I shot during two portrait sessions and a wedding late last year!

I call the one above my “Adam and Eve Portrait”. I mean really, all we needed was for them to be naked with an apple near by, don’t you think? Meet Brian and Kelli.

This is my favorite nature portrait to date. The location was the waterfall at the Japanese Gardens in Maymont Park in Richmond, VA. We were extremely lucky with this scene as Maymont can turn this waterfall on or off and this was the first day in quite a few months that it had been on while I was there. I can’t quite figure out their schedule or if there is rhyme or reason to when they have it running or not. But on this day, luck was on our side.

The sun was setting, if not already set, by the time we arrived at this location. I’m lighting the couple (and what a great couple they are too!) with a single Canon 580 exII  flash on a light stand just out of the frame to the right. I’m several dozen feet away, shooting with a Canon 50mm f/1.2 lens on a Canon 5D Mark II camera with an exposure of 1/30th sec. @ f/5. The ISO was 400 and the flash was fired using a Pocket Wizard remote. The flash was gelled with a 1/2 CTO and the camera’s white balance was set to 5700 K.

I use a Sekonic I-358 Light meter to determine the baseline exposure for the flash in situations like this, then use the image review on the camera, with the histogram displayed, to work out the proper exposure for the ambient light. In this situation, I wanted the couple to stand out a bit from the background, so the ultimate exposure was one that underexposed the ambient light by about one stop, but kept the “proper” flash exposure. The trick is to do this fast enough that you don’t send your subjects into a coma from boredom. I think I got this in two shots. We were at this specific spot less than 2 minutes before moving on. I knew I had the shot; no need to linger!

We shot at several locations this day, in and around Maymont, but this one is my favorite.

The next blog update will be a shot of this couple we did at the James River.

Needles Starburst

Canyonlands National Park in Southeast Utah is divided into 3 geographically diverse areas: Island in the Sky, The Needles and The Maze.

The image above was shot in the Needles district. This is a region of the park where columns of stone are practically everywhere. In this image, taken about an hour before sunset, the late-afternoon sun is being reflected from the rocks on the other side of a small canyon to camera right. This reflected light is striking the needles in the scene, causing them to practically glow with warm colors. The rocks in the foreground are lit by the cooler blue light of the sky, creating the warm-cool color balance in the image.

The sun can be seen peeking through a hole in the rocks, creating a starburst effect. You can achieve this effect by positioning your camera to catch just a bit of the sun as it appears around a foreground obstruction, and use a small aperture on your lens. For this image, I noticed the sun would be coming down close to a hole in the rocks and I positioned my camera to just catch this event. As I was preparing to take the shot, I kept having to move my camera closer and closer to the rocks to keep moving the sun slightly upwards relative to the hole, so I would be ready just as it made it’s appearance.

This image is made from a single exposure on a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 16-35 mm lens. The exposure was 1/8th of a second at f/22 (the smallest aperture available on this lens) at ISO 100.

By using such a small aperture, I sacrificed a bit of resolution to maximize the starburst effect. On a 21 megapixel image like the Canon 5D Mark II, diffraction effects at apertures smaller than f/16 will cause a detectable loss in resolution. However, I felt it was worth it for this image.