The drama soci­ety recently pro­duced a play call “Remem­ber­ing Rose”. Writ­ten by a stu­dent here at NUIM, it was one of the fun­ni­est pieces I’ve ever seen! I hope the script makes it bey­ond three per­form­ances here on campus.

Any­way, I offered them to make some promo shots and they gladly accep­ted. Here’s what came out of it.

So how did I do these pho­tos? Well, the secret to a black back­drop is that you kill all light sources and just use flashes, but mak­ing sure that you only light the sub­ject, not the back back­ground (i.e. don’t put your sub­ject in front of a wall). The set-​up here was: 1 large soft­box fairly close to the per­son, about 45° from the left, just above eye-​level, and another flash with a reflector and honeycomb-​filter (to dir­ect the light) from behind to the right, about at hip-​level, a fair bit off so it doesn’t fire into the cam­era.

But the biggest thing here for me was that it was my first proper photo shoot (if you don’t count the one with Andrea a few weeks back). These guys didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, I just bluntly prom­ised them some nice pho­tos (and I didn’t tell them it was my “first time” until after­wards). But it all turned out quite well, I think. The biggest les­son I learned (again) was that you really need to dir­ect people. The more con­crete, expli­cit and pre­cise you are, the bet­ter. Being pho­to­graphed by a stranger is in itself a fairly awk­ward situ­ation, you’re not quite sure what’s going on, if you’re “doing it right”, and so on — so being told what to do reduces this insec­ur­ity as you can just focus on what you’re told to do. How­ever, this can be chal­len­ging as you also have to think about all the tech­nical as well as artistic issues… But the best way around this is: prac­tice, prac­tice, practice.