I’ve wanted to shoot in Baltimore’s Carroll Park for some time now. This park is in southern Baltimore and features an abandoned train, a burned-out bathhouse, a colonial mansion, and lots of gnarled trees. There’s literally too much awesome stuff there to use in a single shoot. Maryland Deathfest provided me not only with some great music and great music photos, it also provided me with a model willing to shoot in Carroll Park.

We went through a few looks, from the soft, natural-light styling shown in the headline photo to the two shots below, where Cara put her death-metal wardrobe to use and I put a couple of those gnarly trees to use. These were shot with a single SB-800 on or near full power, with no modifiers. I was at ISO LO 1.0 and a high shutter speed to underexpose the ambient as much as possible - in particular, I wanted some nice contrast in the clouds (we lucked out with a cloudy day; a sunny day would have made these photos way less interesting). The first shot is taken at 14mm, and even that wasn’t wide enough to capture the whole scene. I went a little tighter for the second shot, which is taken at 24mm.

And one last shot. This photo was something of a happy accident. I don’t actually think it’s that great of a photo, but in my post-processing I managed to make it pop like no other portrait I’ve ever done. At the root of it is an aggressive, high-contrast black & white conversion. Making Cara’s skin almost white isn’t something I’d do with most people, but it works for her, and her black hair and shirt are perfect contrasts. After the black & white conversion was some funky selective sharpening and local contrast adjustments that make the hair and eyes in particular seem to jump out of the frame. I only wish the original photo was a bit better!

There are a few more of these in this set over at Flickr.

I first heard Holly Miranda opening for Tegan and Sara back in February. I enjoyed her opening set as much as, or more than, the headliners, and bought her album when it came out a few days later. I liked it enough to go back for more when Holly and her band returned to DC, this time in the much more intimate confines of the Black Cat backstage.

I did a quick portrait shoot with Holly before the show; luckily, I had the chance to take a lot of time scouting a good location and setting up a lighting treatment while the band was soundchecking. I came up with a three-light setup using a bunch of folding tables sitting in a freight elevator as my background. In this first shot, I’m nuking the ambient light with an SB-800 through a 1/4″ grid spot at camera right aimed at Holly’s face; this is more or less the main light. For fill I used an SB-600 with a shoot-through umbrella and a 1/2 CTB gel at high camera left; finally, lighting the background is an SB-600 through a blue gel (primary blue, not CTB), flagged to prevent flare into the camera lens.

Holly said, “I like creepy,” and so I also did this:

Here, I exposed to bring the ambient way up, though I still intentionally underexposed by over 2 stops and then brought it up further in post to give it a particularly gritty feel. The only strobe that’s really in play is the SB-800, which provides a bit of clean light on her face and upper body. There’s a bit of light from the background SB-600 as well to keep everything from becoming a total orange wash.

And, bonus! Holly tweeted a photo of me taking this shot. The lesson to learn from this (other than, to take interesting photos, get on the floor!): notice the roll of black gaffer’s tape on the stool next to me. This is maybe the key piece of gear at every shoot, aside from the camera and the lights. Never leave home without it!

I also shot the show, of course, and while the Black Cat’s lighting doesn’t compare to the Warner Theatre’s (I got some seriously gorgeous photos from that show), I still got some decent stuff and the performance was fantastic. I wrote a few words about it over at the City Paper.

I couldn’t have asked for a better setting for a photo shoot than the line of three abandoned train cars that Jamie took me to near Fredericksburg, VA. We got started around 6pm, with a couple hours of glorious setting sunlight, and I shot a number of looks that emphasized location over model - which is often (but not always) my style when shooting portraits like these. The above shot is by far my favorite, with the golden sun warming up the red traincar and a touch of cloud to give the sky some interest. Jamie is lit by a single unmodified SB-800 just outside the left edge of the frame, at something like 1/8th power.

Although one generally associates abandoned industrial equipment with rust and decay, there was no shortage of bold color to take advantage of at this particular location. This one is a simple portrait lit by a White Lightning X1600 through a large softbox at high camera left. Don’t remember the power setting. The idea here was simple: use the colors of the background to make an otherwise run of the mill headshot a bit more interesting.

Then, after the sun set, we went for one last look, with Jamie putting on her trademark angel wings. I was trying to get a shot where my main light would cast the shadow of her with the wings against the traincar. But, I couldn’t figure out how to accomplish this without blowing out the details on Jamie herself. So I went for a different strategy, and this resulted in probably the shot I’m proudest of out of the session, even if it isn’t my favorite. The above photo is lit by two light sources: the White Lightning X1600 at low camera right, and an umbrella’d SB-800 with a 1/4 CTO at camera left.

The catch is, I didn’t actually trigger the X1600 strobe - instead, I used the modeling light at full power as a continuous hot light, dragging the shutter for 5 full seconds to get the exposure on the train. Jamie herself is lit by the SB-800, which was set high enough (again, don’t remember the power, sorry) to overpower that modeling light and freeze any movement in her and her angel wings, giving a nice sharpness to that part of the photo while the train blurs out and almost looks like it’s moving behind her.

All told, I do wish I’d come away from the session with more good photos - it should have been a cakewalk given the amazing location and talented model. But this is why I keep practicing!

It was 75 degrees and sunny, with just a little breeze, on Wednesday - perfect conditions for an outdoor portrait shoot. I spent a few hours shooting with Crystal in central Virginia, starting out in mid-afternoon, when we found some great open-shade spots and I shot purely with available light; and going on into early evening, when we went to a nearby park and I did some balanced flash/ambient work. Four outfits, four hours, and seven or eight locations later, we came away with a varied set of shots that I think we’re both very happy with.

The headline shot above was done with a 35/1.8 DX lens on my full-frame camera. I’m really loving this lens mismatched onto my D700. The slight vignetting gives a nice feel in certain situations, and the quality of the bokeh is remarkable for such a cheap, plastic-fantastic lens. Here’s another one with that lens, also available light only; in this one I actually exaggerated the vignetting a bit in post:

For these available-light shots I was really looking for color. When we started, I wanted to find a great background color that would contrast with both Crystal’s blond hair and her pink shirt, and it occurred to me that green grass might work great. (This shot shows the color contrast better.) Later, we were near an Amtrak station with colorful walls and doors, and even though I wasn’t sure the background color in the shot above was going to work with her hair color and skin tone, we shot it anyway - and I’m glad we did. The colors complement each other and the photo still pops, rather than it all looking washed-out and monochrome.

Moving into the late afternoon and evening, the sun went behind some clouds and we got some great, soft natural light as we shifted location to a nearby park. We found a dome-shaped jungle gym and I set up my White Lightning monolight with a large softbox, and got some great stuff. First a simple portrait:

Quality of light from the softbox is great. Balancing the exposure was a bit tricky: I needed to use a low power so that I could shoot wide-open and blur the background, but I also needed enough power to underexpose the ambient at least by a little bit. I ended up at about 1/32nd power, shooting at f/2.8 and 1/500 sec, a full stop above the max sync speed. There’s a darker band in the lower part of the frame that I’m pretty sure was caused by shooting above the sync speed. From that dark band (which I admittedly lightened up a bit in post) you can see that the strobe wasn’t adding that much to the exposure, but definitely enough to make the colors pop and put those all-important catchlights in the eyes. I certainly could have shot this with just ambient light, but it wouldn’t have been as good a shot.

Then, we got a little more adventurous and ended up with one of my favorite shots of the day:

Again, a mix of ambient and flash, with the flash serving mostly to add a bit of pop to the photo, especially in terms of detail in Crystal’s hair. The X1600 was at camera right, with the softbox positioned such that the light was feathered off Crystal’s lower body a bit - because her face was further from the light than her legs, I had to do this to make sure the light falling on her from the flash was relatively even. This was the second-to-last shot I took at this location; I looked at it in the LCD and knew that I’d gotten what I wanted.

On to the final location: the lake! This was a beautiful lake with the sun setting in a perfect spot for us to take advantage of it. It wasn’t a spectacular sunset by any means, but the orange tones reflecting off the water still gave us some great stuff to work with:

What really makes this shot, of course, aside from Crystal herself, are the ripples. The water was so amazingly calm that any time Crystal moved it caused perfect concentric circles to radiate out from her. That’s what made me shoot this with such a wide angle: Crystal is obviously the main subject, but the ripples themselves are a secondary one, with the sunset a distant third.

This shot was lit with my SB-800 through a quarter cut of CTO and a shoot-through umbrella. I had the light mounted on a stand but it was too far away from Crystal to get enough light onto her (I’d left the X1600 and Vagabond in the car because I thought it would have been too much of a pain to lug it down to the lake - I probably should have sucked it up). So what I ended up having to do is actually hold the lightstand with my left hand, such that the flash was positioned at high camera left and aimed down onto Crystal and the water in front of her, while shooting with my right hand. This was pretty tiring, but I wasn’t complaining because, after all, I wasn’t the one getting wet! Anyway, using this contortionism I managed to get satisfactory exposures at quarter power on my SB-800, though in retrospect I should have bumped that up by about a stop.

And one more; Crystal dunked herself almost all the way into the water and we shot a few more frames with her coming up out of it, splashing water around a bit, etc. None of these worked quite as well as I had hoped, mostly because I needed more flash power. We actually should have waited about half an hour before working with the sunset, as I needed there to be a bit less ambient light to pull off what I was going for using just a speedlight. Oh well - still definitely made some photos I’m happy with!

Last week I was sent by the Washington City Paper to cover the opening night of the brand-new U Street Music Hall. However, the owners of the club are not allowing any photography during their events, which made my task a bit more challenging. Instead of shooting the actual opening night, I showed up before doors to do a quick portrait of the owners, local DJs Will Eastman and Jesse Tittsworth. I had an idea of using a gridded light on them in the middle of the dance floor, with a logo or light show in the background.

When I got there it was clear that this was going to work nicely: there was indeed a lit logo I could use as a background; even better, there was a large stepladder sitting in the middle of the floor that I could use to get a nice high angle on the two DJs and the shadows that they would cast from my light. I didn’t actually grid it, just zoomed it a bit; and after a bit of deliberation I also added two SB-600s to the exposure. Even before it opened, U Street Music Hall was becoming known for an incredible sound system, and I highlighted this a bit by using my SB-600s to paint a little light on the two speakers at the base of the stage. In the above shot they’re not fully visible, but a horizontal version of the photo ran in the City Paper, and without that additional light the sides of the photos would have gone totally dark and boring.

On the way to Orion Sound Studios to shoot avant-rock trio Zevious, I put together my vision for a portrait of them before the show. Orion is seemingly in the midst of industrial Baltimore, and there are tons of great grungy backgrounds to be found, but I opted for a simple loading dock doorway. I wanted to light the trio from underneath, but use a couple fill lights to avoid the really harsh, demonic shadows that usually result from that kind of uplighting. The above is what I came up with. In retrospect, my fill lights were turned way too low, but I’m still happy with the shot.

The lighting scheme was a White Lightning X1600 at half power popped off from (obviously) below the camera and on-axis, plus two speedlights in umbrellas at camera left and right. Those speedlights were set to 1/16th power, and despite being literally just outside the frame are contributing very little to the frame. That makes the shadows on the door nice and hard, but it also means that the shadows on the faces are a bit harsher than I wanted. Still, I think it works - not a look I would want to try for, you know, a singer-songwriter or an indie-pop band, but for these guys (or for any metal band really) it seems appropriate.

I also shot the show, but Orion’s light is dim, static and red, so they’re nothing special. I converted to black & white because of the monochrome reds. Here’s the set.

I first saw and heard folk trio Red Molly when they opened up at the Carolina Chocolate Drops show I was covering for the Post. I’d never heard either group before and was suitably impressed by both, so when I heard that Red Molly were playing in the area again at a great venue (for attending concerts, not for photographing them), it wasn’t a hard choice to go. As is my wont, I contacted the band beforehand and set up a quick portrait shoot with them before their set.

The venue, Jammin’ Java, has a very colorful if rather cramped dressing room that we used for the shoot. I probably could have just stuck these three musicians on a couch in front of those brilliant red walls and gotten a perfectly usable shot, but I was hoping for something a bit different (three women on a dressing room couch: already done). So I had them stand in one of the doorways, lit them with an umbrella’d SB-800, and lit the background room just a bit with an SB-600 pointed straight at the ceiling. The key light is soft if a bit uneven, and I like that the background light creates some crazy shadows back there. It’s a bit of a chaotic shot, but I actually like all the clutter in this case.

And then I shot the show itself. Jammin’ Java has absurdly dim lighting. There’s a bank of nice incandescent frontlights that, for this show, were pointed directly in front of the performers and not actually on them. So the light was feathered off of them in such a way that their legs were way brighter than their faces. Not ideal. In the background there was a bank of those awful LED cans that look nice in person but translate horribly to film because they just create incredibly deep colors that blow out channels like nothing else. Thankfully, the band was set up far enough in front of the LEDs that they weren’t too much of a factor.

I shot the show using a custom white balance at 2300 Kelvins (with incandescent light that dim, this was necessary to keep skin tones looking reasonably natural), and at ISO 6400 the whole time, mostly using my 80-200/2.8 zoom at shutter speeds of 1/50 or even below. This is a non-stabilized lens, so I braced myself and shot several frames at a time to ensure I got some decently sharp photos. Considering these conditions - not to mention the fact that the three mic stands were constantly in the way - I’m very happy with how these shots turned out.

Here’s the full set.

Back in February, I shot a Hotspur show at the 9:30 Club, and they liked my shots enough that they booked me to do an afternoon promo shoot with them. I chose a couple spots in Georgetown as our location: a pedestrian alleyway lit up by rows of incandescent lights, and a spot in the canal that was (mostly) dry with things like fallen trees littering the way.

We started in the alley, and I used a single unmodified SB-800, zoomed all the way to 105mm, to light a few band shots with them sitting on a little staircase. The strobe was way up above my head but basically on-axis. I had to be careful not to put it too high, to avoid getting some serious shadows in the eyes (in many cases I wasn’t quite careful enough). These worked pretty well thanks to those rows of incandescent lights, and the setup was a snap.

I also did some quick individual shots here, again just using one light. This time, I stuck my SB-800 into a shoot-through umbrella and positioned it camera left just out of the frame. I also used a ton of gaffer tape to block off the top half of the umbrella to prevent the light from spilling onto the ceiling.

After these, we moved into the canal. I needed a bit more power here, so switched to using a White Lightning X1600 monolight. The first shots we tried were just basic shots of the band standing in the middle of the canal, with me shooting lengthwise down the canal. I used my light - gridded to control the spill - to overpower the sun and underexpose the background a bit. These were all simple, one-light treatments; nothing fancy done or needed.

For one final look, I finally brought in a couple more lights to do something a bit more involved than a one-light treatment. Two umbrella’d speedlights were used for this last shot, with the White Lightning splashed onto the background (I think I was still using a 40-degree grid here though, to control where the light was going) to give a bit of context. I triggered these all with RadioPoppers - the first time I’d used the RadioPopper PX system to trigger a mixture of speedlights and monolights - and it worked like a charm. I love that I can remotely adjust the power of my monolight using the PX transmitter, especially since the light was 13 feet in the air for several of our shots.

Overall, I’m happiest with the shots in the alley. It’s tough to do anything really creative when you’re shooting a group of five people, so the backgrounds really matter, and I think we found some good ones. It helped that the guys were a pleasure to work with and invested in helping make some good photos.

Last Friday night, I shot local powerpop (pop-punk? emo?) group Hotspur at their first-ever headlining gig at the 9:30 Club, as a sort of informal follow-up to a great City Paper cover story on making a living as a musician from a couple years ago, which used the band as a case study. Before the show I did a quick portrait shoot with them in one of the 9:30 Club dressing rooms, above. This is just two unmodified speedlights, one on each side of the camera, nothing more and nothing less. There wasn’t enough space between the band and the background, so my lighting spilled over too much onto the walls. So, I needed to go in and darken the background to make the photo pop a little more, using a simple layer mask in Photoshop. Nothing particularly artistic about this one - I’m finding it pretty challenging to do really creative stuff with small groups in cramped settings.

With the Margot MacDonald Band, one of the openers, I tried lighting Margot (with whom I did the wonderful snow photo shoot a couple weeks ago) with soft, warm light (SB-800, shoot-thru umbrella, half cut of CTO) while hitting her band with hard white light (single bare SB-600), and letting some of that white light spill over as rimlight on Margot to give a bit of definition and separation. I think it worked pretty well, except the unmodified speedlight spilled over a bit too much, creating some shadows on Margot’s face that I wish weren’t there. Still, more interesting than the Hotspur portrait I think. I like the hard shadows on the wall.

Then we goofed around a bit for a couple other shots, including a few with them posing with the 9:30 Club’s generously provided (and delicious) cupcakes. This one was just a single SB-800 through a shoot-thru umbrella, virtually on-axis. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. Many thanks to both Hotspur and the Margot MacDonald Band for sitting through these photo shoots and being super easy to work with.

And then, of course, I shot the show. Sort of. For some reason, the photo passes at this show were band-specific, which would have been fine except for no one told me that until I was being kicked out of the pit during Margot’s set. After some talking with club staff they did let me shoot from outside the pit despite the “no pro photo” restriction, but I was still pretty miffed. Despite this very strange experience of having basically unfettered backstage access before the show and then not even being allowed in the pit during parts of the show, I still managed to get some shots of the openers, although nothing nearly as interesting as I would have gotten had I been in the pit rather than sniping away with a long lens. Still, No Second Troy in particular had a gorgeous lightshow, as below, and I was able to move around in the crowd a bit to take advantage of some nice back/rimlight effects.

And then Hotspur was up, and it was game on. All of a sudden there were tons of credentialed photogs, none of whom I’d ever seen before in my life, plus a couple dudes shooting video. I suspect most of them were bloggers and friends of the band - nothing wrong with that. But a crowded photo pit combined with my earlier access problems put me in a pretty foul mood. Luckily, Hotspur are pretty tremendous performers. Even though I don’t care for their music, their high-energy set immediately put me in a better state of mind, and I had a great time shooting them. No song restrictions, the pit was wide enough to accommodate all the photogs, and everyone seemed to know the unwritten rules of the pit well enough to stay out of each other’s way. Got some good stuff as a result:

Here’s the full set, with much, much more, especially in the way of epic Hotspur pics.

As mentioned in my previous post, it was snowing hard (historically so) and the temperatures were rather cold last Saturday, so naturally it was a perfect day for a promo shoot outside. I spent a great day shooting with Margot MacDonald, a fast-rising young musician from the DC area. I’d planned on doing a portrait with her and her band at her Friday 9:30 Club show, but that got postponed thanks to the snow, and so we decided to do an impromptu portrait session on Saturday instead. The nice thing about living in a city is that I just walked to our chosen location (in and around Dupont Circle), and Margot hopped in the metro, and getting around was no problem. Definitely not the case for my friends further out in the suburbs, who are helpless until their streets are plowed and by now are going through some serious cabin fever.

Margot brought a number of outfits and was a fantastic subject; what amazes me most is that she somehow doesn’t look cold in any of the photos, even crouching in knee-deep snow wearing a dress. She also just looks like she’s having fun in so many of the shots, which I think is in keeping with her personality and image. Because most of our shoots were in broad daylight, my favorite stuff, such as the headline photo above, tended to be shot with natural light. Snowstorms basically turn the entire world into a giant source of diffuse light - the cloudy sky becomes a huge overhead softbox, and all that already nondirectional light reflects off of the snow and fills in shadows everywhere. It’s about as flattering as natural light can get.

That said, I did gang a couple speedlights together - after putting them in Ziploc bags to protect them from the rapidly falling snow - to overcome the sun in a few shots. For instance, the above shot was in full daylight, but I was able to underexpose the background through a combination of high-speed sync (1/500th) and two SB-600s fired at full power with no modifiers. I put one SB-600 on a light stand as normal, and used a Justin clamp to stick the other one in roughly the same position to avoid divergent shadows as much as possible. In retrospect, I could and should have put them even closer together, as the shadows do look a little wonky. Plus, the light is obviously really hard - this would have been an ideal time to have a more powerful studio strobe with enough excess power that I could have put a softbox or at least a beauty dish on it. But then again, there’s no way I would have been lugging around a battery pack for such a strobe on a day like this.

The speedlights in all these shots were triggered with RadioPoppers, as I don’t trust Nikon’s CLS system to work 100% in broad daylight. Incidentally, I’ve been frustrated by the fiddly mounting system of the RadioPopper PX receivers, so instead of using them yesterday, I just used gaffer tape to stick them to the flashes. That was much more effective than those plastic mounts, and I didn’t have to worry about them falling off at all. I also covered the battery compartment of the RadioPopper transmitter with gaffer tape to seal it from moisture - not sure if that was necessary but it definitely made me feel better.

Later, as the sunlight faded, I was able to get a little more creative with the lighting and save my batteries a bit, as in the above shot. This one was done with an SB-800 and an SB-600 ganged through a shoot-thru umbrella, both at 1/8 power and with full CTO gels, along with an SB-600 with 1/4″ grid spot lighting the background (also at 1/8 power I believe). This shot is obviously a bit too “artsy” to be used as a promo pic, but it’s one of my favorites from the day.

There were some unique challenges with this shoot. Because it was so cold and Margot’s outfits were not exactly warm, we retreated to Starbucks or Soho Tea & Coffee after each shoot to warm up. In other words: condensation city. About halfway through the day my D700 focusing screen fogged up, on some internal surface I couldn’t clean. I actually did one of our shoots - the one from which the below photo comes - shooting almost blind; luckily the condensation didn’t affect the image or the autofocus functionality, but it certainly meant that I couldn’t give Margot any feedback as she was posing - because I couldn’t see her!

Here’s a set of some of my favorites from the day. Check out Margot’s music at Myspace.