I don’t work with controlled lighting all that much, so I rarely get to use the photographer’s trick of making dramatic portraits by lighting a subject with warm tones and setting white balance to tungsten, letting the sunlit background go to blue. Sometimes, though, I get the chance to do this by happenstance, as when a musician performs under incandescent lights outside or near a window while there’s still some daylight left. Above, Molly Hagen performs at Artomatic yesterday, a perfect opportunity to shift my white balance and turn the background to deep blues. Actually, the light on Molly was way beyond tungsten; it was a red-gelled incandescent can. I had my white balance at the minimum 2500 Kelvins and it was still too red - oh well.

Here’s another where there wasn’t quite enough sky visible to get quite as dramatic an effect. Also, the photo kind of sucks a bit. Whatever. This is Jan Bang, performing during Nordic Jazz Week with Arve Henriksen, who’s pictured in an earlier post:

I really want to do some portraits like this - next time I’m doing a portrait session outside I’m definitely bringing my CTO gels.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Lighting & Studio, Music, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.