Bad weather, good pictures

I was shooting a handicapped-accessible treehouse (what a great idea — why aren't there more of these?) in Richmond's great Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens when a sunny day suddenly turned to storm. As is so often the case, bad weather can make for good pictures.

Also interesting: The property was originally a club for "wheelmen" (bicyclists) in the 1880s. This was when cycling in America was limited to men of leisure who could afford a handmade bicycle and the time needed to learn to ride it — and who were young, fit and daredevil enough to start one of those contraptions rolling and vault up onto its high seat! (Yes, bikes soon became critical to the cause of women's independence, as Susan B. Anthony famously remarked, but not until they'd moved beyond the huge front wooden wheels and tippy frames of the 1880s.)

A little background...

Not an uncommon problem: A magazine client has an important story for the week, and wants a cover image to go with it. But the photographer (me) arrives at the event they assign and finds people standing at a podium with a couple flags behind them. What to do to make this scene a little more cover-worthy?

How about a nice (blue) strobe on the beige wall next to the flags? (Just set the strobe on the floor.) Plus a light on the subject. Two small strobes from the camera bag and the resulting image (of an AT&T official, above) is a lot more interesting!

Ten minutes

It was a typical Washington shoot - the subject is running late (more than an hour), the subject needs to get to his next appointment, we need to try to do this right here in these offices.

But that's fine. You pick several spots to work in, so the designer will have some choices, figure out the lighting for each, and then walk your subject through them. And when the subject is Justin Smith, president of Atlantic Media Company (publishers of The Atlantic, which overall is doing quite well despite being in the hard-hit media sector), you end up with multiple choices for a good-looking cover.

The color of light

A problem for photographers shooting indoors on location is that different light sources have very different colors. Our eyes miraculously see a white sheet of paper as a white sheet of paper, no matter what the lighting. But a camera might see that same sheet as white, blue, yucky orangey-yellow, or even worse green, depending on the light source.

The simplest way to deal with this is often to just blast everything with strobes, which cameras quite like. But sometimes those differences in light can be helpful, if you're aware of them.

A recent cover assignment had two challenges. The first was that I was supposed to somehow make a cover image from a tele- conference. ("A tele- conference? What do I do -- photograph the phone!?!?") The second was that the participants, sitting at a conference table, were lit by very warm (in color) overhead lights, while lighting that would register as blue was pouring in the windows.

In this case, problem #2 provided the solution for problem #1. By taking advantage of the warm light on the people contrasted with the bluish light in the background, a picture was made, one that could run on a cover.