First Take: David Kennedy

Another Advanced assignment! This time we are learning studio lighting.  Before this past week, I took light for granted.  Light never complains, never needs anything, it was always there for me.  The studio is a cruel place where if you want light, you must learn to create it.  This was much harder than I though it was going to be.  My classmate portrait was supposed only use one light, and then another light for a total of two portraits with different lighting variations.  The aim was to show something about your classmate in the portrait under the strict lighting conditions.  So, I thought about how best to capture my subject via a portrait.

My classmate was David Kennedy. David and I are both graduate students at the University of Missouri so I wanted to show David’s personality in the two portraits as best I could.  If you know David, you know that he has extensive experience in photography.  His father taught him the craft at a young age and he is a connoisseur of fine Canon and photographic equipment in general.  My portraits came out like I thought they would…amateur-ish.  I plan on spending a lot more time in the studio to perfect this craft.

The image at the top of this post was the shot I decided to turn in for class.  David’s personality is such that he is firmly planted in his ways.  His knowledge and ability make him pin point accurate on exposures.  He always seems to rise to the occasion, just like someone else I know (through pop culture)….Bond, James Bond.  While my main man David doesn’t yield the tuxedo wearing, martini drinking swagger of Mr. Bond, he does posses a trait which I thought was worth displaying in his portrait: technology.  Just as James had ‘Q’ to lace him with the latest and greatest in spy technology, David keeps the newest cameras, lenses, and software in his arsenal of weapons, diminishing low light foes with a mear switch of aperture.  This is why I also choose the below portrait, because he’s not ashamed to let YOU know about it.

This is how David looks when he is about to correct you.  This is the face that lets you know something you said was wrong or had minor errors.  Hahahaha…Dont get me wrong, David is the man when it comes to technical know how, but I noticed this face every time he corrected someone.  In fact I asked a question about gear as I took this photograph.  I thought this image captured his tru personality more than my first image.

I learned a lot from this assignment.  I trusted the images in my camera by sight instead of looking at my histogram.  Honestly, I never look at it to see if I have to right information in it.  Somewhere along the line, my metering was off.  I’m not sure if it is the color gel or the exposure that was so hot, but the information on the right side of Davids face is kind of blown out.  I know it is there, but I could not tone for the sake of the assignment.  In the future I have to make sure that bright light is more diffused.  Mistakingly, I did not place a diffuser in front of the gel floodlight when I fired it.  I assumed the light was far enough away that it wouldn’t be so hot. When I saw the image in the camera, I thought “GREAT!” on screen was a different story.  My diagram of the setup is below.

Overall, I had a ton of fun with this project.  I feel that I can practice more with the lights now to see if I can better control the light.  I will ask some young lady to take her photograph and offer free facebook images, I’m sure she’ll model for me. More Advanced images to come!