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What is the secret to taking great pictures? - part 2 of 1 2 3 4

by Damian McGillicuddy Published 01/10/2016

And really this is no different to the early days of my career when we filled the studio with promotional family portraits and engagement pictures, where on a Saturday we might have shot six family portraits.

Now, by today’s standard, that doesn’t sound a lot. But when you consider that they were promotional, and we were trying to shoot a couple of family groups, the kids together, the kids individually, and mum and dad together, and still have change left from 15 exposures on a Bronica, conceptualisation and pre-planning became key. That’s why I maintain that 90% of my work is done before I pick the camera up.

Back to the Miss Havisham picture, which was really quite simple. I’d found the mirror in situ at the location. The trouble was, by the time I’d got back to that location on the day, the light had moved around the building and was streaming through the window to camera-right. So the first thing I had to do was control that situation, by blocking the window with a big reflector. Then the trick was to light the subject’s face, which was achieved using my beloved Elinchrom ELB 400s (since I didn’t have to plug them in anywhere, they could go wherever I wanted them to) with the small stripbox for control. Because, as with killing the natural daylight, it’s as much about where the light doesn’t go as where it does.

So I placed the light virtually flush to the wall that the mirror was hanging off and feathered the light back towards the subject’s face. And I did this for two reasons: firstly it was the way of lighting Jess’ face most flatteringly, and it also gave me a blade of light that ran down her body, just to separate her off on that side. So I’d achieved direction in my light, then I jigged the model around a little bit to make sure that it was hitting where I wanted it to.

There was a tiny bit of light leakage coming from the window, as you can see - in fact, what looks like a crack to the bottom-right of the mirror is actually a bit of my black reflector panel jammed onto the window-sill! It was just pure chance that it worked, but leaving that bit of reflector visible really served the picture and made the mirror look even more fractured and broken. The window was about eight feet across, and we could block it all out bar one section, but that section lifted the density of the shadows and accented the voile quite beautifully.

'THE DAYS HAVE WORN AWAY'

One of the other big secrets of the picture is, because I placed the big stripbox to camera-left, just out of frame, it is creating that natural shadow and vignette on the wall. So it’s adding to this decayed, derelict, dreich atmosphere. And the sort of Miss Havisham-esque quantities of voile that are masking the figure, but leaving her face open in the reflection, is almost like being able to see the now as well as the past.

• What is the secret to taking great pictures? page 1
  
• What is the secret to taking great pictures? page 2
  
• What is the secret to taking great pictures? page 3
  
• What is the secret to taking great pictures? page 4
  

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