Lee Durant

On Assignment – Catherine Casey’s Shed

The brief for this shoot for the Daily Mail was simply, travel to a location near Farnham in Hampshire and photograph Catherine Casey and her shed on wheels. The only instructions further was to have her smiling with the usual head, mid and full length shots…. Other than that it was up to me to be creative.

I arrived at Catherine’s house and luckily had a little spare time to set up and create a plan for the shots required. This was one of the rare occasions that I’ve ever had a make-up artist along for the shoot and while she was working away I had plenty of time to set up and formulate some kind of a plan.

As soon as I arrived I was looking at the ambient daylight and assessing how to handle it. As a photographer you would think that a lovely blue sky and bright sunshine were the perfect conditions for a feature shoot, but that is most definately not the case. Bright sunshine means a very large subject luminance range, for those of you new to digital photography this means there is a vast range of bright and dark areas of your picture (very dark blacks and very bright light areas). Digital cameras have a tough time coping with situations like this, and you will often hear wedding photographers chuntering under their breaths on the big day about white dresses and black suits.

I immediately knew the flashes were going to have to come out and looking at the shed in question I knew also that I was going to need to light the inside to add interest to the background. I always have three speedlights with me, and although I could always use a couple more, three is the minimum for me to be able to get really creative and add that little bit extra.

I set up one of my strobes in the inside of the shed on a small stand, manual at 1/4 power. I only have one set of pocket wizards so I had to take into consideration the fact two of my SB80 flashes would be on slave, the one inside the shed had to be close enough to the door to pick up on the flash from at least one of the others. I set up the other two outside with a shoot through umbrella and a 1/4 CTO Orange flashgel filter on each (slightly warming up the colour temperature of the flashes).

The main flash was powered up to at least Manual 1/2 power for the majority of the shoot to compensate for the fact I was underexposing the ambient to cope with the bright sunlight. The other was used to fill in the shadows that were being cast by the main light. This fill was mainly kept between 1/4 – 1/8 power depending on where it was placed for each shot.

I like to keep the flashes at a constant distance from the subject when I’m working under pressure on press jobs. This means that when the flashes are set up at the beginning there is no further messing about with turning them up and down for each setup. If the terrain and situation allows I will move the subject into position and then place the flashes where I want them, keeping them the same distance away from the subject as before knowing that the amount of light will remain the same. (obviously a little chimping will confirm this is the case).

If the situation doesn’t allow for this turn the strobe up/down a stop as you see fit, the closer the flash gets to your subject the less light you will need so turn it down accordingly and the further away the flash is the more light you need. If at the shooting stage you are changing position or you are changing lenses and therefore perspective, you can leave the flashes exactly as they are as the exposure should not change dramatically but you will gain a different shot for the set without changing the setup.

Once the flashes were set it was then a case of working away to get the maximum number of poses and shots done before Catherine became bored of me saying “just one more”… Thanks to Catherine for her patience and to her husband for letting me into their wonderful home.

I ended up sending a total of 27 shots from this one shoot across to the Daily Mail picture desk that night. I would say that this is an average number to send although the trick is to get to the stage where you are seriously happy that you have a full set of good shots with no real fillers… bearing in mind of course within this that you need both your GV’s and your detail shots of the subjects. You will have to ensure that you follow the brief and get your correctly exposed head, mid and full lengths, but this leaves at least 15 good poses, expressions and/or situations to provide the editor with, a decent range of pictures to choose from that also fits with the story.

The published article.

Tags: Editorial, news, Photography, Portraits

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.