Photo Blog
Joe Mcnally goes out on the range and shoots ace portraits
It just goes to show, no matter how many Speedlights you have, the sun rules
Over at my Instagram feed (www.instagram.com/ joemcnallyphoto), questions about lighting regularly pop up. The latest round of questions come from a picture of Fallon Rivers, who is a wonderful model, stylist and overall presence in and around Nashville, Tennessee.
The shot on the fence [3] was taken out on a farm that once belonged to Johnny Cash, all the way out in Bon Aqua, Tennessee. Fallon is Johnny’s grandniece. Shot at 1/4000 sec, f/2, ISO200 with a Nikon 200mm f/2 telephoto, on a D810. I got a nice minimum depth of field, resulting in high-speed sync. The light shaper is a Lastolite 4-in-1 umbrella, in shoot-through mode, and fitted with a Triflash, holding three Speedlights.
Now here’s where the ambient light comes into play. There’s a tremendous amount of naturally occurring fill and rim light coming from the intensity of the sun, providing the hair highlights and the shoulder rim light. It just goes to show, no matter how many Speedlights you have, the sun rules. One light source, camera right. Done and dusted.
My introduction to this lovely family came from Cookeville, Tennessee’s own Jane Ellen, DJ, Internet wizard and one smart, sassy lady. Through Ellen I met and photographed Johnny’s younger sister, Joanne, who is Nashville royalty, of course, and has many albums of her own. I’m proud to have one of my pictures on the cover of her current
CD [4]! She is a soulful, beautiful person, with an amazing voice.
Just act natural
The image main [1] is Miss Joanne, in Johnny’s study, with the Man in Black guitar. That was a hard picture to do. The sun was blazing outside, but not in a fortuitous way. I had to recreate the feel of natural light in the room, but not in a way that it looked ‘lit.’
Hence my tried-and-true method of placing Speedlights in the places where sunlight was creeping in. There are three Speedlights out the window, just tucked up and to camera left out of sight. And another threesome of small flash out the door you can’t see, off to camera right.
These units are coming at the photo guns blazing, i.e., max power. The light outside is classic, hot summer, Tennessee noontime light. No way to really overpower it (except maybe if I had a bit of a grip truck with bunches of highpowered lights). So I drove those Speedlights hard. And of course they got hot. We had to keep changing batteries. But the result is a pretty good rendition of the room as my eye saw it. Just had to amplify the light and make it extend into corners and open up shadows.