The last couple months I've done a few shoots with flour and dancing as you might have seen on my Fb page. Theoretically, there would have been a blog post to go along with each of the shoots....but I've been too busy working on other projects I keep forgetting!
But I'm finally going to sit down tonight a write about the first shoot at least, it'll get the basics down, then for the next two shoots I'll focus more on how the techniques changed and evolved to fit the situation.
Over break, Victor and I got together with Michelle to do the first ever shoot with flour. It was freezing out on a rainy night, and everything was thrown together about 4 hours before hand. So basically, it was how we usually do things :) Michelle was only going to be on the island until the next morning, so it was then or wait until the summer. We went to the school where there is a covered area we could set up under. And there we stayed for the next four hours....somehow Michelle didn't become a human ice cube. What she was wearing in the pictures was pretty much what she was wearing the whole time, so not at all what someone should be wearing when it was that cold outside. Thank you Michelle for toughing it out for so long!
Originally, the plan was to try some things with water as well as flour, but given the temperature we decided (probably wisely) against doing anything with water outside....that left flour.
Taking a step back, you may ask, "so what do you have to have to do a shoot with flour??"
Well, you need flour first of all! I buy the cheapest, largest bag of flour I can find. One shoot usually uses 5 lbs of flour, but if planned right most of it can be put back into the bag and used next time. Which brings us to the next point, tarps. I used one 10x20 tarp for this first shoot, and that was not nearly, on any level, big enough. Most of the flour just went on the ground, so it was good that we did it outside! Sweeping up flour does not work, you need to mop the ground very well to get it all gone. I'll go over what we did to keep the mess contained the next two shoots since we did them inside.
As for clothing for Michelle, we chose to go with black clothing. I thought it might make the flour stand out more, and it kinda did. Once we got things dialed in though, her clothes were covered with flour and mostly white! So it helped a bit but mostly it was ineffective. Next time I shoot with Michelle, I'll have her wear white. The one big advantage of the black was that it defined her form really well with the back/cross lighting we used.
Speaking of lighting, how do you light flour anyway? You backlight it at a very high power. This was actually one of the trickier parts of the shoot. We shot outside at night, so we had no ambient light to worry about. I wanted a black background to make the flour stand out, so we gave ourself lots of space in the back for the light to fall off. This is SUPER important unless you are using a black backdrop. Anything, ANYTHING, within 60ft will be illuminated, so beware. If you want a clean backdrop you'd better set one up or move outside. However, I didn't do this for the next two shoots, and in the next two parts I'll explain how I got around this annoying little hiccup.
Backlighting...but then Michelle would be in shadow and not show up, right? Well, yes and no. Backlighting is anything from perpendicular to directly behind the subject. The idea of backlighting powders is to give them a ton of contrast. The closer the light is to the camera axis, the flatter a subject will be. It's why skiing on cloudy days is
Directly backlighting flour would put the strobe right in the lens, which is no bueno. Lens flare, aberrations, just much nope nope. Especially at such high powers, the strobes need to be off frame. In fact, they need to be about 20 degrees of from the edges of the frame to avoid major flares and light leaks.
What we ended up with was putting the strobes (on either side) about 30 degrees from the perpendicular line (read: 30 degrees back from the dancer) and about 20ft away from her. This gave a good enough back/cross light to get the flour as well as throw a little light to model the front of her. Farther back would provide more definition on the flour, but would throw Michelle into shadow more. It also would spread out the flour more, making it into a particulate cloud more than particulate So more dense v less dense kind of thing. That also depends on the amount of flour used. The lights are about at head level too. That doesn't matter as much, just makes the shadows level or not. Under lighting is not generally flattering, but it can be fun! Here's a diagram of the lighting set up.
I've included the camera settings on there, as well as the flash settings. 1/4 power was actually a little bit too dim, but not enough to really effect the overall photo. Plus, it gave me a higher effective shutter speed, so that there was less motion blur. I could also get away with shooting at ISO200 since it was cold out, and so the camera operated much, much better. In the cold, you can shoot at a higher ISO and for longer exposures with out as much risk of hot pixels because it takes more energy to physically heat the pixels to induce noise. I say f/8 when it was actually f/7.1, that's only a third of a stop so it makes minimal impact. For simplicity sake, start at f/8 and then open or stop down once things start to get dialed in.
I chose to shoot at 50mm (really 85mm since the 7D is a crop APS-C sensor) because it is a good all around length. It's not too wide, and doesn't compress space too much. At a longer focal length, I think the space would be compressed too much, and the image would lose it's depth. At a shorter on, there would be more lens flares and just bleh. A narrow field of view is definitely needed for this. Think of it as cropping v. framing. In cropping it's 2D, in framing it's 3D. Re-framing changes the angle and can induce perspective shift etc, but cropping just changes what's shown on an x y plain. Does that make sense?
In addition, when I talk about compressing perspective, it's not the lens that does that. Physically moving the camera does that. A lens is just cropping, seriously, that's all it does. Almost exactly the same as digital cropping, but with optical distortion. Moving your body is what changes perspective and how object sizes relate to one another. Same principle as covering something far away with your thumb. You can cover anything if you put your thumb right up against your face, but move it out to arms length and you can maybe only cover something the size of a penny. The relative size of it changes based on how far it is away from the camera.
Okay, enough tech talk, how does one actually take these pictures?? First, we covered Michelle with flour. Movement is key for these, you need to flour to fly every wear and be thrown off her body. For example, if she was doing a jumping shot, she started crouched and we put flower on her back, shoulders, arms, knees, etc. Anywhere we could. That way when she jumped it all fell off and went crazy. For some, she also held flour and threw it when she did the "action." Any gross motor movement works as long as the flour ends up in a different place than where it started.
Pretty much any way you can make flour explode somewhere, do it. These photos are all about dramatic movement. Since neither Victor nor I know much about dance, Michelle would show us a jump or move, then we'd go from there with placing the flower. It's a bit of an experiment each time, but that's the fun!
After you figure out the best way to make the flour turn into a cloud, it's just up to getting good timing! Both the flour and jump need to be timed correctly, so it took a few ties for each jump to get the shot. I had Victor to put the flour on Michelle and throw it in the frame too if needed, so I used my shutter release cable to trigger the camera. I had a lot of flour on my hands, so attempting to keep the camera clean in good....
That's another thing, if you can keep one hand clean to operate the camera. Flour is a fine particulate and can easily get into your camera/lens. KEEP THINGS CLEAN.
Moving on to post processing. There are two main objectives to the photos, contrast/tonal range and then the flour/posing. Contrast and tonal range can be adjusted on any of the photos, so the first thing I always do is to simply sort the images. Obvious, I know, but I feel it's worth mentioning. The sorting process is maybe a little different than simply looking at the photos and picking good ones. Some may have good parts to them, but also some bad ones. I have say, two photos that are the same jump. One has a fantastic jump, but the flour was horrible. The other has amazing, dramatic flour but the jump was meh. In this case, both photos would be saved and grouped together.
As I continue the editing process and reach those photos, I would combine them in Ps to keep the best of both. Before I move to Ps, lens corrections are applied. I like to get that step out of way first before I do any major edits as the corrections can change how an image looks a lot. In Ps, I just use layer masks to paint in what I want. Flour is incredibly easy to add back in because it has no hard edges. Especially if you use the lighten blend mode, you really can't tell the difference! To make the layer mask, I roughly align the images, then create a black mask over the layer I don't want the whole of. Using a white brush I can paint back in exactly where I want. Mostly it's just the extra flour I want, so a big soft brush does a very nice job.
Moving back into Lr, the contrast/tone adjustments start. For this shoot, I did all b/w to keep things clean and about light rather than color. Cameras flatten the contrast range of photos, so improving that is my first priority. Using the rule of thumb of exposing to the right, I have the maximum amount of image data and therefor the most latitude to push an edit.
Exposing to the right means exposing it as much as possible with out clipping any highlights. Unlike in film, where there are two processes to create your negative (one adding information to the shadows, the next to the highlights) digital only really has one that you can control. The dynamic range of modern DSLRs is crazy, so chances are that your "blacks" actually have a lot of image data you can pull from. However, clipping highlights is not recoverable. Once it's blown out, there's nothing there. So expose as much as you can without blowing things out.
I'll be honest, my workflow is very jumbled and disorganized once it gets to this point. I do a basic edit where I do initial adjustments to contrast and what not. I've made a short video explaining how I do this, it's probably easier to understand when you're seeing what I'm talking about!
Next, I let the image sit for while. I'll go and work on another one or even wait a day. After editing the same thing for a while, your vision can get skewed. Returning with fresh eyes will really allow you to keeping tweaking the image to exactly the way you want it. Editing multiple images has the same effect. Keep switching between them helps to keep all the edits similar, as well as viewing each image with semi fresh eyes. A big thing I've been working on with series like this is consistency in my edits. All the images need to fit together and have the same aesthetic qualities. Having one with way more contrast just makes it look crappy compared to the others! Even if as a stand alone it looks great, having a lot of variation will lead a viewer to determine a "correct" aesthetic for the series and then judge the outliers.
After I give the image time to smolder, I'll keep doing little tweaks then let it sit, then tweak, then sit, etc. I continue this until all the images fit together and I'm satisfied with how they all look. It can take a week or more sometimes with a new kind of edit I'm trying or with a large batch, but that's okay!
One other thing I should say is the order I do the edits in. After sorting and rating the photos, I start editing at the beginning and just work my way down the line. I never edit for than an hour or two straight, so whenever I start back up after a break I return to the beginning and start doing tweaks on what I've already edited. This keeps me in check with how I started, where I am going, and where the edits are at the moment. It's really easy to go through a series only once and end up with edits starting in one country and editing in another as far as aesthetic choices go. I really can't emphasize how important editing each image multiple (read 5 or 6) times is. You see something new each time.
Finally, I'll do my cropping, noise reduction and sharpening. Noise reduction and sharpening usually aren't a big deal unless I'm printing, which is another blog post for another time.... Cropping though, I've been sticking with traditional aspect ratios for simplicity. It makes output and print a lot easier, plus I think it just makes a cleaner looking image a lot of the time. 4x5 is one of my favorite ratios, I use it with about 75% of the photos. If I want skinnier I'll go with the original 2x3, and if fatter then a 1x1 square works. If I really, really need to I'll make a custom crop, but 99% of the time a traditional ratio works just fine. Just remember, the tighter the better with most photos. Especially with these, you can get dead space taking over the photo real fast. Include only what you need, get rid of the rest.
Which is why I wanted black background. White would make the flower disappear, and pretty much anything else would become an important element and possibly busy the photo. I wanted everything to be about the flour and dancer (read: motion and dynamics), so it was essential to have an empty space that could be filled.
I think that's it...anything I forgot will be included one of the next two posts. See you soon! Here's a couple of my favorite images from the series. You can see the rest HERE.
Yeah, these lens flares were part of the image. Using a wider lens will do that is you don't move the lights farther out! I like it though....
