Clowning Around: Doing lighting tests with Anna Sigvardsson

Clowning around.
Photo: ©2013, Anna Sigvardsson

I owe Anna Sigvardsson a lot. She is one of the people who influenced my current career choice very strongly. Anna is a great photographer, and extraordinarily good at making people comfortable in front of the camera.


I met Anna at a mingling event a couple of years ago. As it turned out, we had some shared interests. She was a very good professional photographer, and I wanted to learn. At the time, I just wanted to take better photos. (There is a story there, but I'll save that for another blog post.) Over time we met now and then, had a cup of coffee here, ran into a mingling event there, and we always talked about photography. Always interesting conversation, and always inspiring.

My version of Evil Clown. I jumped at the opportunity to don the clown nose.
Photo: ©2013, Anna Sigvardsson

When Anna needed a model to test lighting setups in her studio, I jumped at the opportunity to get in front of her camera. I have modeled for Anna before, and it has always been loads of fun. Working with other photographers, whether you shoot with them, model, direct the shoot, or fetch coffee, also provides great opportunities to learn. I want to do it as often as possible.

There is another reason: Standing in front of a camera can be difficult. Even professional models can become uncomfortable. Standing in front of the camera helps me empathize. Empathy helps me help whoever I am photographing to relax so that we can create better photos together. Anna is a master at making people relax in front of a camera. I know no one whom I would rather learn from.

Clown front and centre. You can see the lighting setup, two softboxes to the sides, and an octabox angled downwards in the middle. As you can see, my shadow falls on the paper, but low, so that it does not show in the portraits.
Photo: ©2013, Anna Sigvardsson

For the shoot, Anna used a large silver umbrella at the front, and two large softboxes to the sides. At various points in the shoot, Anna moved the strobes slightly, or changed the power settings. The softboxes did not just light me, they also lit the brown paper behind me.

You may wonder why I wear a hat, sunglasses, and a clown nose. It is because the tiara I tried first did not fit. Just standing there in a black t-shirt would not have been very fun, so we dived into Anna's stash of props to spiff me up a bit.

Anna looks good in photos no matter what you do, so shooting her was easy.

I know only two photographers who can shoot me and make me look good. Anna is one of them. On the other hand, Anna looks good no matter what. Her favorite camera is a Canon 5D Mk III, which is what was used for all these shots.

Me the way I usually look.
Photo: ©2013, Anna Sigvardsson

You might wonder if Anna took any photos of me looking more like, well, me. She did. The one above is my favorite.

We had a wonderful afternoon, geeking out with lighting and photography. If you are serious about photography, I strongly recommend practicing and experimenting with friends who share your interests. Great fun, and you will learn a lot.

A couple of days later, Anna and her boyfriend David invited me to a housewarming party in their new apartment. On my way there I saw this elephant… But that is another shoot, and another story.

How to get out of a photography slump

Light painting is easy to get started with, and you can climb pretty far.

If you are a photographer, professional or amateur, sooner or later you will get into a slump. You are not improving, and the fun just isn't there anymore.

Getting out of your slump is easier if you understand a bit about motivation, why you used to have it, and why you don't anymore.

One idea about motivation that I have found useful is Self Determination Theory (SDT). SDT is a theory in the scientific sense, like the theory of gravitation. Gravitation affects you whether you believe in it or not. Pretty much the same thing with SDT.

According to SDT, there are three factors that are important to human intrinsic motivation. If you are in a slump, it may be because something is wrong with one or more of those three factors. Fix what's wrong, and photography may become fun again, and you are out of your slump.

 The three factors are: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness. Think C-A-R, and it will be easier to remember.

• Competence: We need to develop and build competence. The tasks we perform must be challenging enough to be interesting, but not so difficult so we give up. As a photographer, if you shoot the same thing over and over, it will become something you can do in your sleep. Pretty soon you will do it in your sleep, because there is no challenge.
• Autonomy: You need to decide how to do things. If someone else tells you exactly what to do and when, motivation is lost.
• Relatedness: We, even us photographers, are social animals. We need to feel close to other people. If you have few or no buddies who are as fanatic about photography as you are, it will be difficult to maintain interest.

Using SDT as a framework, it is pretty easy to figure out things to do to get out of a slump:

• Set yourself new challenges, and slowly increase the difficulty. You might take up a kind of photography you have not done before. Or, find the best photographers in your field, and set yourself the goal of beating them. Don't try to do it all at once. read books, try tips, learn, slowly, but surely.
• Photograph on your own time, just for fun, with nobody to tell you what, when, and how to do things.
• Find other photographers with interests similar to yours. You can find photographers at Drink-And-Click, photo clubs, street photo events, and other places. When you find them, start doing things with them, like practice shoots, photo book projects, and other stuff you might be interested in. Also, find people with an interest in being in front of the camera, like models, musicians, singers, acrobats, tattooists, fire dancers...

I do hope you find something here to help you bring the light back in your vocation as a photographer. If you do, add a note about it in the comments to this post.

Why not put yourself in front of the camera, for a change? A friend of mine, Anna Sigvardsson, asked for models for a lighting test. I jumped at the chance to play around a bit.
Photographer: Anna Sigvardsson

Now, go and have some fun!

Heidi Hay Photo Gallery 1: The first day

I promised to publish photo galleries from the Heidi Hay Tattoo Party. This is the first. More will follow.

Shooting at the Heidi Hay Tattoo Party

I went to the Heidi Hay Tattoo Party and shot for three days straight. Last year, I went because I wanted to photograph Steam Punk cosplayers.

This year, I went because Hasse Kosonen, one of the organizers, asked me if I wanted to shoot again. If you follow this blog, you may recall that I sometimes shoot Mays Hounds, the band Hasse plays in. I was also the wedding photographer at Hasse's and Tanja's super cool rock wedding recently.

I must admit, I would have gone anyway. Last year was a photographer's dream. I shot hundreds of visually very interesting people, and everyone was happy to have their picture taken.

This year the theme was pirates. Tattoos are a great head start when cosplaying pirates, and there were people at the convention that played it to the hilt.

Sana Kazura, my favorite dancer and choreographer, gave three performances. We also had a portrait session, and talked for a bit, about dance, choreography, and life as a traveling performer. I'll make a separate post about our talk.

Batman, Spiderman, and Iron Man made appearances. Batman and Spiderman were from Superheroes against Cancer.

Of course, for most visitors, the tattoos were the big draw: There were several tattoo competitions, you could get tattoos from top tattooists, buy equipment, sit down and talk about tattoos...

In upcoming articles, I'll post galleries with photos from the convention.

Follow this link to the first gallery.

Portraits, personality, and punch

Stefan Högberg

A few days ago I photographed Stefan Högberg and Lennart Guldbrandsson. Stefan and Lennart wanted pictures for advertising a presentation on copyright.

Lennart is a writer, his speciality is ghostwriting. Stefan works at the Region Archive in Gothenburg. We shot at the Region Archive, because the environment there relates to the subject matter of the presentation, and to Stefan's and Lennart's jobs.

Lennart Guldbrandsson

To capture a person's personality, you need to get to know them. Lennart and I know each other from before, but I had not met Stefan previously.

Before the shoot, we had a cup of coffee and talked about what we were going to do. We decided to try  a couple of different locations. We ended up shooting at three. It is important to get a variety of photos, so that the client has material to choose from.

For the portraits above I used a fairly wide aperture, f5.6, to blur the background a bit. I used three flashes: Two were set to the left and right, at an angle of about 30-40 degrees. The third flash was put behind the subjects, and used to light the background a bit.

The catchlights in the eyes are important. They make the faces look alive and friendly.

No books were harmed while creating this picture!

We had a fun session, and could not resist getting a bit whimsical. We had not planned to make a levitation photo, but suddenly, it seemed a good idea, and we did.

Planket Photo Exhibition

Planket (The Fence) is a yearly photo exhibition in Gothenburg. We were 130 photographers who exhibited our work along a wooden fence in central Gothenburg.

I'll make a brief presentation of some of the exhibitors here. You will find more photos in the slideshow above.

Cornelia Schmidt showed off some of the artwork from her forthcoming book Just People. Cornelia is doing some stunning work, bringing out character and personality in the people she is photographing. The photos are both respectful and funny, a difficult thing to bring off when everyone is photographed nude.

Kjell Nilsson showed his large scale macro photography.

Tim, my son, was my assistant for the day. He wants to exhibit his own work next year. I have promised to assist.

Lina Wennström setting up her photos. I show more of her work in the slideshow.

Jan Kwarnmark is a street photographer. His work shows a great understanding of composition, and timing.

As for myself, I had picket five candidate pictures for the exhibition. Then I asked my son Tim to pick two of them. He picked the one of me levitating, and the dinosaur.

In all, it was a fun day, I got a lot of photo inspiration, and some ideas about what to do next time.

Butterfly Dreams

I got the idea for the butterfly dreams picture a couple of months ago, in early spring. I knew the perfect location for the shot, less than a hundred meters from where my mother lives. Unfortunately, the trees had no leaves, so I had to wait.

When my son and I visited my mother recently, I got the opportunity I had been waiting for.

My son and I went for a walk. When we got to the right spot, I checked the light and took a series of test pictures. It worked very well.

I needed clothes that matched the light, so I bought a pair of green trousers and a green t-shirt. Shooting at the right time of day was also important. I decided to shoot early in the evening. The sun was still up, but low in the sky. This provided me with the green color I wanted, soft shadows, and ambient light I could control with my camera settings.

I used two remote controlled flashes. Both had green gels to match the light filtered through the tree leaves. I put one of the flashes behind me, on my camera tripod, to provide a glowing edge, separating my body from the background.

The other flash I mounted on a Gorilla pod, a small tripod with flexible legs. I put the Gorilla pod in a tree to the left of the path. I wanted the flash to have the same direction as the sun.

Finally, I mounted the camera on a second Gorilla pod and put it on the ground. By putting the camera close to the ground, I ensured that my feet would be above the ground line. If the camera had been higher, the final picture would have looked as if I was standing on the ground.

After taking the shot of me, I removed all visible equipment, and took a background photo. The Gorilla pod in the tree provided a bit of extra brightness in the foreground.

I wanted a splash of light directly beneath me on the ground, so I took a third shot where I hold a flash and aim it down, towards the ground.

Combining the three images in Pixelmator was easy, just a matter of creating masks and painting out the parts I did not want. The picture above shows the first version of the image. I thought it looked a little bit boring, and there was no clue to why I was screaming and hovering in the air.

Originally I had considered adding a crackling energy field, but looking at the picture, I thought that would not fit very well, so I went for a softer glow and butterflies instead.

To get the glow, I duplicated the layer containing the picture of me, loaded a selection from the mask, disabled the mask, inverted the selection, and erased the background. I the used Pixelmator's Glow effect. I moved the Glow layer behind the layer of me.

I used three butterfly layers, each with butterflies of slightly different color and size. The butterfly is a brush from Pixelmator's built-in Nature set.

Finally, I played with the layer modes, changing the butterfly layers to Screen and Linear Dodge to get the effect I wanted. I also erased a few butterflies that were covering my mouth and eyes.

In all, a fun exercise. I will probably do more variations of this picture, just to try a few ideas out.