Suburbia series

[texxter]

My goals for this year were to shoot on location and learn to light on location, to include more planes in my images, not just the subject and the background, and to improve my ability to tell stories with my pictures. I have made good progress with the first two, but the story-telling still escapes me most of the time. For 2011 I am going to focus all my energy and creativity on story telling.

I was ready the Getty website recently (I have a small portfolio of images in Getty) and learned that they need more images of suburbia, normal people doing suburbia things. Well, I live in suburbia and this request is something I can contribute to. So this is my first posting on a new series that I want to start right away - the place where I live. I think I am going to put all the fancy lighting and compositional and color work to the side for a while to tell the stories of the place where I live and what people around me do.

My first entry is a humoroous one - my boy went to ice skating today dressed as a mummy in a sarcophagus, as they had a Halloween costume competition. He won a prize, which happened to be a toy mummy. He was pretty excited about it! Here is a picture of him skating with his toy mummy. The lighting in the skate rink really sucked, and I had to shoot high ISO - a new one for me - so I am going to have to accept that journalistic story telling is not about perfect lighting and low ISO. We'll see how much I enjoy it, but I am going to give it a try!

I am re-reading the wonderful "Photojournalism" book by Kobre.

[texxter]

I don't know yet which direction this series is going to take, so I will just start walking.

I want to create images that I can market as stock, tell some kind of a story, doesn't have to be a dramatic story, and look like simple snapshots. When providing feedback, please think about the purpose of the image - it's not a super clean studio portrait, it's a snapshot, hopefully a well-lit one with some story to tell. If it doesn't tell the story for you, I want to know about it!

Today my wife and I both teleworked from home - so I decided to take an image of her about teleworking. Could have made it a bit more over the top, but decided to go with simple for now. I used a single light to light with a warming gel to light her and make it look like the light on her comes from the lamp. Ambient light from windows was used as fill.

EDIT - should I have lit the background to create a more consistent tone across the space?

[jeffro20]

I know I will certainly enjoy witnessing your journey. An echo from others, your explanations and visual aids are always greatly appreciated.

Usually cups and water bottles are clutter but in this case, it certainly tells a story.

[texxter]

Thanks for the kind comment, Jeff. Some of these images are going to have clutter, and sometimes the clutter may be too much. Here is the third installment of the series with a bit of story to go with it.

This morning my two kids came to my bed and spent some time watching movies or playing games on portable devices. I decided to do a "suburbia" portrait of them showing both the inside and the outside of the house.



I have variations of this idea with the camera closer to the window, but this one seems to show enough of the outside to tell more the story of living in suburbia. Very little postprocessing, and I didn't remove any of the clutter in the patio.

Lighting: One SB-800 flash shot thru an umbrella and pointing directly to the children inside the bedroom. One SB-24 on a stand to camera right putting a kiss of light on the brick wall. I underexposed ambient to make it look very early morning.

This project is forcing me to step outside my comfort zone and take risks.

What do you think?

[DoublyDan]

these are cool Paco! I for one am all about experimenting with different ideas...Our failures/experiences are the strongest lessons in life.

I like the image of your son...too funny. The one of your wife makes me want to grab a cup of coffee and finish reading my book..The last one is okay, I find it a little difficult seeing what is happening inside. But its good practice nevertheless.

Thanks for sharing...

Dan

[texxter]

Thanks, Dan!

Yes, the last one is hard - I tell you a little bit about life inside this room but not enough for you to figure it out. This picture allows you to observe what you normally wouldn't do - peek thru somebody's window into their lives. The image is not so much about what they are doing, but about how we live in our homes, the safety and comfort of suburbia. If I just wanted to take a portrait of my kids in bed I wouldn't need to go outside the house

Thanks again for taking the time to comment.

[Nikonfan]

The great Edward Hopper did a whole series of paintings with the same idea. He would ride on elevated trains and catch tiny glmpses of peoples lives as he passed by the windows. So he did a series of paintings about this. Edward Hopper is better known for his painting of a Diner which was later redone to look like the people sitting around the bar were James Dean, Elvis, and Marylin Monroe.

[peeker]

Hey Paco,

I love the fact you have specific goals where you want your photography to go. I understand the first and third one. For the second one, would you consider cutting waaaayy back on the off camera flash and use the natural tungsten light with a higher ISO? This would more capture the mood and also not have as much flash shine on the couch and back cabinets. I'm also thinking that mirror above the fireplace contributed to more light being cast than you intended. I like the composition of the shot, although less light would make it a bit more dramatic.

My two cents
Scott

[texxter]

Scott, thanks for your suggestion and kind comments.

Concerning the second image, your suggestion, although apparently intuitive and easy to implement, will not work for a couple of reasons. The camera sees differently than we do and has a much more limited ability to capture dynamic range. I just went to the living room with a meter and measure the light on the scene - it's a little different than what it was when I shot this image #2, but it's good enough to explain my point.

Exposure where my wife's face was is f/4 1/6, the top of the lamp is f/16 1/6, the bottom of the lamp is f/8 1/7, the background today is f/32... If I expose for her face I get three f-stops of overexposure on the top of the off-white lamp (can you say blown out?) and a whooping 4 f-stops of overexposure on the background. There is no way this photo is going to look good. What I need to do is reduce the dynamic range so that it "fits" into a 2 to 3 f-stops so that the entire image has detail in shadows and highlights. Flash does this.

The second issue is that I cannot submit a high ISO image to a stock house, unless it's so superb that ISO doesn't hurt it. They also frown upon noise reduction filtering. And for a static scene like this, flash is the answer. Whether my use of flash was the best possible is another question, and I'd concur that this could be done much better with more lights and more time, which still keeping a real mood.

[jeffro20]

Originally Posted by texxter

Thanks for the kind comment, Jeff. Some of these images are going to have clutter, and sometimes the clutter may be too much. Here is the third installment of the series with a bit of story to go with it.

This morning my two kids came to my bed and spent some time watching movies or playing games on portable devices. I decided to do a "suburbia" portrait of them showing both the inside and the outside of the house.



I have variations of this idea with the camera closer to the window, but this one seems to show enough of the outside to tell more the story of living in suburbia. Very little postprocessing, and I didn't remove any of the clutter in the patio.

Lighting: One SB-800 flash shot thru an umbrella and pointing directly to the children inside the bedroom. One SB-24 on a stand to camera right putting a kiss of light on the brick wall. I underexposed ambient to make it look very early morning.

This project is forcing me to step outside my comfort zone and take risks.

What do you think?

I like it. The light in the sky gives me an early morning feel. I like how you have used the edges of your pool in the composition...It adds to the whole image. The colorful noodles add some extra flair to the image and I certainly feel the comfort of being within one's castle. Keep 'em coming.

[texxter]

Thanks, Jeff! I worked on a different version of this file that has a much warmer mood.

[jeffro20]

Originally Posted by texxter

Thanks, Jeff! I worked on a different version of this file that has a much warmer mood.

Now I feel like I'm in the Texas Panhandle sitting thru a late afternoon dust/sand storm. You better put the tarp on your pool.

[texxter]

Jeff, yes, I think I went in the other direction a bit too much!

Here is my next image in the series, this time, a suburbia landscape, without people. I really like the mood of the yard at the end of the evening, with the house lights on. I tried to recreate this mood with this image below of my front yard and a swing hanging from the tree. I wanted to convey a feeling a warmth and comfort. I debated whether to clone out the neighbor's window or not - left it there to maintain the "accuracy" (very relative, of course) of this series.



I used an unusual lighting technique - this is a 30 sec exposure. I went around the swing with a flash at low power, and flashed it about 12 times, pointing it at different places, to get a light distribution on the scene that may look credible. It was fairly dark and the long exposure just captured the light inside the house. Everything else is flash.

[texxter]

I have neglected working on this series with my recent travel. This evening I decided to add one more picture to the project based on my son's Speed Stacking obsession - he is getting really good at it, and practices whenever he's not busy with other more important stuff. I wanted to make a portrait of him playing speed stack that captured a bit of the motion and the speed of the game. Not sure I was successful with this first attempt.

Attempt #1. He did his playing in the dark, with a flash light painting light on the stacks during a long exposure. I added a flash pop on him during the exposure. Flash was gelled with a full CTO.



Attempt #2 - done in the dark, but this time I did about 8 pops of low power flash on him during a long exposure. This captures more movement and speed, but the strong letters on his shirt are a problem. I think I will experiment with stacked strobe pops some other time he's wearing a solid color.

[Bruce M. Morris]

Paco, I like the image of the swing.. I was going to ask if you had done any in this series painting with light. The colors in the swing are great!

for the Speed Stacking, I wonder how the cups would look if you had a strip light with diffusers underneath the cups? there would have to be some modifiers to keep the light off your son's face but it would bring a different feel to them...