I wanted to shoot fast and flexible and wanted the girls to have fun, laugh and enjoy themselves while I photographed them. No elaborate setups, no static, stiff posing, just girls playing, having fun and capturing lifestyle images in my camera.

I set up two Einstein lights with softboxes and grids, each running on a Paul Buff battery pack and triggered by Paul Buff Cyber Commander. I love this equipment. It gives me studio-level flashes with on-camera lighting control in a portable, affordable and powerful lighting rig. I could easily move my lights around myself, do a quick setup, check the lights by grabbing a couple of frames, then I could work with the girls on activities instead of concentrating on my lights, posing, and composition. After shooting hundreds of thousands of images, many in studio, I have finally gotten comfortable enough with my equipment that I don’t have to think on my lighting and camera settings much. I know them inside and out and I know from experience about what settings are going to work. I can set my lights up, shoot a test shot, and dial in the lighting in just a few seconds. This allows me to do what is REALLY important, spend more time interacting with my subjects so I can get the emotion and action I am looking for.

Have you ever tried to get 13 year old girls who don’t know you from Obama to laugh and have fun during a photo shoot? And you are a 52 year old male photographer who looks like their grandpa? It took a bit to get them loosened up. I don’t know any jokes that a 13 year old girl would find funny. Thirteen year old boys? A good fart joke always works with them. Not so with girls.

My strategy was to move fast, take lots of pics, talk to the girls, get them moving and having fun and laughing, and try to capture the magic that would hopefully come. At first they were a bit uncomfortable to say the least, and the pics showed this. I knew the first few pictures were going to be throw-aways so I started with props and scenes that weren’t my favorite, then eventually working our way to the stuff I really wanted.

Three girls on a fence railing having fun.

Of course mom’s were there monitoring the shoot. I had given them a heads up before the shoot that my preference was for them to stay in the background and let me direct. I was happy that they were very much in the background. I set up my Nikon D3s to transmit images wirelessly to my iPad so the mom’s could view images of the shoot as we progressed. This was a big hit.

One of the girls was very uneasy around these huge horses. I don’t blame her, these things weigh over 2,000 lbs! But they are gently and used to people and distractions. It was fun shooting with the horses but a bit challenging since they don’t listen too well to my directions.

There are some interesting people who attend motorcycle rallies. I think it is more interesting than the fair!

It took me several years of experimentation to learn to shoot with interesting light on my subject while at the same time getting a clean, pure white background.  It is easy to toss up a couple of white umbrellas, put your subject against a white background and fire way, but you won’t get these kind of pictures – not even close.  Instead you get flat, even, and what I consider boring lighting plus some shadows on the background that you have to often photoshop out.

After several years of trial and error and studying, I learned to isolate and light my subject on a totally different plane than my background.  This requires a really big studio since you need to position your subject about 10′ in front of the white background.  You flag off the background lights from the subject so they don’t contaminate your image, then use light modifiers to create interesting light on your subject.

I like to use a lot of hard light sources for my subjects – grids, snoots and small light sources.  I then use big soft boxes to fill in the shadows and make them not quite so hard.  So the hard lights are the keys, and the soft lights are just fill.  I can dial up and down the soft lights as I wish to create the kind of contrast I want in the image.  I will often have 8-10 lights working on the set – hard lights to define shape and soft lights to control contrast and provide fill.  I have also learned to work the edge of the light rather than the center.  This allows me to feather just the right amount of light I want to create the shape and shadows.  I vary the distances of my hard lights from the subject to control the light transition from highlights to shadows.  The closer the light to the subject, the quicker the falloff and the more contrasty the light.  The further form the subject, just the opposite – the light falls off more gradually and with less contrast.

In the photo below of Emily, I wanted the light to be a mix of both soft and hard lighting.  Normally you light females much softer than males, but in this case Emily had the features and body that could easily handle the harder lighting.  I used a beauty dish high to camera right as the key light, to define her features.  I then used a strip softbox in very close from behind and camera left to define her back, and a bit bigger gridded strip softbox camera right front for fill.  The distance of the light from the subject is critical and is what defines the falloff on Emily’s cheeks and her facial features and her collarbone.

In this photo of Cody, I wanted to define his muscular structure so knew I needed to skim hard light down his face and front to highlight his well defined abs and pecs. I had to be careful and not blow out his forehead.  So I feathered a beauty dish right down the front of his body.  Placement was critical – just an inch or two one way or the other totally changes the look.  This front skimming light is what defines his pecs and abs.  Of course this made his eyes dark, so another light was used to fill in his face a bit. Like with Emily I used a gridded strip box behind him to camera left to give some shape to his body.  I did not want a straight on frontal strip light like Emily since that would reduce the shape of his pecs and abdomens, so I swung a gridded vertical softbox around behind him to camera right to give some definition to that side of his body, without contaminating the shape on the front of his body.  Notice the striated ribs.  If you use a front light you lose this definition for him.  I then used a large soft fill right behind the camera to knock down a bit of contrast, but not much, just enough for proper exposure.  Again these lights were in tight so the falloff was more dramatic.

The photo below, while somewhat the same on composition, was lit totally different than the two above.  Here I wanted a softer light with softer features.  I used a large parabolic umbrella right over the top.  This light has different features than most umbrellas in that the light is very focused with a quick falloff from the center of the light beam to the penumbra and into the shadows.  But positioned high overhead, the vertical falloff was much more gradual. Notice the falloff from her face, down her body and then the rapid falloff at her feet.  This light characteristic comes from the parabolic silver umbrella.

I used gridded softboxes to camera right and left behind the model to provide some separation, but at much lower power than the above photos.  One giant 8′ softbox behind the camera then controlled the contrast of the image.  It was dialed up a bit more than the pictures above since I wanted a bit less contrast in the image.

So there you have it.  Three similar images, three totally different lighting schemes to create visually interesting images that helped define the subject.  Lighting is so much more than tossing up a couple of umbrellas and shooting away.  Learning the characteristics of each light modifier, how the light is shaped and how the light falls off allows you to better sculpt your subject to fit your vision.

Below are my first subjects.

Like most photographers, a wide variety of things inspire my work.  I enjoy studying the work of past photography masters to understand how they captured life in front of their lens.  I also enjoy and receive inspiration from paintings, sculptures, and interesting architecture. Music never fails to inspire me. Great cinematography always catches my eye and I try to dissect how the director created the storyline and inspired the viewers.

Despite all these awesome works by masters and experts in their fields, the single most inspiring scene for me is a view I get to wake up to many mornings.  You see, the master bedroom of our home faces southeast with floor to ceiling windows.  Our bed is on the north wall. Right before the sun rises, beautiful, soft, gentle light flows into our bedroom like a quiet mist, bathing the room with the most exquisitely soft, warm light in the world.  I usually wake up to this early morning light and if I am lucky I get to lay quietly and observe the most beautiful scene in the entire world, one that inspires me in my photography and my life. It is my beautiful, awesome, wonderful wife of 30-plus years sleeping in our bed next to me.

I often lay there for what seems like hours, studying how the light flows across her face and the gentle curves of her body.  Years ago I would just enjoy the  beauty in front of me, but as time and my photography interests grew, I began dissecting this most exquisite live picture.  I would observe how the light gently caressed her skin, so soft and peaceful  yet radiant and alluring.  My mind would wonder at the curves of her body and wonder how in the world God created such a beautiful person. Even today, the scene just continues to amaze me and inspire me.

During the many mornings I have observed this inspiring scene, I have wondered at how I can either capture that beauty with my lens or recreate that beauty in my pictures.  Oh, I have tried many times.  One time I even talked my wife Kay into posing in our bed for me while I tried to capture the beauty I saw in my eyes each morning. That was when I discovered how inadequate I was as a photographer and the limitations of my equipment.  Despite what I thought were highly evolved skills, I was just unable to come close to the perfection I see most mornings.

Since that time I have studied, analyzed and observed the scene when I am lucky enough to see it.  Kay often is off to the gym well before daylight, especially during the winter, so it is usually a weekend day when I get the luxury of enjoying, admiring and analyzing this beauty in front of my eyes.  I make note of the large floor to ceiling windows, I try to figure out how to recreate the light from the early morning sun, and I try to calculate the camera angles, f-stops and other myriad of details that I would need to capture this incredible gift of a woman I have been given.

Unfortunately despite my many, many observations and attempts, I have not yet been able to either capture or recreate this vision of perfection. At times I feel inadequate.  I have come close with a couple of pictures of my daughter Emily, but even those fall short of what I see each morning with my wife Kay.

While my inability to capture what I see frustrates me, it also inspires me. I strive to capture that incredible natural beauty that God provides me on many mornings. Like a golfer always striving for a perfect game, a violinist trying to hit the perfect note, or a baseball player trying to make the perfect swing, I have come to the realization that I may never be able to capture the true beauty of my wife sleeping in early morning sunlight.  But the challenge for perfection motivates me, inspires me, and excites me each and every day.

When I first started as a pro with film in 1996, I kept my images in archival sleeves, organized by date.  I would sometimes write on the sleeve some tidbit of information about the subject.  I even tried printing labels to place on my 35mm slide sleeves, but as the volume of my images increased this became difficult to keep up with.  I also kept groups of images on the same subject in manila file folders inside my dated hanging file folders.  This system worked decent for the film days, but by no means was perfect and as my film archive grew to nearly 100,000 images, this workflow became unwieldy.

I purchased my first digital camera, the Nikon D1, when it first arrived around 2000. This both improved the workflow yet created its own problems.  I could now shoot far more images so my image volume went up even more.  At the time there really were no good image tracking databases around and XMP/EXIF data stored in the image file was not very well known.  I tried creating my own database in Microsoft Access but this proved a big challenge and was difficult to maintain.

Eventually I was referred to a great database program called iMatch. It allowed me to catalog my images and assign them to a variety of categories with just a click of the mouse.  Within a few years I had 80,000 images organized in cataloged in iMatch, and could find any image I needed in under 2 minutes.

Ultimately I had to switch from iMatch to Adobe Lightroom and this proved problematic.  It seems iMatch did not store the keyword information in the image file, but in an external database.  This made the program fairly fast, but when I went to reimport the images into Lightroom, all my keywording and categorization was lost!  I ended up having to go back and keyword over 100,000 images – a real pain and a project I am still working on.

I am fairly happy with Lightroom now, although it by no means is a great program.  It does however store the keywords and captions inside the image itself so any time I export images, copy them to another program, or load them to a web site, my captioning and keyword information is kept intact.

Today it is still a lot of work to keyword and caption each and every image I take, but I have learned it is much easier to do during image capture than it is after the fact.