Good morning, South Beach

  Good morning, South Beach Part Deux

For one of the last classes of the spring semester, students met IPC Visual Lab instructor Carl Juste on South Beach for an early morning assignment. "Just take pretty pictures," he said. Carl pointed out that there were plenty of ingredients for pretty pictures: bright colors, architectural details, golden light, beautiful people.

Jennifer Kay thought to herself, "... but I don't take pretty pictures. I see weird South Beach, shapes and shadows, not pretty South Beach." She came upon a group of silhouetted people saluting the rising sun.

And then she came across an element that had eluded her during her shooting for her previous "South Beach Morning" project: a airplane flying within frame across the blue sky. Something pretty came out of the shoot after all.

Share your views of South Beach in the morning in the comments or by email! What elements do you look for when you're shooting in an environment as target rich as South Beach?

A Walk through Utah

JKay recently took a hiking trip to Utah, where she walked through Salt Lake City and Arches National park in Moab. "I looked for ways to show the vastness of the environment around me - the size of the landscape, the contrast of the harsh light, the dryness and the breadth of scenery so different from the cluttered urban area where I live."

JKay On Assignment

Jennifer Kay writes for The Associated Press, and she recently found herself on assignment without a photographer. She would have to take pictures to accompany her article. Here's how she coped with the challenge:

I was assigned to cover the launch of Fabien Cousteau's 31-day underwater living experiment in the Florida Keys. Cousteau left from a dock in Islamorada on a bright, sunny Sunday morning. I wanted    to make sure that we had fresh images of Cousteau, just in case something went wrong with his month-long underwater expedition. Otherwise, we only had hand-out photos that were taken in 2012 when he had last visited the underwater base. As Cousteau and his crew gathered for a press conference on their boat, I put my recorder at their feet to collect audio so that I could add their quotes to my story. Then I sat as close as I could to their boat without getting in the way of the television cameras around me and pulled out both my point-and-shoot camera, which has a zoom lens, and my DSLR with a fixed 50 mm lens. Cousteau and his crew stood on a white boat under a blazing mid-morning sun, so I knew the challenge would be balancing that white boat with the dark shadows thrown on their faces.

I tried to frame each shot to highlight Cousteau, the focus of my story, as well as some of the details around him, such as the mission logo on the wetsuits hung behind him, or the life jackets that signaled where the crew was standing, or the Nokia camera phones that the crew would use to film their project. While Cousteau emphasized the team effort that was sending him 63 feet below the ocean's surface for a month, I looked for moments when I could isolate Cousteau, the grandson of ocean exploration pioneer Jacques Cousteau.

To see more of JKay's story and photos, see the AP story here. What would you have done differently?

"Finding Vivian Maier" is a documentary that explores the life of a nanny who secretly may have been one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th century.

Some IPC Visual Lab students saw the film after class recently.

Anthony Harris says Maier seemed to be a private person: "No one really knew what and how she thought or what her passions may have been. Our only insight of her is through her vast amount of photography. Her in-your-face, daring, almost challenging approach to her subjects is inspirational and motivational to me in my development as a photographer. Her use of light, knowledge of her camera, composition is brilliant. ... Maloof deserves a ton of credit for bringing her work to us."

Jennifer Kay left the film wanting to know less about Maier as a person and wanting more time to sit and study her work: "The mystery of Maier is a great story, but I wonder if she had led a more 'conventional' life or had a more socially acceptable personality, would we be as enraptured by her work? I tried to think of another artist who left so little documentation about his or her artistic motivations and aspirations behind -- no correspondence, no journals, no cameos in the work of contemporary artists, no exhibits or articles -- and the only comparable artists I could think of were the ancient people who left haunting paintings in caves -- we don't know why they left them, we just know that we respond to them. Do we really judge people on their art, or do we judge how good the behind-the-scenes story is first? What if there was nothing but the art to look at? My favorite part of Maier's work/story (will they ever be inseperable?) is seeing a new perspective from the 1950s and 1960s. It's not often anymore that we see something new from those decades. The film also made a good point about how Maier shot from the hip with her twin-lens camera, the perspective of a child that altered the posture of her subjects. I hadn't thought about shooting from the hip in that way before, and I wonder what would happen to my photographs if I started shooting that way."

Have you seen "Finding Vivian Maier"? Leave a comment with your thoughts about the film and continue the conversation!

Hard Light

Photographers often talk about the golden hour and good lighting. What happens, though, when you don't have the light you want?

Since starting this starting this semester's lighting course, I've started to think more about the times when I'm shooting in hard lighting situations -- for example, at night under harsh exterior lights, in a dark gym lit only by a handful of spotlights and outside at midday in bright sunlight. It wasn't hard to find the light in these situations, but it was hard to work around their limitations.

Outside the theater, I could have used a flash to illuminate the crowd, but the crowd wasn't my focus. I wanted to focus on the theater's neon lights and the marquee with the name of the play I was seeing. Unfortunately, the marquee was only half-lit at the time. I chose to focus on the blue neon, choosing a camera setting that would saturate its color and at the same time still show the backlit crowd.

In the gym, I first pulled out my DSLR because of its higher iso settings. However, my 18mm - 55mm lens made all the netball action look flat, even when the iso was adjusted to compensate for the gym's poor lighting. I switched to my point-and-shoot camera with a surprisingly steady 300mm zoom and set the camera to 1600 iso, the highest iso it has. Forced to choose, I chose depth over light, knowing that if I could get close enough to my subjects from the court's sidelines, there should be enough light to illuminate the action. 

When I came upon an apparent fashion shoot at midday on a bright, sunny day, I wondered why the shoot was happening at all. Wasn't that breaking all the lighting rules I had just learned? The women shooting on Virginia Key didn't have a scrim or a diffuser or a strobe to fill in the dark shadows I assumed the harsh light was casting on the model's face. Maybe that's the look the photographer was going for - maybe she was seeing something I wasn't in all that sunlight reflecting off the model's white clothes. Maybe that was her vision. I just kept thinking there had to be a better way to get those shots, without hoping that editing software would save the image. I made my image with my camera set to a "beach" setting and a low iso to compensate for the sunlight, and I ended up pleased with the image I was able to make -- I hope the other photographer was pleased with her work as well. 

What would you have done if you were in J Kay's place?  Leave a comment with your fixes for hard lighting situations!

Jennifer Kay uses her Leica point-and-shoot during a netball game and set her camera at 800 ISO in order to stop the action and retain some image quality inside the dark lit gym.

inside the dark gym.

Flash vs. Natural Light

Generally, I shoot mostly with natural light _ I'm comfortable working within the limits of naturally lit scenes. This semester, however, I've branched out to include strobes, diffusers and other light sources in my compositions. Luckily, I have two perfect, amenable subjects who don't mind if I make mistakes while they play. On my last two trips to my brother's house, I experimented with a flash and diffuser mounted on the top of my DSLR. My aim for using the flash was to light the kids' faces without harsh shadows, but in using the flash I lost the warmth of the ambient light.

On my most recent trip, I tried to compensate for the shadows created by multiple light sources and a reflective table. I lost warm skin tones, though, when I fired the flash.









Bouncing the flash off the ceiling fills in the shadows and casts light back underneath the chin (due to reflective table), hence reducing hard shadow and giving an even distribution by the flash.

Bouncing the flash off the ceiling fills in the shadows and casts light back underneath the chin (due to reflective table), hence reducing hard shadow and giving an even distribution by the flash.

The most useful use of my flash was outside at noontime in direct sunlight. The shooting the flash directly at my subject, I was able to fill in the deep shadow on my nephew's face.

Reflected Light

 
In the first class of the spring semester, IPC Visual Lab instructor CW Griffin challenged us to manipulate natural light before we started thinking about picking up strobes. For our first homework assignment, we had to find a surface that would reflect light, then use that surface to create a portrait in which the subjects were lit by light through a window and backlit by light through a window. 
 

The kids' easel in my brother's home had one side that was plain white, and standing next to a window, it reflected light even on a cloudy, rainy day. I had my brother sit with the window lighting the left side of his face, then I had him sit as close to the easel as possible so that the white surface lit up the right side of his face. I also had the children stand facing the easel, with their backs to the window, so that the white surface illuminated their little faces. The results   were softly lit portraits of people I love.

I found another reflective surface - one of my brother's computer screens. In a darkened room, from less than 2 feet away, the screen lit up my brother's face as much as a strobe. The result was a dramatically lit headshot that uniquely utilizes the tools my brother and I use the most - a computer and a camera.

Editor's Note:  Ms. Jennifer Kay is finding light in unusual places by utilizing reflective materials and
unorthodox light sources.  Hence, she creates a natural feel and ambiance when she takes advantage of all the light that is available without over powering her subjects.