April 25, 2022
If you are paying attention, you will certainly already be scratching your head about this post. I always start these blog posts off with a date, and you are undoubtedly scratching your head and looking at your watch to verify that you weren’t dreaming for all these days and weeks. You are right, the date is nowhere near recent, but there is a good reason for that. This trek was done a while back and I use the term “trek” loosely here because it was more of a client shoot. However, there were a lot of similarities to a trek in that I had to wake up at 4:30am and get on the road before the sun came up. I traveled two and a half hours up to Salem, VA, for this shoot. Sounds like a trek to me, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t going out for a landscape view, or even a nice rusty car that I wanted to shoot. This was something else entirely. To really understand what brought this on, we have to look back to the month of March when I got an email from Dave Russo, a poet based in Sparta, NC.
Dave had contacted me to update his professional headshot for his various profiles as well as for a possible book project that he wanted to embark on as a collection of his poetry. He had been following this very blog, which was how he knew that I had been delving into that field of photography. I guess that folks actually do read my little dear diary pieces, but I digress. We ended up doing the session later that month and it went very well for my first on location headshot session. In fact, the images from this day were so much better than I had actually imagined. More importantly, Dave was impressed with the work and the whole experience.
As we got to know each other a bit more, I found out that he was a photographer as well and was starting to get into shooting landscapes as an aside from his usually musician photography. Of course, the change in genres brought with it a change in skills and we started to talk about those things. One thing led to another, and he ended up coming out for an hour mentorship session where we talked about the different filters and ways of using them. From there, he signed up for my Spring Landscape Workshop at Stone Mountain. During this time, he also shared with me that he was the project manager for a book project that was actually underway. This project was a biography of a man named Joe Gaither who among many other things, was a basketball coach, a deacon in his church, and a pillar of the community. Dave had gone out and tried to get a photo of Joe for the cover of the book, but it hadn’t quite turned out like he had hoped. He reached out to me to see if I had any advice to improve the photo, and he snuck in there that he would like for me to shoot it, but since Joe was in Salem, VA, he figured that was too far for me to travel. It didn’t take but a few seconds for me to realize the potential for this situation and I replied that I would be happy to go and get the photo done for them. I mean, I’ve traveled further than that just to get portfolio images which rarely have an immediate payday. This was a paid shoot, and something that I wanted to do for the learning experience if nothing else.
We went through the customary consultation on the phone, and I found out more about the project and the timeline that they were wanting this done in. There was nothing mentioned that I couldn’t handle so I was fully in on the project at this point. Of course, I also offered to assist Dave in another attempt should my quote be higher than they could afford being a self-published book. I have a soft spot in my heart for those self-publishing books because I know how expensive that can become before you even know what your sales will look like. I did price my services according to my experience in this genre which was quite a bit less than I hoped to be able to charge down the road. Even that felt a little high looking at the number, but after Dave reviewed the quote, he agreed to the terms and then sent me his project notes on the book. I thought I was detailed, but what Dave had created was longer than most paperback novels I’ve read. I went through the whole project and was thrilled when I got to the part about photography and where he had put in the probable cost of having a professional photograph used for the cover. I was right on the money with the estimate and that made me feel pretty darned good about how this was going so far.
For the following couple of weeks Dave and I went back and forth about ideas for the book cover shoot, and I started to create a mood board and project list of my own through a program that I have been getting to know called Milanote. It is a great platform to gather ideas and get notes and lists together for a large project and for this one it seemed more than perfect. As it turned out, Dave already had a great idea for the elements used in the photo that he shot. Of course, he had Joe as the focal point, but there was also the basketball court that he grew up playing on which happened to be right next door to the church that he has been a member of snice he was 9 years old. Based on the contents of the book, these elements seemed very important to me. There was also the inclusion of a basketball which commemorated his first 100 wins that had a collection of signatures on it. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Dave had the right ingredients with his photo, it just lacked a bit of production value.
As part of my creative process when it comes to portrait shoots, I like to speak with the client directly and find out a little bit about them. That is the best way that I know of to be able to capture the essence of the individual in a photo. Dave set this up as a video chat since Joe was located in Salem, VA. There was no reason to have anyone travel at this point and the video would allow me to read body language and hear the tempo in his voice. That process lasted right at an hour, and I got to know Joe and I was able to hear directly from him what his expectations were. Simply put, he was just humbled that the project was even being done and wasn’t sure what to think of the whole thing. He had no expectations for the photos which then opened the door for me to share the vision that Dave and I had come up with. I switched the screen over to the Milanote boards and I started to go through the different elements to get clarification.
This was the very important part of the process because I learned exactly where Joe wanted the emphasis with the photos. In some cases, I had been figuring the wrong balance of importance and it was good to get that cleared up early on in the process. I took the time to listen to what Joe wanted represented in his photos and while he didn’t really know what he wanted the photos to look like, I was able to piece together the parts that were important to him and work through some possible compositions in my head. By the end of the hour, I was confident that we were on the right track for a cover image that represented Joe, and the contents of the book. We had also decided that I would get started by doing some headshots of Joe and some images that could be used for marketing purposes as well as possibly contents of the book. We were also discussing having Joe’s Pastor join in for one of the photos.
The next stage was working out the “deliverables” which included things like sizing for the cover photo and color space preferred by the publisher. Since I was shooting for a very specific purpose, I wanted to make sure that I delivered what was expected by all parties that were going to be involved. As it turned out, the book was going to be sized at 6×9″ which was the native aspect ratio for my camera. This made visualizing the placement of the elements quite simple. Dave set up a communication with the publisher and we talked about cover design. The preference of the publisher was to use the photo to cover the entire front cover with room for the title and author to be overlayed on the image. In other words, I was going to need plenty of headroom for the text and ideally some space at the bottom which was open for text. The other part of the equation was the color space that they were working in. I found out that they worked in CMYK which is a very limited color space and one that I have very little experience operating in since I primarily work in ProPhoto RGB for the largest color gamut possible, and sRGB for most outputs. All of this was factored into my creative process for the end result.
Now that I had the go-ahead from the project manager to go forward with the planning phase, I started to really put ideas together for the shoot and thought about how to work through issues and problems. The location of the shoot was probably the biggest issue to deal with. It was a playground and basketball court which was situated right next to the church. The courts were surrounded by fences, parking lots, buildings, and playground pieces. It was also open to the public which meant that I needed to pick a time when there would be little to no traffic at the court so we wouldn’t get in the way of anyone. From talking with Joe, he said that during the week, and before 1pm was the best time to get the court all to ourselves. Utilizing Google Maps, I realized that the orientation of the church and courts would dictate shooting into the sun in order to get a morning shoot accomplished. Since there were three people involved in this shoot, and the fact that two of them would have to drive 2.5 hours to get there, we couldn’t wait until the weather was looking good to go. We just had to make a plan and get a day in the books. This was about two weeks out and there was no telling what the weather was going to be.
Knowing that I was going to shoot unless there was rain, I had to figure out how to deal with the sun at Joe’s back. I could do the easy thing and overexpose the image which would give very nice even lighting on Joe but would blow the background out. While this technique is all the rage in portraiture, it would defeat the purpose of storytelling with the image where I wanted to include the background. I could use a reflector to push some light back into Joe’s face, but if the sun was bright and low, that reflected light would blind him causing his eyes to squint more than they do naturally. That wasn’t going to work either. My only other option was to bring my studio strobes which happen to run on battery power to the shoot location. With that 500ws strobe, I would be able to overpower the sunlight and use the sun as a rim light, and background light while I controlled the light falling on Joe.
That might seem simple enough, but there was another concern that I was facing. I had not yet used flash outside to overpower the sun. I knew that the flash had the power to do that and that was why I selected the 500ws strobe in the first place. While I hadn’t done it in practice, I knew that I had two options on how to get the task done. I could either go with high-speed sync which would allow a faster shutter speed that 1/200 but would reduce the output of the light. I could also use an ND filter to reduce the ambient light coming into the camera allowing for full power on the strobe. I had an old variable ND filter that has been in my closet for quite a while that I had put in my lighting bag for just such an occasion so I figured that I would go with that option to ensure that I had the power in the strobe. I fully intended to practice this technique before going out to do the client shoot which would have been the proper thing to do. However, I never actually go around to setting it up outside and trying it. I fully understood the method though and felt confident that I would be able to deliver once I got there.
As the date of the shoot approached, the weather reports were not looking favorable at all. That is to say, it was looking bright and sunny all around the shoot date. I would have much preferred some good clouds, but at least we weren’t looking at rain which would have mandated a reschedule. I just kept watching the weather and hoping for some clouds. I was also looking at the gear that I was going to have to bring to this since I didn’t exactly know how the lay of the land would look in person. I had to be prepared for just about anything which meant bringing along most of my studio. I always love it when I have that moment of relief over purchase decisions made long ago. I had put together a studio environment that I could relatively easily transport to another location. Of course, I don’t like transporting so much gear, but I bought with portability in mind. Just to give you an idea of what I ended up taking, I had two camera bodies (no words can express the level of “suck” if your only camera body decides to break), four lenses, two studio flashes (extra for the same reason as two bodies), stands, reflector/diffuser panels, umbrella with diffusion, a beauty dish, tripod, and several small accessories. I had the back of the 4Runner filled up when it was time to head out to the court.
I left home at 5:30am in order to get to the court by 8am which was the agreed-on time. The plan was I would have an hour to get comfortable with the environment and scout out good locations for the photos that I was going to need to produce. I also wanted time to set up the flash and get a few test exposures done with the sun very low in the sky to make sure that I had the power that I thought that I did. Dave actually got there first which made me feel bad. I don’t like it when the client beats me to the location, but he had stayed up there the night before, so he had a lot shorter of a drive, and I was still there slightly before 8. We walked the area and looked at the different places that we could set up and shoot at. As it turned out, the location that Dave had used for his cover photo was absolutely the best location as it included everything that we needed and avoided a lot of extra stuff that we didn’t need. There was nothing that I could do to improve on his selection.
It was the production process that I was able to improve on, well at least I was hoping that I could. Once I got a general feel for everything, I pulled out the camera gear and set things up near the same hoop that Dave had shot with. I used my 24-70mm lens even though I was planning on shooting with the 35mm to really put Joe in the forefront of the image. As I was looking at how things were lining up, I was realizing that I was much closer to being at 50mm than I thought. I was looking to line up the hoop and the cross on the church as those were instrumental parts of the composition as per our consultation. I was going to execute these elements slightly different from what Dave had done before. My plan was to put Joe between the two to keep the image better balanced. As I was tweaking the composition, I realized that in order to get the scale right and have the two background elements be a big enough part of the scene, I was going to have to go with a much narrower focal length than I had thought. I was in the area of 60-70mm and was thinking that I wanted to go tighter than that. I didn’t want to get into the telephoto end too much because I wanted to keep a bit of distortion on Joe to emphasize his height and to keep him on the same level as the supporting elements.
Looking at the sun, there was going to be no way to do this without using a flash, so I went back to the truck and got one of my strobes and mounted it to a boom stand. Since I was dealing with natural undiffused sunlight, I chose to keep the modifier simple and just used a standard 7 inch reflector. I got the unit back to the court and set it up where it complimented the sun’s position the best. I then had Dave stand in as I started to balance the ambient to the flash lighting. I was well into high speed flash shutter speeds, so I added an ND filter and dialed in about 3-stops of light reduction which gave me about 1.5 stops underexposure to the ambient. I then added in the flash and found that it just worked at full power. The sun was still down very low and I knew that I had about an hour and a half before I would be shooting that image so I knew the sun would reduce in intensity during that time….or that was what I hoped would happen.
At 9am, Joe arrived, and I saw him walking across the grass to the court. It was time to make this happen for real. All the planning was done, and all of my prep work was finished. My goal was to have Joe out there for the least amount of time necessary. We also had to go inside for a photo with the Pastor which would be another setup, so I needed to work efficiently. Something that I have learned with people pictures is it is never a good idea to go for the main shot first off. Both the model and the photographer are cold, and the resulting images will not look natural. To avoid this, I decided that we would start off with some basic headshots against a brick wall that was in the shade of a neighboring building. For these I had my 85mm prime which was a fantastic lens for close up portraiture. We did a few different shots with that and when I felt that Joe was getting comfortable with me, we moved out to the court. I wanted to give lots of context to the images so including props was going to be important for these shots. He had brought the commemorative ball with him that had been signed and a whistle for the coaching aspect, and he also brought along his Bible which was not something that was discussed, but worked out great. We got everything situated and I looked at the lighting. There was a very nasty hard light on Joe that caused shadows which I didn’t want in the image.
Since I was doing half and 3/4 shots, there was no reason to bring the flash over. Instead, I utilized a voice activated light stand, aka Dave, to hold my 1-stop diffuser panel to block the light hitting Joe. That gave a really beautiful light on Joe and something that I could work with. We went through several different poses like that. It was here that I really started to experiment with expressions. We would go between serious and intense looks to a natural smile which was usually brought about by me trying to be funny. I don’t know if Joe was laughing at me, or with me, but he was laughing and that was what I wanted to have happen.
While we were still at this part of the court, I wanted to get something a little different. I placed the ball on the ground with the coach’s clipboard propped on it. Knowing that I was going to get more of a storytelling image, I switched out to my 50mm prime before asking Joe if he minded kneeling down next to the ball. He was very accommodating to that request, but I felt bad for asking him to do it. I did have an idea for a storytelling photo though. We went through a few test shots to get the pose right and he asked if he could stand up. While I was getting repositioned, he stood up and stretched for a minute. He then came back down while I was already sitting on the ground. The moment that his knee hit the ground; I saw the pose develop that I hadn’t even known I wanted. I got the focus and hit the shot in just a matter of a second. It was a grab image before I shot another handful of posed ones. I was very happy that I had grabbed that one shot because it was the one that had the emotional connection and fit with the intense part of Joe that I wanted to capture. The harsh lighting wasn’t a problem here because I was going for more of a profile shot so I didn’t need Dave to hold the reflector. However, if you look closely, Dave’s head is casting a shadow at Joe’s right foot. That is all part of the game when you just grab a shot like this. There isn’t time to tweak the shot, and the small shadow had no bearing on the image at all so I didn’t mind it being there at all.
From here, we went through a few other poses that I wanted to try at the picnic table. The ones that I really wanted to do weren’t really possible because the sun was too bright and hurt Joe’s eyes. There was only so much of the scene that I could diffuse with the panel so that only worked for a few of the compositions I wanted to try. As a last-ditch effort, I moved behind Joe and had him looking over the court and playground. Well, it looked like he was looking because I said that he could close his eyes to deal with looking in the direction of the sun. I had placed the clipboard on the edge of the table as a foreground introducing the diagonal aspect of the table which led to Joe. It was a good image for telling the story, but I didn’t like that the subject could have been anyone. It really needed Joe’s face for the purpose of the shoot.
By this time, we had been shooting about 30 minutes and I knew that it was about to be time to get the main image of the day. The Pastor was arriving around 10 and I wanted to make sure that we got him involved as soon as we could so that he didn’t get tied up with other things. I had exhausted my ideas for different shots anyway, and since the primary purpose of the day was this one shot, I wanted to take my time in getting this one right. I let Joe rest while I fit the 24-70mm lens back on the camera since I had decided that around 61mm was where I needed to be. I went ahead and screwed on my ND filter and set the camera up on the tripod that was still sitting where I had left it after the trial shots with Dave. The flash was still in place as well. I got things dialed in for the ambient exposure which required right at 2-stops reduction in light this time to keep my shutter speed at 1/200. It was time for Joe to come in and I popped a test exposure with the flash. It was way overexposed now that the sun was getting higher in the sky. I made some adjustments to the flash, and I think brought it down to just over 1/2 power before making another exposure. This time the light balanced out quite nicely.
We shot a series of about 10 images with serious and smiling expressions and when I started to review the images there was something that didn’t sit right with me. First of all was the light. There was too much shadow on Joe’s face for my liking and there wasn’t a story here. He was pretty much facing me with a background. This was designed to be a start to the process, and I was going to tweak the pose, but I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t going to like so many aspects of it. It was passable, and Joe as well as Dave liked it. I knew I could do better though. Looking at the image as I had shot it there was a potential story there that I wanted to put more time into. I could see Joe turning to his right facing more towards the basketball goal while the cross was ever prevalent behind him. It just dawned on me that Joe is a very spiritual man and loves the church. He has told me that everything in his life is due to God which fit into the composition because no matter what Joe did in life, he knew God was behind him and the church was there to support him. What he had chosen to do with his life was coach and be a mentor to his players. While keeping the cross behind him, he looked towards the hoop while staying grounded in the Good Word (notice the Bible in his hand).
To make this new storyline possible, I just needed to adjust the pose slightly, and change the direction of the light. I had set it up the first time to work with the sun as it was down low on the horizon. Now that it was higher, it had shifted anyway. The switch in direction of light allowed me to use the sunlight as a direct rim light on Joe while making the flash my key. It is obviously a flash lit photo, but that was the effect that I was going for since I wanted Joe to be larger than life in this composition and the definite main subject.
As before, we went through a few facial expressions, and I realized that I wanted to make Joe a bit larger in the photo. This meant that I needed to move in closer and recompose slightly. I ended up losing a nice addition of two other crosses in the far background behind the goal, but those were getting a little crowded anyway. With the new position, the scaling was spot on, and the secondary crosses were no longer needed because the main cross was so dominant now. We went through a couple more frame with different expressions and I looked at what I had captured. I was sold! I showed Dave and Joe both and they were very happy with that last batch as well. This was what we needed, and I was satisfied that I had enough from here on the court. We had been out here for about an hour and fifteen minutes up to this point.
It was getting hot, and Joe was getting a little tired at this point so it was time to move inside to the air conditioning. I started to break everything down outside so that I could manage to bring it all in at the same time. I had visualized doing the shot with the pastor in the sanctuary to give context and tell the full story of the two. That was where we ended up once we got inside and I started to look around for a good composition that I could use. What I liked was the pews and how they had some of the similar colors from the book palette. The best section of them was over at the far side of the sanctuary because that was the only side getting any natural light from the outside. The problem with that was the light would be coming in from the background and there would be no light on either of the subjects on the camera side.
Fortunately, I had already prepared for this eventuality and had brought the Phottix strobe which I had already used outside. The lighting requirement would be different in here though as I was now going to use the strobe as the key light for the whole scene with the sun giving a nice rim light. I needed a better quality of light than I had used outside, so I pulled out my large umbrella with diffusion which would easily light both subjects with a nice soft light. It would also cast additional light into the background since umbrellas are good at flooding an area with light.
Not wanting to have the Pastor break away from his responsibilities while I set the lighting up, I just had Joe sit where I expected to have him, and I had Dave fill in for the Pastor as I got the lighting ratios set. Once I was confident that I had everything ready, we called for the Pastor who was nice enough to join us briefly for the photos. I wanted to get two different takes on this moment of communication. The first idea was to get them involved in a funny conversation that would hopefully give some genuine expressions and make the photo seem more casual. The second attempt was to get them talking about something serious just to give some variation in the look. I shot about a half dozen frames of each concept as they just chatted away. After about 10 minutes or so, we were done, and we wrapped everything up.
I made a quick check with Dave and Joe to make sure that we had everything that was wanted for the session. We all felt comfortable that there should be plenty of great choices to look through. With that, I got things packed up and they helped me take everything back out to the truck. From there it was a matter of playing Tetris to load it all back into the 4Runner, so it was all secured for the ride home. The 2.5 hours on the road home gave me time to really think about how the shoot had gone. From a planning standpoint and execution, it all went according to plan. I was there slightly less time than I had planned and had gotten everything accomplished that I had been asked to. It all went smoothly and there were no hiccups on my end which made me feel great. The only question was whether or not my photos would meet the expectations of Joe and Dave. That would have to wait until I got home to really find out.
I got home around mid-afternoon and went down to the studio to get things unloaded from the truck and to get the photos imported into Lightroom. I was very pleased at the results of these photos from a quick look through of the RAW files. I started to cull them down into what I thought captured Joe’s personality the best. Once I had a handful of really good images I started to work on the editing. Part of this process was dealing with color manipulation to make the colors fit the desired color palette as closely as possible while keeping the colors accurate in the images. That took the longest time, and then came the normal concerns with a shoot which included a lot of little adjustments designed to create a finished photo. Obviously, it was the cover image that took the longest which included a lot of cloning of the power lines and the removal of the smaller crosses that were now mixed in with the goal which created a distraction. The cleaning of the image made it all pop and come together nicely. In fact, I only did the one that is shared here because I felt that it was by far the strongest of the bunch with the intent expression on Joe’s face. I figured that was the best option for the cover because I wanted the cover to be his game face with the intent stare while most of the other images let you into his personality which is how the majority of the book will be focused. It just seemed like the right choice to make and when I presented it to Dave and Joe, we all agreed that was the image to go with.
By the next morning, I had confirmation that these four images were to be selected for use and licensing. About an hour later, I had them packaged and uploaded to my file sharing platform for them to download. Thanks to some serious planning before we even got started, this shoot went amazingly smooth, and it was a lot of fun. As always, it was a pleasure working with Dave because he is meticulous with his planning and knows exactly what he is after which is communicated to me easily. That makes my job very easy because I have a full direction in mind as I work on the creative end. He has his own book out now, and I invite you to give it a read. As for the Joe Gaither book, it has just now been released and you can pick up your own copy of it here. You can also opt for a Kindle version here. From the time I got involved with the project until I got word that the book was live on Amazon on the morning of July 23rd, was a bit over three months. Keep in mind that the content of the book was largely finished already at that point which gives you some idea of just how much time it takes to get a book put together after the hard part of writing it is over.
You might notice that the cover is not quite what we were expecting. After all that fuss over the conceptual cover image, creative team decided that they were going to go with one of the earlier photos I took that day. The reasoning was they wanted to go with something a little simpler and more direct which I can understand. The concept for the cover shoot was a little busy with all of the elements that were involved. I had tried to simplify it the best that I could in the field and had done a really good job there, but the author still wanted something a bit more simplified. I can’t argue with the ultimate choice as that was one of my favorites from the day as well, and as long as the clients are happy with what I have provided, that is really all that I can ask. Dave has shared with me that everyone is thrilled with how the project came together and how the photos lined up with their intended uses.
I can now say that I have my second book cover added to my resume which is a pretty big deal, I think. I’m thinking that when I look back on 2022, I’ll see it as my year of publication with a book cover and associated promotional photos to my credit as well as being included in a book about Ashe County Photographers which is featuring five of my images from the area. It has been a long time coming, but it is nice to have my work in book form.
Now, we just need to figure out what is next on the accomplishment list and make that happen.
Until next time…
