Film noire - Waiting

Light­ing dia­gram for Waiting

This is one of my Film Noire ses­sions for 2010. A last minute ses­sion put together with Cat to take advan­tage of my sched­ule. The loca­tion for the ses­sion was in Dundee, and makes for a won­der­ful back­drop for this image. The ses­sion was what I call run and gun, basi­cally find a loca­tion and grab shots before mov­ing on to the next.

All told this is one of the more dif­fi­cult ses­sions I’ve had to do. I was pressed for time due to the weather (it was cold and rain­ing) and also the loca­tion area I had to work in which was a nar­row walkway.

When I saw the loca­tion I knew I wanted the pools of light to fea­ture in the image, to either spot­light the model or to frame against the night to make her stand out. So I metered for the light­ing and decided to not only drag the shut­ter but also use a high ISO. How­ever using a high ISO caused other com­pli­ca­tions with bal­anc­ing the flash power.

Nor­mally I use E-TTL with the Canon flash sys­tem; this is usu­ally because I’m fight­ing against vari­able light­ing. How­ever since I was shoot­ing at night the light and ambi­ent was con­stant mean­ing I could use the Sky­port sys­tem to trig­ger the flash and con­trol the power man­u­ally. I set the flash at 1/64^th but found it was still too pow­er­ful so dropped it down to 1/128^th power which was still a touch too bright so I brought up the shut­ter speed to com­pen­sate. Down­side of all this I lost the ambi­ent so again I had to jug­gle num­bers to end up with 1/60^th shut­ter speed, f/2.8 aper­ture and an ISO of 800. The flash was set to man­ual at 1/128^th. I could have used ND fil­ters on the flash to cut the out­put but when you’re look­ing to bag a quick shot gels can com­pli­cate things. On the flash I also used a home­made snoot to avoid light spill and to cre­ate a spot­light on Cat.

Post-processing is pri­mar­ily a cross-process tech­nique using curves with some extra addi­tions from my own work­flow. I wanted the image to have a nat­ural or a film like con­trast rather than a punchy colour­ful image. The cross-process tech­nique I used enhanced the shad­ows with a cool tint which accen­tu­ated the warm tones in the image. This is called colour vibrancy where you have oppo­site or com­ple­men­tary colours cre­at­ing a har­mony. In this shot we have three main colours work­ing in har­mony red, blue and yel­low to make Cat stand out. With the nat­ural Depth of Field from my lens this works really well. Apart from minor skin retouch­ing to remove the harsh reflec­tions on the skin that’s inher­ent when using a snoot plus the colour treat­ment the rest of the image is pretty much as is from the can.

Here is a few more images from the ses­sion with using iden­ti­cal lighting.

Cred­its
Model: Cat

Related posts:

1. Sum­mer Dreams
2. Bad Girl
3. Autumn Col­lec­tion