‘Light Work’ Photography Workshop with Gregory Heisler
Last week I was up at the Maine Media Workshops taking a class in photographic lighting with ultra-big-name portraitist Gregory Heisler. Here’s some photos from the workshop…
(Above: Bill poses on top of some oil tanks in the basement of a now-defunct school building, lit by a variety of lights that Heisler picked up at Home Depot.)
Gregory Heisler demonstrates lighting fellow workshop participant Fred with a $20 Home Depot fluorescent light fixture.
In one of the “split into groups and go shoot” sessions in the workshop, we spent the afternoon shooting portraits of each other (no models!) in an ancient and now-defunct school building. Each group of three or four would divide up into a shooter, a subject, and one or two assistants. Here, fellow workshop attendee Dani decided he wanted to do a portrait of Dave (pictured) leaning over the sink — with the sinks around him full of variously colored lights. This is a shot I grabbed while we were tweaking things around. (For the photo nerds, it was taken with a Canon 85mm f/1.2 lens on a 5D body.)
The light on Dave’s face was Bill’s idea — he hid in one of the bathroom stalls and threw a beam of light from a big lantern flashlight into the sink mirror to get the glow on Dave’s face.
Another portrait I did at the workshop — Ned riding a bomb, strapped down to the roof of an old sedan. We found this car (marked “Jazz Not War” on the other side) in the yard of Firefly Restoration in Hope, Maine — a company dedicated to restoring old firetrucks. Ned’s illuminated by a gigantic movie-light-style Fresnel lens in front of a battery-powered studio flash unit. I threw so much orange gel over the front of the light that the rest of the world looked really blue in comparison, and then cranked up the power so that the rest of the world was really dark in comparison too.
