These two people are ghost-hunters, who have just started a new business, and will be carrying out ghost tours and investigations in the mould of TV's "Most Haunted". The brief was to get "spooky-looking pictures of them".
At 1.30 in the afternoon.
OUTSIDE a church the clients claimed was haunted (Not allowed inside, churches get funny about this sort of thing, it seems. Exorcism OK - it's done by priests - but the general public? No way).
This church doesn't have a spooky graveyard, either.
The weather was "sunny periods".
And the church has no north-facing view I can use.
So -- an unspooky time, location and weather conditions....
Hmmm, what to do, what to do?
Given that I had to use the church itself as backdrop, (1) was to hope that there would be at least some cloud, as even on a winter's afternoon there's plenty of sunlight washing about on south-facing aspects. That way, I could wrestle the daylight into submission with an SB900 so that (2) I could pop enough light from low down to make the scene look spooky, uplighting being one of the classic ways of doing this. I decided not to rely on the promised ghost-hunting equipment as props, which turned out to be not especially striking, visually. A pendulum and divining rods were the best on offer.
I arrived just before 1.30, very pleased to see that we were getting some periods of cloud, and the clients were there on time, willing to be photographed "spookily". Game on.
Find the best view of the church - I know it well, so it's the west wall and door, especially for the upright image I think will look best. I set an SB900 up on my camera bag pointing up at the subjects, fired remotely by the commander mode of a D300 pop-up flash. ISO down to 400 as it's usually at 800 this time of year - I could have taken the ISO to 200, but that leaves the flash feeling a bit weedy and I can't get the flash much closer at the angle I want it - shutter to max sync of 1/250th, and see how far I can darken the church by closing down the aperture and yet still have enough flash power to light the subjects. At f8-and-a-bit the flash is firing TTL at full power, which at the distance I have it from the subjects is enough to keep them well-lit. I select f8 to save the recycle time and now the subjects are actually a bit bright on the LCD so I ponder for a moment on taking the aperture down again, then decide that I'll shoot raw. I'll darken things in Aperture 3 later, as it means the church front will get darker too, which I can't do much further in-camera.
Sort out their positioning and stance, take a few pictures with the flash to my left, then to my right, then work out the best place to position them for a view (horizontal) shot, just in case that shape is needed, and the same again with flash to left and right. A bit of chimping shows I have at least one upright and one view to work on, with one in particular already standing out even on the back of the camera. We are done here. I actually have to repeat this at another churchyard a few miles away for another of the group's papers, but this next church has gravestones to use and the cloud is nearly permanent when we get there. I do a variation of the shot, still lit from below, but using another SB to uplight a tree and some gravestones behind the subjects.
Once we are done, I download the pictures into Aperture 3, and a do little bit of post-production - an overall reduction of about 0.8/0.9 stop, then curves, highlight recovery and a little burning in (their hands are closer to the flash than their faces so making them noticeably brighter), which does the trick. Export as jpegs and FTP over along with all the other "immediate" pictures from the day, easily in time for deadline.
Here's my favourite, and it is the one that stood out initially on the back of the camera from the first church. Unfortunately, the final page shape ended up using one of the views... Oh well.
I still have the picture in my Aperture library, so there are a couple of things I might try out, ready for the next time...
