Lighting How To

Dividing his time between his New York City and Paris studios, photographer Adam Savitch specializes in still life and motion studies for advertising and editorial clients, often with an avant-garde mindset. When it comes to lighting, Savitch believes in the old adage “less is more.” He doesn’t throw a light at every nook and cranny of his tabletop sets. Instead he mostly employs only one light and finesses its effect on the subject.

The flash bracket has become the “forgotten accessory” in photography but it’s still an essential tool if you’re looking to achieve consistent studio-quality lighting on the fly.

I have wanted to photograph some of nature’s details with x-rays, but I just never got around to doing it. In writing this issue of the Petersen’s Photographic Digital Photography Guide, I thought it would be interesting for you to see what can be done with this unique way of capturing images. So, I decided to put the extra effort into taking the pictures in this section.

The studio lighting genie is not going back into the bottle anytime soon and LED light sources are finding their place in more and more camera rooms. Clever and versatile lighting systems such as Rotolight’s new Anova V2 and their compact RL48-B battery-powered portable lights are part of the reason why.

A unique way to create complex geometric, multicolored designs is to attach tiny Christmas tree lights to a bicycle wheel and spin it in a dark room or outside at night. I found 7 ft of Christmas lights powered by 3 AA batteries online for about $12, and that was just enough to cover the entire circumference of the front wheel of my son’s medium sized bike. I took the wheel off the bike with a simple crescent wrench and used black electrician’s tape to affix the lights and the wires onto the rim, figure A.

We’ve seen colorful orbs in a light painting before but never as many as the East Coast Light Painting (ECLP) group crammed into a single exposure this past summer. In fact, the Guinness World Records just confirmed that the ECLP set the world record for most complete light orbs in a single exposure with 200 orbs.

I think it would be helpful to you if I explained how I handled different kinds of low light photographic situations. Apply my approach to your own images and make note of the technical solutions for each subject and scene. As photographers we are constantly challenged with shooting in circumstances where the light is not sufficient to get what we really want—sharp pictures, effective depth of field, minimal noise and a good exposure. We often have to make compromises but our goal is to get the best images we can under often trying conditions. In this chapter I’ll be sharing my thinking process in dealing with tough subjects in a variety of circumstances.