Creative Lighting Workshop

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a 2.5 day workshop hosted by Stephen Faust, of Stephen Faust Photography. Stephen is a Boston based commercial photographer with studio space in Watertown Massachusetts, but the workshop was held in a 2000 square foot warehouse space in Littleton that is home to several artists, as well as other commercial business. The workshop ran Friday night, from 4pm to 9pm, Saturday from 9am to almost 9pm and then Sunday from 9am to about 6pm.

Friday night started with a little meet and greet. There I met Stephen, his amazing assistant Terry as well as the rest of the workshop attendees. The attendees were a nice mix of experienced photographers and near beginners, but all with great attitudes about learning and a genuine passion for photography. I so enjoy a good conversation with anyone who's passionate about photography. Once we were all settled, we went through a review of lighting tools, techniques and terminology. While this was a review for me, it was a good way to guage the other attendees knowledge. We finished by reverse engineering several of Stephen's images and reviewing his lighting. We packed up for the night and agreed to meet in the studio at 9:30am for a days worth of hands on.

Saturday morning, once everone arrived, we packed up and headed out to a beautiful location about 10 minutes away. The location turned out to be a large open field with some beautiful tall grasses, some fantastic fall foliage colors and a couple barns/sheds. I quickly identified at least a half a dozen promising "set" locations for shooting. Stephen had male and female models, make up artists and hair stylists on hand as well as enough equipment to set up 3 or 4 seperate concurrent shooting locations powered with with portable generators or with a battery pack.




My first exercise was to balance/overpower the sun. Since it was overcast, we stuck a flash with a CTO gel and aimed it at our location and called that the sun and did all of our lighting around it. We ended up adding in a small softbox and cross lighting our subject. The setup was quite popular with the class and stayed set up pretty much the rest of the morning.





Next, I spied some tall grass with overcast sky in the background and thought that would make a nice challenge. We brought in a small octobox and later a beauty dish on a boom, really close to the model. This allowed us to stop down and turn what would have been a blown out sky into something with some interest and texture.




We spent the rest of the afternoon doing the same sort of thing, in different locations. We'd look at how our model was being styled (makeup, hair, wardrobe) and device lighting setups to best take advantage of this.


After hours of this, and a quick catered lunch (included with the workshop), it started to rain so we packed up the gear and went back to the studio. For the evening session, we had new models, new stylists and an empty studio to work with. Again after seeing the styling, we built a handful of "sets" and devised lighting. As a side note, both outdoors and in the studio, the make up artists and stylists did an AMAZING job! Pretty close to 9pm, we wrapped up shooting and retired for the evening.

On Sunday, again, we met at 9am but this day was a little different. This time, Stephen had a couple sets already configured, and we have some very highly stylized models to work with. Our first problem was a half black, half white background and models dressed in either all white or all black, forcing us to figure out how to light white on white and black on black and keep both detail and seperation.

Next up was a human marionette behind a curtain with ropes. Lighting that without shadows and the like turned out to be a very fun exercise.




We moved on to hot lights afterward, diffused with scrims and reflectors to bounce light around. We used gobos to force shadows and lighting into specific patterns.



We used window light, with and without reflectors to allow us to shoot wide open and get very shallow DOF portraits.

At the end of the weekend, I have to admit I was beat. 2 full days of shooting, moving lights around, designing schemes and generally flexing our creative muscles but it resulted in some fantastic images, some new knowledge, renewed confidence in my creative thinking and, certainly not least, some amazing contacts with some incredible makeup artists, models and stylists. All this for the price of less than even a cheap lens.