29.09.10
Shooting in Low Light: Wadey James
Two things have been key in influencing Wadey’s style of dark, suggestive images, firstly his training as a cinematographer and secondly – more surprisingly – his career in commercial travel photography. “For a long time, much of my commercial work involved shooting travel destinations and, naturally, travel clients will always want bright blue skies, aquamarine seas and lots of detail, so the presence of light was always the starting point. Several years ago I began to wonder what I would be able to achieve, technically and from a mood perspective, with the absence of light.”
While by day Wadey was still shooting bright and colourful travel images, by dusk he was experimenting with the use of minimal light, achieving more subtle but also more intriguing images.
Although each image has a very dark canvas, each also has at least one point of engagement, whether it’s a flashed model or subject in the foreground or some action in progress, which he uses to pull in the viewer.
When working with low light, planning is the key. He says: “I always visit the location the day before I’m going to shoot, so I know exactly how long I’ve got before the light dies. You have to shoot the image at just the right moment. I have found there’s a 10-minute window at dusk, a ‘sweet moment’ for capturing that dreaminess; get it right and your shot will look seamless, get it wrong and it will look like a bad comp because the background and foreground just don’t gel.”
Wadey is now adept at recognising that moment but occasionally still gets it wrong. “I was working on a personal project, a portrait. I shot the background a fraction too early but by the time I realised, I’d missed the moment – there’s not much margin for error in fading light.”
When the sunny days and blue skies required for travel shoots fail to materialise, Wadey takes the opportunity to experiment and produce something with an altogether different mood. “The images I end up with are completely different but I’m no less satisfied with the results. It’s good to be prepared to think differently if things aren’t going the way you expected, rather than pack up and go home. You never know what you might come away with.
“For example, most skiing shots – commercial ones at least – require azure skies and virgin white snow but one day on location for a ski shoot we had murky weather and I decided to shoot anyway.
“In order to get close to the action I snowboarded down the slope a few metres in front of the subject and got him to ski towards me. We repeated this over and over, which gave me a good selection of images to work with. I used a Canon Speedlite flash at maximum out put, which illuminated only the skier in the foreground and therefore under exposed the grey sky, which fell into darkness; this in turn also darkened the reflective nature of the snow, so the result was a correctly exposed skier whose action and snow spray was captured while darkening the ambient light.”
Wadey also darkens the shadows using high dynamic range (HDR) in post production. “I process out the same RAW image three times but vary the exposure, these are then merged to form one image with a high dynamic range in contrast.“It’s important not to darken the whole image or you’ll lose the highlights, which in the images of snow and surf are an essential aspect, so the key is to turn the murky greys to black and leave the highlights untouched.”
When photographing action shots, Wadey employs some of the know-how he gained working in film and TV. “I plan to shoot around 30 seconds after the action has begun, trying to get as close to the action as possible.”
It pays to be resourceful – while shooting some surfers he went out to them in a borrowed dinghy in order to capture the detail of the surf. “Although I’ll flash only a small area of the frame, a surfer for example, there are enough highlights in the spray of the water to retain detail while the rest falls back to black. Even with these very dark shots, I like to keep just enough detail to establish or suggest the setting.”
While Wadey’s commercial work often takes him abroad, he is a firm believer that a good location does not depend on exotic settings. “Composition is the starting block because it gives the viewer the information they need,” he states emphatically. “You don’t need to worry about grand locations to create the right mood; you can just as easily go to the bottom of your garden, or the end of your street, as I do.”
In contrast to his travel pictures, with their strong colours and clear narratives, Wadey enjoys the fact that his darker images require more consideration by the viewer.
“I like people to figure out what’s going on in the images and get inside them. Someone recently thought one of my images of a surfer looked like a picture of an ultrasound scan – it gave me a real kick.”
Biography:
Trained originally as a cinematographer, Wadey James is a commercial photographer who has shot everything from Eskimos in the Arctic to the Malaysian Grand Prix for clients around the world. www.wadeyjames.com
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