Professional Photographic Assignments On Location
by William Lulow
I recently was on an extended road trip and wound up combining a couple of assignments as well as a wedding and a lot of sight-seeing. Everything was planned, but not knowing exactly what the locations would be, I had to be prepared for anything. In Chicago, I had to photograph a professor both in her office and with the city as a background. I managed to scout the location of her office and walked around the neighborhood looking for suitable spots to photograph her. By the time of the shoot, I had come up with several places that I thought would be good. I walked around and took some iPhone snaps of a couple of locations nearby including her office:
These were a few ideas I had. I still wasn’t sure what I would do with the lighting, but I had a couple of portable flash units with me. An assistant took some of the shots of me shooting:
I wound up using about three or four different locations, all with a slightly different feel, but all still recognizably Chicago. One thing that helped was that I had been to downtown Chicago many times and was familiar with the setting, traffic patterns and the kind of light that daylight would provide.
This was the “cover” shot:
For this shot, I had my assistant hold the portable flash, so as not to take up extra room on the street. This was the unit I used:
This one is attached to a light stand. It has a battery and a radio slave. It is synched with the camera so that it can be placed anywhere. The same flash setup was used in the other assignment.
This was a portrait and interview with the director of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ms. Shelley Ritter. Here, I had an assistant stand behind the wall on the left and aim a light on the background, while I used a light on the camera with a large diffuser to soften the overall effect. These situations demand that the background be lit as well as the subject. If I didn’t use a background light, it would have reproduced totally black. You have to remember that light from flash units tends to fall off very quickly with distance.
Here was another shot:
Even though this was shot outdoors, I still used the light on the camera to make sure everything was lit evenly.
I carried my normal camera bag with several lenses and radio slaves and another bag with a couple more portable flashes just incase I needed more light. But both these jobs were able to be photographed successfully with really a minimum of equipment.
