The Blog of Photographer Jacob Vorpahl.
How to save a life.
If you’re at all into modern music, you listen to the radio, watch televsion, at some point you’ve probably heard The Fray’s hit song “How To Save A Life”. Chances are that just by reading that you’ve heard the words being sung in your head by the group’s lead singer Isaac Slade. I know I did as soon as I finished typing it. It’s catchy, it has a nice sound to it. Specifically for those reasons recently the youth pastor at my church did a series on witnessing and the theme was “How to save a life”.
You’re probably wondering why on earth I’m mentioning this on a photography blog and my answer would be the picture at the beginning of this article. See, we have this guru of Powerpoint guy that works with us in youth ministry named Tim. The guy’s a stud at combing the internet looking for graphics to use for our youth pastor’s slides during his messages and subsequently putting them together with all sorts of crazy and appropriate fonts. He makes the usual drab graphics stuff have some life to it. Unfortunately (and rarely), he couldn’t come up with anything to go with this series, so they were scratching their heads trying to come up with an idea.
By all accounts, if you can’t find what you need, create it. Cue the guy with the camera who loves photography. They had some rough ideas and volunteered some of our teens for the picture and asked me if I could put something together. Well, I’m not sure if this was their original idea, but as soon as I got the gist of the message and the target audience I had something in mind: an aprehensive teen looking over his shoulder at some other students near their locker. With a visual in my head, I brought my gear to the church and went to work.
The location I was shooting at (the church’s school hallways) is kind of narrow for the seperation I needed for the different subjects so I decided I would take the pictures seperately and combine them in post. The first picture I took was of the students. I wanted them isolated from all of the different distractions in the hallways but I wanted some of the lockers showing, so I put them all in a tight group against a set of lockers, then I placed an SB800 on a boom almost to the ceiling and to keep the light as tight as necessary I slid a grid on to it (one of the ones I won way back when).
With the exception of the lights that I couldn’t get rid of because of hitting my maximum sync spped, it turned out just as I’d hoped. There’s a few small things here and that Photoshop will need to take care of, but I’m pretty satisfied wit the results out of the camera. On to the main subject.
A nice kid named David reluctantly volunteered to having his picture taken (not sure he realized every teen in the youth group would see his face up on the big screen for 45 minutes once a week for 4 weeks) and we moved into one of the classrooms so I could isolate the light a bit more. I put the SB800 into a Westcott 28″ Apollo Mono Softbox for this one and put it right next to his face, tinkered with the levels and placement a bit and got this:
I experimented with a kicker light off to his rear right, but the seperation wasn’t necessary for what I needed and it was throwing light in some bad places (for some reason I never thought to put a grid on it), so it was nixed. I would have liked to have had less light hit the back wall but I could do nothing to kill it with my on hand supplies and it was going to get the chopping block in post anyways so I let it be. You may think I’m being a little lazy and too dependent on Photoshop with this, but I had my reasons, namely that this was going to be a photo where I used very little of the picture outside of the main subject.
So I go home and I put it together, tweaking curves, cleaning up this and that, and it just doesn’t look quite as good as I thought it would. The feeling just wasn’t right. So I made two versions: one natural, the one that didn’t feel quite right, and then another that was more stylized and gave off the feeling I was looking for. I used Photoshop’s Cutout filter to get a cartoon/Grand Theft Auto-style look to it, doing each picture seperately and then recominbing them because they each needed seperate tweeks to come off right. I sent off both versions to the assisstant youth pastor and he, like me, loved the stylistic one a whole lot more.
Now, as a photographer who is toying with the idea of starting up a professional career, just what does this offer me? First, it gave me a chance to help out my church, even in a small way. Small for me though is big to them. They loved the idea of having kids from OUR youth group being featured on the slide, getting involved just a little bit more. Second, I got a chance to be creative with absolutely no downside. If my experiment failed, what’s the loss? I mean really? So we have a lame slide for a couple weeks, it’s not the end of the world. Third, I’ve got one more addition to my portfolio, which I’m slowly pushing toward creative portraiture.
But fourth, and this is important, is that we all won. Every outcome of this was good. Taking pictures doesn’t always have to be a payday. Sometimes it can just be a good thing to do. I’m not advocating you become the pro bono photographer for all your friends and family’s photo interests, but be willing to make exceptions. I did, and I’m better for it.
