Asha, Smriti, and Visha
The Banthias got together for Thanksgiving and chose to spend a full afternoon of their special time together posing for a family portrait with me. This was the first pro photo shoot I've done since the abortive shoot with Greg last May. Once again it restored to me full-force why I want to do photography. Capturing the visual essences of people is incomparable joy!
In ordinary discourse we gloss over the physical presence of the people with whom we share physical space and energy. We listen to what they say and try to respond with our own expressions of self. Ordinary gatherings with other people are largely intellectual, mediated through the audible expression of our presence. Photography is unabashedly visual. When I take photographs I respond to their physical energy but the medium of capture is visual.
The physical space in which this capture occurs is significant. One day I'll learn to take onsite images but for now the blank, white background works very well for me. Against this white space, the subjects come to life in unusual vividness of color, line and shape. Music, I've found out, is a significant component of the process of capturing personal energies. Although the still camera does not capture sound, music plays on us emotionally and influences our physical expression. We started the shoot with my choice of music—Mozart chamber music and Strauss lieder—but when we had settled down the energy took a new direction when the Banthia children brought in their choice of music—modern Ballywood dance music.
All this is probably hocus-pocus, frilly figments of imagination. Professionally one should speak about lighting and resolution, composition and color balance. I have much yet to learn about lighting but I think I am now more comfortable using the lights I have (though they are mostly intended for video capture than for still work). If I didn't have Photoshop to adjust exposure, white balance and fill light, lighting would be more complicated and manual controls not effective. The main component I can't change with processing is depth of field, which affects the clarity and blur. I left the soft box on all the time, just moving it closer or farther from the subjects. I turned on and off the three other lights. While I achieved effects that I think improved on the resulting images I forgot that hard lights cast shadows more easily than soft box.
More than ever I appreciated shadows cast on the subjects. These are the shadows I like because even with flattened lights they give dimensionality to the images. Soft light is great but it's the hardness of light that gives complexity and perhaps ultimately the drama so vital to images that touch and move us.
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