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Category: Tutorials
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Published on Monday, 08 June 2009 09:09
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When Ash contacted us and said she wanted to do 'something' with an Angle Grinder we were not surprised. The last time we worked with Ash she had a noose around her neck for the series of hanging shots we did with her and Laura.
We looked at some of the other work that had been done using angle grinders including the freak show act 'Grinder Girl' where she wore metal underwear and produced sparks by running a handheld grinder onto metal clothing but we discounted this as too dangerous, we wanted to keep control of the grinder so instead we decided to shower our model in sparks from the angle grinder and produce a firework effect.
From the outset the plan was to produce as much light as possible using the sparks and to fill in the missing or additional light with one short bust from the studio lights. The only way to do this was with a long shutter speed and a short single burst of light but we were concerned with loosing too much definition of our model and we did not want to rely on post processing techniques like Photoshop.
From a safety point of view we insisted on protection of the eyes at all times, we experimented with different metals on the grinder to see which would product the most consistent trail of sparks but they also needed to die quickly so that all the heat was lost from them before they came to rest on our model. The most consistent metal turned out to be ordinary cast iron in the form of an old rusty bar that we clamped firmly to a chair. By running the angle grinder along it and angling the blade we could control the direction of the sparks.
Choice of protection for the face was easy, it had to be a gas mask! This shot had all the suggestion of a fetish shoot so why not go the whole way? We also took some additional shots with some of the props already in house, like masks and flying goggles but the ones that stand out on their own are the gas mask series. There is always something sinister and foreboding about a gas mask and a single eye looking straight at you…
The soot itself was a relatively simple setup once we had everything worked out, we setup our lights in a standard configuration with the fill light directly in front of the model and elevated to 45 degrees above her head. We set our key light to 45 degrees to her left and almost eye level. The lights were metered as normal for F8 on the key and F4.5 on the fill to create a pleasing shadow on the face.
Ash was positioned in such a way that that she stood about 8 centimetres in front of the line of sparks so that they fell mainly behind her and they did not obscure her eye or face when the shot was complete. We accepted that our model would not be able to stand completely still for 4 or 6 seconds with hot sparks landing on her so we opted for a technique called second curtain flash to freeze our model and add some definition to an intentionally confused and blurred shot.
We shoot wirelessly and the version of pocket wizard we shoot with does not support second curtain flash so we set both lights to slave (cell mode) and used a 580EX flash mounted to the camera to trigger them. The camera we were using was a Canon 5D MKII with an 85mm 1.2 L series prime and we had it set in manual mode and mounted on a tripod to minimise movement from the camera itself. The camera was set to F8 to allow enough depth of field to catch both the model and the sparks behind her, we always shoot at ISO100 when in the studio to keep the digital noise to a minimum and in the majority of the shots we were using a 4 second delay (in some we used 6 seconds).
In the manual settings section of the camera we set the flash to fire on the second curtain (or rear curtain) which meant that the flash did not fire until the end of the sequence rather than the start as it traditionally does. When we took the shot the curtain opened and the flash fired on the 4th (or 6th) second as the curtain was closing, this had the effect of allowing the sparks to leave trails across the background but in the last instant to freeze our model in time leaving her relatively sharp and with enough light thought the glass of the gas mask to see her eye clearly.
There was minimal Photoshop work needed at the end which was surprising given the complexity of the shots and the nature of what we were doing. I have to add that Ash did amazingly well to hold still with a shower of hot sparks landing on her body.
In the final edit I had to take a small halo from around her shoulder where there had been minimal movement and a few stray and unwanted trails of sparks were cloned out to produce a more pleasant end result, the eye was sharpened and the contrast and levels were tweaked. A vignette was added to give the spark a more pleasing start and end point rather than appearing abruptly from the edges but the overall shot is as came out of the camera.
Below is a brief outline of how rear curtain flash works. Because we did not want to loose any of the intensity of the sparks we covered the flash head with our hand for the ‘pre flash’ and only allowed the studio lights to be triggered by the second flash. We could do this because we had metered the lights previously and we did not need the camera to measure the light intensity, in fact we had the flash head angled in such a way that it did not light the model at all, it was only used to trigger the main studio lighting.
•Rear curtain sync:
•Press shutter button.
•Pre-flash fires so the camera can measure and adjust the intensity.
•Curtain A opens.
•Frame is open for some period of time (as determined by your shutter speed).
•Flash fires.
•Curtain B closes the frame and ends the exposure.
