Talking Photography

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Controlling the Light. Straddling Two Worlds

Visual Choices Abound When You Own the Exposure

By Frank Van Riper

Photography Columnist

The first time I learned how to control light, I knew my life as a photographer had changed.

Controlling light—most often via a tiny flashbulb fired directly at my subject—would become far more than simply making the scene in front of me bright enough to render a photograph, often in harsh shadow. That would occur when I learned years later to take the flash off my camera and fire it remotely, sometimes in the company of other lights fired simultaneously.

It was as if I owned the sun.

[Of course, studio portrait photographers--especially Hollywood legends like George Hurrell in the 1930s and 40s--had been doing this for years, but with huge and hot—and therefore sometimes dangerous—floodlights. Their work is stunning, but it was nothing that an amateur could even think of trying until the advent decades later of much smaller floodlights and even smaller portable flash units.]

Now I had the power, not only to create light, but to direct it off-camera using remote triggers. I could warm or cool the light with gels placed in front of my flash. I could make the light as broad or as narrow as I liked, using sophisticated light-modifying photo umbrellas or light panels, or, at the other extreme, simple toilet paper tubes attached to the front of a trusty Vivitar 285 portable flash.

When I recently photographed dried roses, for example, using a tiny off-camera 3” x 4” softbox fitted with an amber gel, I could create the kind of chiaroscuro (light emerging from dark) popularized by the Baroque master painter Caravaggio centuries ago. Or, using humble toilet paper tube snoots, I could spotlight stepson Dan’s and my faces for a dramatic spotlit double portrait.

'Caravaggio Roses.' Made in my daylight-drenched dining room, the image could be a detail from one of Caravaggio's canvases. (All photos © Frank Van Riper)

I wanted to make this double portrait to show off our beards. The set-up could not have been simpler.

My life as a photographer has had several important milestones.

Probably the most important occurred when I was maybe 8 as my parents and I went to LaGuardia airport just to look around and watch airplanes land and take off. (In that more innocent time it was much easier to do this.)

I had a small Brownie camera and immediately began to photograph whatever was in front of me--the tall control tower, baggage handlers ferrying luggage to and from planes, and a crowd of passengers standing below us outdoors waiting to simply walk through a chain link gate and on to the tarmac to board a plane maybe 25-50 yards distant. I waited around until I was able to photograph their plane heading into the sky.

I didn’t know it then, but that was my first picture story. And it just felt right.

So it shouldn’t surprise that the bulk of my photographic life has been spent as a documentarian, telling stories about the world around me, from New York to Maine to the Chesapeake; from Italy to France to Japan, as well as many other parts of the world.

Top: Snowy ashcans, Bronx, NY, ca. 1960. Center: 1st day of class, two-room school, Whiting, Me, ca. 1990. Bottom: boys in Tokyo digging for worms after a rain, 1979.

Documentarians, street photographers, etc., generally rely on recording their world by available light, recording what they see before them, often with stunning effect.

Cartier-Bresson in France, Gianni Berengo Gardin in Italy, Mary Ellen Mark and Garry Winogrand in the US, to name but a few. With rare exceptions, they worked by available light, with handheld 35mm cameras or later with small DSLRs. I did the same—when working on our book on Venice, for example, I carried two tiny 35mm Leica M6s and never used flash—though I carried a tiny one with me.

It is interesting that in my wife Judy’s and my forthcoming book on Umbria, I have used flash, sometimes to great advantage, though I’d still guess that more than nine out of ten of our images were done without it. For me this was the inevitable blending of the two worlds that I straddle.

In the Umbrian town of Todi, I used on-camera flash to show detail in one of ex-pat American Beverly Pepper's monumental steel columns, that now grace Beverly Pepper Park on the town's outskirts.

Which brings me to today and two pictures that illustrate just how much control one can have over light when working in the studio.

I have been doing floral and plant “portraits” for several years now—largely in reaction to the mediocre floral mugshots I was asked to judge at local camera clubs. Most often they were macros shot outdoors at high noon, with the flower in the center of the frame doing all the work. All the photographer did was press the shutter release, bringing nothing of him or herself to the image.

When Judy created a lovely arrangement of Hellebores in an elegant green glass vase last week, I knew I had to shoot it. First the flowers themselves were elegant, in beautiful shades of purple. But their stems—calling to mind a swimmer’s limbs in the water—drew me in as well.

The set-up was simple—pale grey seamless on our dining room table, with several small flash units at my disposal. I loved the green glass of the vase and in my first series, thought I’d double the effect of that green by shooting a softbox-mounted flash above and to the right of the vase so that a bright green shadow also would appear behind the arrangement. For added drama, I shot the flowers at an angle.

Night and Day...I made these two photos literally within minutes of one another and marvel at how different the subject looks when the lighting changed.

The shot looked terrific. But then, as I was putting aside the flash, I noticed how delicate and gorgeous the flowers looked sitting alone on the seamless and lit by a wall of windowlight to the left.

The effect could not have been more different. I deliberately shot the arrangement under available light with more, not less, seamless, to add to the flowers’ look of fragility—even gentleness.

The first picture, with directed flash, fairly shouted for attention. The second, made by available light, barely whispered.

I love them both.

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Frank Van Riper is a Washington, DC-based documentary photographer, journalist, author and lecturer. During 20 years with the New York Daily News, he served as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor. Afterwards he served 19 years as the Washington Post’s photography columnist. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and jointly holds (with the late Lars-Erik Nelson) the 1980 Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White house Correspondents Association.

Van Riper Named to Communications Hall of Fame

Frank Van Riper addresses CCNY Communications Alumni at National Arts Club in Manhattan after induction into Communications Alumni Hall of Fame, May 2011. (c) Judith Goodman