Micah Walter

Doing a little “pro-bono” work is always a good thing. Yesterday I found myself traveling with a group of green medical students to a small village in the mountains of Dominica. Yes, I do have an odd life. The med students were heading there to do a diabetes screening event for the town. They set up blood pressure test stations and a host of other simple tests, but mostly they were there to help educate the villagers about diabetes. So I came along to photograph the event.

Before leaving for the event I decided to challenge myself a little. I have done this several times in the past an always with great results. I chose to bring just one lens, one camera and one 4 Gig CF card. Shooting in RAW+Jpeg mode meant that I would have room for about 300 images, which should be plenty.

The idea behind restricting myself to this setup is pretty clear. I wanted to work with the available light and struggle to find the good angles. It is a trick that always works.

The event was taking place inside a small school. They had set up blood pressure stations outside on the walkway and other testing stations inside the classrooms. The classrooms were your typical Dominica style open air rooms with giant open windows and little artificial lighting. So, the light just poured into the rooms, and although it wasn’t very bright (I had to shoot at ISO 400 or 800 most of the time) it was a great horizontal quality that only window light can provide.

The difficulty in shooting in a situation like this is making sure that you are facing your subject in the right direction so that not only is the light falling on them nicely, but you are also not blocking the light. I wasn’t able to reposition my subjects, so I had to move around quite a bit to find the right combination of good looking subject (the easy part) and nice light.

I have a few examples posted here that you can browse through if you click the picture at the top of this post. Notice the one of the man who is harshly backlit. I think this is a nice portrait even though it is traditionally not very well lit. For some reason, in this case the lighting is sort of moody and fitting to the subject. I also included a few wider shots of the classroom interior so you can see how the light was entering the room.

I really like this type of shooting. You have to think, and move around. You have to get close to your subjects and think about composition and lighting all at once. It is also the type of shooting where you are living out on the edge, meaning you are pushing the ISO to the upper limits, shooting at f/2.8 most of the time and trying not to dip down below 1.60th of a second. I have always done my best work in these situations, or worse. For some reason I just find this “zone” to be the type of situation I enjoy the best.

These were all shot with a Canon 20D, 17-35mm f/2.8 lens, and a 4 Gig San Disk CF card. To see the entire gallery click here.

As many of you may already know, my girlfriend Kendra, runs a pretty cool website of her own called Island Med Student. The site started just before we left for Dominica, where we now live while she is attending medical school at Ross University School of Medicine. Over the past six months the site has become pretty popular, and it is always fun to see students on campus walk up to Kendra and say things like “aren’t you the Island Med Student?”

Over the winter break we took the time to redesign her site. We gave it fresh look and a new back-end using Wordpress as the blogging platform. I blogged about the Aperture/Photo related side of things on Inside Aperture here.

Well, the other day we decided to go out and shoot some new portraits of her. Actually, she had been nagging me for weeks on this one, and finally, the light was just right!

So, we grabbed the camera, the 70-200 and a small portable lighting stand and umbrella. The setup was pretty basic. I placed my Canon 550EX Speedlight into the umbrella and set it to slave mode.

I then used the wireless transmitter (Canon ST-E2) to fire the flash. I have to say, I have never been too impressed with the TTL stuff. It is pretty hard to get things to do what you want, but for this shot, I went ahead and used it anyway.

Kendra stood out on the new Seaside Desk on the Ross campus and I placed the light at camera-right to fill in the harsh shadows made from the evening light. Balancing the ambient and the flash took a few tries, but we eventually got it.

The result, I think, is a pretty nicely balanced portrait, shot outside, with warm light.

Enjoy

A 30 minute portrait shoot on our balcony at night.

Katie in one of her hats. Click the pic to see more.

So lately I have had a couple of things on my mind. Number one has been, “How can I expand my business?” and number two has been “What is next in my digital worlkflow?”

And I have come to these conclusions. The answer to the first question is, simply: expand what you shoot. So I have recently taken an interest in doing more serious portraiture. I think it would be great to try and combine my journalistic experiences with portrait or studio lighting. Just a small departure from the norm that I think might get my creative juices flowing again.

A few weeks ago our good friend Nate came to visit us. I have been interested in photographing Nate for sometime now, as he is the subject of a project I have been thinking about taking on. Nate, a transgender female-to-male, has been pretty eager to help, and the only problem so far has been that he lives in Baltimore, so we don’t get to see him too often.
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