Scott Hargis Interview

[Scott Hargis]

Mmmmm.... great question.

I do shoot Canon, but apart from the 430ex I use on the camera, all my other strobes are Nikons. My bag has 8 lights in it:
430ex (Canon)
3 SB80dx's (Nikon)
2 SB600s (Nikon)
2 SB24s (Nikon)

The SB80dx's are the greatest speedlights, ever. They cost about half of what an SB800 costs, they have the same GN, and despite what the specs say, they are almost as fast recycling. And, best of all ------- they have KILLER built-in optical slaves. The optical slaves on these things will work at outrageous distances (indoors), even around corners and up stairs. Outdoors, they suck. But I don't care about that.
For the other lights, I'm using cheap radio slaves. Pocket Wizards would be great, but I don't have the budget for them, yet. And these "Poverty Wizards" are actually very good, although they do get mixed reviews.

[Scott Hargis]

As for a basic setup, I'd say you need the following:

Wide lens (I assume we're going to talk about lenses later)
A good on-camera flash that dials down to very low power - 1/64th or lower.

Actually, you can do quite good work with just that alone- check out this photog's stuff, all done with one on-camera light: Flickr: Photos from tlpacheco

However, it constrains you in terms of what you can shoot. The SB80's are a good choice for a remote because you don't need anything special to trigger them remotely, so that's what I'd recommend.

Strobist is really THE place to learn about off-camera stuff.

[peterst6906]

That's the perfect way to lead into the last question on your lighting and I guess having all these lights gives you plenty of options for placement.

However when I look at your images there are no bright spots that are obvious signs of stobe placement.

How do you place or arrange your lights so that they light everything evenly without casting shadows, but at the same time remain hidden.

Are you pirmarily placing bouncing them off walls behind you and ceilings to create larger light sources, or do you have some other tips?

[Scott Hargis]

While I'm at it, check out these two: one does almost all ambient-only (Aaron), one uses Alien Bees and a bagful of Vivitar 285's (M. James):
Aaron Leitz | Fine Seattle Achitectural, Interior, and Real Estate Photography
http://www.jnorthen.com/

My point is that there's many ways to skin a cat.

[Scott Hargis]

OK, that takes a big answer, gimme a second.

[Scott Hargis]

As for hiding the lighting; whenever possible I try to get my main light coming from the same general direction as the ambient. Sometimes you can’t do that, and sometime the ambient IS the main light source. In any event, my first thought is always to bounce the flash against a wall or other surface that is not visible in the photo. A speedlight is about 1” x 2”, which is essentially a “point” light source. It will create harsh light and hard-edged shadows. But if you turn it around and bounce it off the wall, even from a distance of a few inches, the light beam spreads out and you have an apparent light source of 12”, 18”, or even much more coming back into your scene. It’s like having a big softbox, and as a result you get much gentler light, and much softer shadows.
Here's an extreme example where I had to pump a LOT of light into a scene, yet it looks very soft:


And here's the setup:

This is taken from the viewpoint of the chair in the above photo. You can see that I've set up directional lighting, most of which comes straight in, but some from the far end of the room. And look at the size of the hotspots - those strobes are maybe 12" or 14" from the wall, tops. In effect, I have 3 jumbo softboxes working for me here.

If you have a large, unpartitioned space to light, and you’re working on a scene at one end, you can turn a speedlight around and fire it at full power at the far end of the space, just nuking that end of the room, and the effect is like having a twelve-foot softbox down there coming back and blanketing your set with perfect light. Then you can use additional lights in a very subtle way to sculpt the lighting around whatever effect you want. I might pop a flash in bare-bult at very low power (like 1/64th or less) just to create some edges or relief, but the main light source is that big explosion I created out of frame.

Bouncing lights is awesome – but you have to very clever about controlling the spill from the lights – the hotspots can be huge and it can be very frustrating at first. But after a while it gets kind of intuitive, where you can place lights and where you can’t. Tiny adjustments in height, angle, and power settings will translate to big differences in your photo. You have to experiment.

[Scott Hargis]

Here's an example where I didn't really have a suitable surface to bounce from, and also had I done so, those big hotspots would have totally shown up in great detail in the windows! So here I had no choice but to turn the lights around and fire them straight in. You still get the reflection, but now it's just a tiny point of light the size of the speedlight; a "one-click" clone.
The shot:


The Setup:

[Scott Hargis]

Sorry, screwed up my links -- I fixed that now so you can see the setup.

[peterst6906]

Great answer and fantastic images to illustrate the points.

Just before we go off topic for a minute, you have everything in focus in your shots and the perspective all seems quite natural.

Do you have fairly standard settings in terms of f-stop that you try to stick closely too, and what sort of focal length are you normally using. You seem to cover a fairly wide angle at times, but there doesn't appear to be much evidence of a wide angle lens.

[Scott Hargis]

Sorry, can't resist: one more example of the kind of soft light you can get from a simple "bounce off the wall/ceiling": there's only three lights in this shot, the on-camera (with a diffuser cap), one about 4' off the floor to the right (barely on, maybe 1/64th) and one up high on the right, that's the main light source.:

[peterst6906]

No problems. You can post as many as you like. I'm glad you are enjoying this and feeling happy to share so much information with great illustrations of the concepts

[Scott Hargis]

Off-topic -- that would be my specialty....

One of the things I did early on in my architectural career was to go into debt and buy the Canon 14mmL rectilinear. I don't know what the Nikon equivalent is.
This lens is SWEET. It has great color fidelity, produces very little distortion at all, and is quite fast (2.8 ).
DOF is not really a big factor when you’re using a wide-angle lens. Most interiors are shot at 24mm and under, and the DOF goes to infinity pretty quickly when you’re that short. You can play around with this calculator to see what I mean.

My lens stays pretty sharp anywhere above f/6.3, so I usually try to avoid going below that, unless I just can’t light something to that exposure.

I leave my lens on autofocus and don’t really care what points it hits, it all comes in every time. Obviously, if I’m doing a funky shot with some object way up in the foreground, a couple of inches from the camera, then that’s a different story.



If you don't want to shell out $2000 bucks for the 14mm, then I'd recommend the Canon 10-22. This seems to be a nice lens, a lot of shooters are using it to make great images. It does produce some barrel distortion, but if you're careful about composition and you don't mind doing some post-processing correction, it's a good lens. The Sigma equivalent is much poorer - I find that it has excessive distortion and is very soft around the edges.

[Scott Hargis]

Hmmm.... what I was trying to say up there is that the 14mm is fast - f/2.8. But it keeps coming up with a little rolling eyes emoticon?

I'm not too good with emoticons, can't make that one go away! Anyway, you all understand what I was saying.

[peterst6906]

OK, to give you a break from the technical stuff for a couple of minutes (a last couple of questions on large spaces, post processing and HDR to come), but slightly off topic and really more of a personal aspect:

what's been your favourite shoot so far (and why) and have you had any strange situations arise during your shoots?

[Scott Hargis]

Well, some would say that my entire life is one continuing "strange situation".

Animals always make things more interesting, and I've often been editing shots at home and discovered little cat faces peering out at me from under the furniture.

There was the master bedroom that had been converted into a dungeon: stocks, chains, whips, handcuffs, leather....and NO - I am NOT going to post that one!

And the time I fell through a fence. I was trying to get a wider shot of the back yard:

and kept backing up and backing up, with my eye still to the viewfinder, until my butt hit the fence and kept going:


If I weren’t so graceful, it might have been embarrassing….

[Scott Hargis]

As for a favorite shoot, that's kind of tough. Of course the most recent ones kind of stand out strongest. If you look through my Flicker stream I put up a whole series from one where I really felt I had pulled the place together and "told it's story". The bedroom shot I put up above was from that shoot. This was sort of the iconic shot I made there:


I try very hard to impart the “feel”, or personality of the house. A newly constructed “McMansion” in the suburbs has a totally different personality from a 120 year-old Victorian in the city, and I try to adapt my style to match the place.
There’s actually a really vibrant discussion going on right now in the PFRE Flicker forum on this subject.

[peterst6906]

Ha. That's funny. You're meant to make their places look good, not destroy them....

OK, last three questions (because we've taken up a heap of your time) and then we'll open the thread for some members questions:

3. Of all your shoots, my own personal favourites are the Paramount threatre and City Club:

Paramount Theater on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
City_Club on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Do you have much difference in shooting large spaces as compared to smaller spaces, especially with the use of speedlights and if instead you were shooting events in these spaces, do you think your approach is still the way to go, or would you modify it much because of the addition of people?

[Scott Hargis]

Well, the Paramount Theatre shots are totally different. That space was outrageously big, and all the walls were literally glowing. You'd think that would be easy, but the highest areas and especially the corners were getting very dark, or else the middle of the walls got overexposed. The problem was the lights in the ceiling were WAY dimmer.
So I did a 30-second exposure on that one (using a tripod), stuffed half a dozen speedlights in pockets, and ran through the room pulling the strobes out and firing them into all the dark corners, like Yosemite Sam and his six-shooters. It was kind of funny, actually.

If I were lighting a large space with people, I'd treat it like a sporting event: put the lights high and wide, and create shooting zones in the room where I know I'll have good light. Search Strobist.com under "basketball lighting" and you'll find a great explanation - it would work equally well on a ballroom.

[peterst6906]

2. In relation to workflow after your shoots. I'm assuming you use Photoshop and what is your basic approach. You mentioned earlier that you had some good information on post processing from Thomas, so care to share a very basic outline of your workflow?

[Scott Hargis]

The Berkeley City Club was a bit more manageable, there was some useful ambient coming in, so I just positioned speedlights in an alternating pattern along the pool, hiding them behind the butresses of the arches, and aimed them bare-bulb up and across. There's one at the very end aimed at the far wall.
That place was AMAZING. It was designed by Julia Morgan, the architect who did the Hearst Castle here in California. This was the next project she did after that, and she imported the same workmen who built the Hearst place to do this one. I was beyond happy to be there shooting.