Scott Hargis Interview

[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.