These days I mostly photograph people and lifestyle subjects but just last week one of my favorite art directors asked me to shoot a project that called for three shots of three rooms in an “idea house” out in the middle of nowhere, Texas.

Early on a Wednesday morning I started dragging Pelican cases of hear to the Honda Element. Not knowing what we’d face on this remote location project I packed enough lights to illuminate just about anything short of a shopping mall. The inventory of lighting gear went something like this: Two Profoto Acute 1200 generators, four Profoto flash heads, two large soft boxes (four by six feet), two large and two small umbrellas and a complete set of grid spots. Also, an assortment of panels, diffusers and stands.
Remembering how we used to do this kind of work let me to think in terms of big and reliable. As an afterthought I reached into one of the tool chest drawers, grabbed two shoe mount flashes and tossed them into the camera case. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need them.

We drove through an “on again--off again” fog that had settled in over the central Texas hill country overnight. We drove past the LBJ Ranch and through Johnson City. An hour into the trip we were barreling down curvy two lane black top ribbons of road that, in a round about way, connect a series of ranches and ranchettes to the nearby town of Fredericksburg. After getting lost a few times and seeing many dead armadillos beside the roadway we finally arrived at the “idea house”. It stood alone at the top of a hill about five miles from it’s nearest neighbor. An architect, a builder, a developer and their “visionary” banker created a really great house, using all sorts of green technology, out in the middle of nowhere. I guess their marketing plan is along the lines of “Build It and They Will Come”.

After we dragged all the gear into the house, found our client and art director, I started setting up for the first shot. It was of a beautiful, open kitchen stocked with all the usual upscale appliances like a six burner Wolf range and a huge, stainless steel, Sub Zero refrigerator. Sprinkled throughout the room were examples of contemporary Texas art, including pottery, sculpture and figurines. Taking advantage of the open space and the two story ceilings we were able to set up the camera to shoot across the dining room. First things first. I found the perfect camera position and put my 28mm shift lens on a Nikon D2x, then I tethered the assemblage to a MacBook.

While I worked on the camera stuff my able assistant got busy setting up the power packs and two heads with soft boxes. I figured out an ambient exposure and clicked off a frame to show the art director. That’s when it happened. I was so ready to fill in the scene with gloriously soft light from my giant soft boxes that I almost forgot just to slow down and use my eyes first. But the scene that popped up on the laptop screen stopped me in my tracks. Whoever designed the interior lighting did a masterful job. In addition, the two story tall windows, just out of frame on either side of the rooms, provided plenty of soft, barely directional fill light. The combination added up to perfect lighting. If I had added ANYTHING it would have visibly degraded the scene. I fine tuned the exposure, shot a Macbeth color card as a white balance reference and waited for the next image to pop up on the screen. It was perfect.

My assistant walked over to plug in the sync cord to trigger the big flashes. I stopped him. The art director and the client took one look at the screen and asked, “What’s our next shot?” I shot two identical safety frames and we moved on.

The next image was a living room shot. The lighting situation was nearly identical to that of the kitchen. The only aspects that needed work were a dark piece of art that was sitting in the fire place and a reflection of outdoor light on a few panes of glass on the right side book cabinet. We popped up a four foot by six foot black panel that dealt with the reflection and then started fretting about the fireplace.
How do you get a nice little glow in a fireplace in the middle of the room without running cables through the scene. And how do you deliver that glow in just the right spot without adding harsh shadows or over lighting the surrounding areas? We tried our narrowest grid spot but it cast a harsh shadow behind the piece of art and the large candles that lined the inside walls of the small cave. We sat down to think of a plan to bring all of our assembled Profoto firepower into the fray. Surely with all the tools at hand we could devise a perfect lighting design that would preserve the feel of the room while discreetly introducing the needed lumens right where we wanted them.

My assistant was getting ready to scale the two story roof and dangle 1200 watt seconds of light down the chimney when the epiphany struck. Ever the model of discretion and professionalism my assistant climbed carefully down the ladder (he hadn’t gotten very far.…..) pulled me aside and asked, “What about just lighting the candles?”

Amazing. the inertia of having big tools available usually compels us to try and use them---no matter how dismal and overdone the results.

We lit the candles in the fireplace, turned off all of the extra Profoto lighting we’d been messing with and clicked off a shot. The consensus? It was absolutely just what the client and art director had been hoping for.

I learned several valuable things during the course of our shoot in the country:
1. Look before you light! God, or a good architect may have already lit the scene for you.
2. Small changes fit better. If we’d needed to light the living room or kitchen we’d have been moving lights and taking test shots for hours. the addition of the black panel to kill the unwanted reflections, and the lighting of the candles took only a few minutes and preserved the integrity of the existing light.
3. If you have an assistant who is acrophobic (afraid of heights) he will sometimes invent a remarkable alternative solution on his way up to a steep roof. Be ready to take advantage of other people’s brilliant insights!

The shoot went quickly and well, and led me to understand a new principle of photographic lighting. It goes like this:
“Any addition of artificial light changes the scene and always adds unintended consequences. Which you must then fix.”

The smallest brush of fill light might reduce the pure black in the shadows which gives a scene its appealing contrast. A small flash always adds a hard shadow somewhere. A perfectly set soft box adds enough diffuse light to reduce the saturation in most objects. The list goes on and on. This is not to say that adding light is never good. In some cases it’s essential. The problem is that we all get into following formulas which have worked well for us in the past even if the formulas aren’t necessarily the right thing for the project at hand. A few minutes of quiet observation may save you hours of frustration. And then again, it may not.

We did get to use our big lights later in the day to light art objects against a sweep of white background paper but we never need our collection of toys for the guts of the assignment. The little portable flashes left the case only once. And that was just as “on camera” flash for the crew shot at the end of the day.
Some times the easiest stuff works.

© Kirk Tuck