They say that even the best laid plans of men inevitably fail. I have always believed that and have always tried my best to be prepared, to embed one contingency after another in everything I plan to do and, to date, it has always worked well. Until this time. This time, absolutely nothing worked and I failed almost completely.
Maasai woman. Because of the intense sunlight and very strong winds, we ended up shooting inside a deep ravine about a hundred meters away from the village. This was the only place with some shade where we could deploy the soft box. (Light camera right, inside 120cm gridded soft box, 1/1 power)
Yes, I am fully aware of what I’m saying: my last photographic foray was a failure. Maybe not complete in the absolute sense of the word, but certainly miles away from what I had planned, what I had envisaged and what I wanted to achieve - if I could call what I had in my mind a vision, well, what I saw on the screen upon my return was as far from it as possible. Even to this day, more than a month later, it fills me with anger and bitterness that I don’t know how to overcome. But maybe it’s better if I explain.
The Covid-19 pandemic threw a massive wrench into my 2020 photographic plans, scheduled assignments and workshops - much like, I imagine, everyone out there. Cooped up at home for more than 3 months resulted in extremely clean camera gear (I think I cleaned the damned things 10 times!), completely reorganised storage spaces (and the junking of a lot of redundant lighting stuff!), a bunch of home improvements but not a single image! No matter how I tried to motivate myself to “make the most of it”, I just couldn’t do it. I actually came up with 3-4 excellent ideas - truly out-there stuff - but the restrictions imposed on us meant I could not realise any of them.
But then, Tanzania opened up to visitors and, for me at least, the world had instantly become a better place, one filled with promise I was more than ready to take advantage of. I could travel again and, more to the point, I could use this trip to accomplish two things the pandemic had nearly killed: test run and fine-tune my upcoming travel workshop and continue the work for my long term project and, hopefully, upcoming book. At least that was the plan!
I threw myself completely at the task, working countless hours to make this trip a reality in only a few short weeks (if you’re wondering, it took 4 weeks from start to departure time!): I researched and found what turned out to be an amazing local partner for the logistics and organisation (www.shadowsofafrica.com). I researched every aspect of the area and the tribes I wanted to photograph, including areal images, accounts from other travellers (of which there were very few), images taken by other photographers and every other detail I could think of. Then I sat down and sketched - yes! - almost every single shot I wanted to take, complete with lighting diagrams and 3-4 alternatives for each. Once I had that, the time had come to start thinking about equipment. Here’s where things got - temporarily - interesting.
No. 1 on the requirements checklist is a surefire way of controlling the light when I’m there - a way to anticipate the strong african sun. Which naturally leads me to purchasing a high quality VariND filter capable of turning a bright summer day to near midnight.
Next is lights. They need to be portable (and as light as possible), battery-powered (with sufficient juice for a whole day’s shoot) and, obviously, cannot cost thousands and thousands of pounds. Luckily I already have 2 battery-powered 200ws strobes, capable of approximately 500 full-power shots on a single charge. To add to that, I purchase a brand new, also battery-powered, 300ws strobe and 3 extra batteries for all. At this point, I’m almost certain I’ll have enough, but to be sure, I test the concept outside my house, at high noon, under bright cloudless sunshine, and it seems to work as intended!
Finally, modifiers. A 60x60cm soft-box, a 90x90cm gridded soft-box and a 120cm reflective umbrella soft-box, also with a grid. All tested, all giving off wonderful light, sturdy and, equally importantly, easily packed and transported. Add a travel lighting stand and I felt I was absolutely ready to take on anything - talk about hubris, right?
First day of the shoot comes up - we had spent the first day in Africa visiting the villages, scouting the area, looking for interesting corners, nice vistas, places to shoot, meeting the people and explaining our vision, etc. - and I’m excited! I have a very busy and intense schedule planned, starting from just before sunrise, going through the golden hour and a little beyond, until the sun rose high in the sky, then taking a small break with interior shots, shots in covered places etc. and resuming about an hour before sunset and conclude just around twilight. The previous day, during scouting, Africa graced us with what is supposed to be typical weather for that time of the year, a wonderful set of clouds travelling across an overcast sky, so on the day of the shoot, when we woke up at 4am, you’d think “I’m ready for an amazing day”, right? You’d think so but you’d be completely wrong. As was I!
August in Tanzania apparently has absolutely no golden hour and no twilight. At 6am it would be dark(wish), at 6:05 a tiny sliver of twilight would appear and it would last for maybe 10’. Then, with no transition whatsoever, the sun would rise and everything would be bathed in harsh, white, blinding light. No golden yellow, no transitions, no nothing. Harsh shadows from 6:30am until 6pm, then 10-15’ of golden hour and then, as if a light was switched off, absolute darkness. All this I discovered the first day of shooting and it was a horrible awakening. Let me expand…
We arrived at the first village (this is on day 2) around 5:20am and the sun had just started coming up. By the time I unloaded the car and moved the gear to the first spot (maybe 10’…maybe less) the sun was fully out and there was no hint of shadow (let alone clouds) anywhere. Against a blindingly blue sky, the sun rose about a foot every 5’ and then a strong wind rose, making the use of any modifier bigger than a shoebox almost impossible. Auspicious start, right? That’s when I knew we were in trouble.
Of course I thought I’d battle on and see what I could do. Using my ND filter I managed to control the ambient light and create a nice, soft background against which I felt I could work. And then I started added light. 200ws were nothing. 300ws, nothing. 400ws nothing. Because of the ND - which was absolutely necessary otherwise I would be shooting against washed out backgrounds - there was no amount of power I could throw at my subjects to create even a mediocre image. So, right now, I’m royally screwed. And the sun keeps climbing (not that it matters - the only thing changing is the angle of the light!).
So, what to do? I start running around, hoping to find different view points, different areas but the options were simply not there. So, here I was, in the middle of nowhere, with more than 100 shots designed and planned, with 100lbs of gear, assistants, a total of 5 different villages and tribes waiting for me to set up shoots and direct them and there was no way I could realise any part of my vision. No matter what I did or how I tried to approach this, my options were minimal if any. Could I just abandon the entire idea and just shoot those amazing people under the harsh sunlight, creating completely uninteresting and, well, bad images or…what?
Well, to cut a long story short, I persevered. I found tiny pockets of partial shadow under trees and inside ravines and bungied all the strobes together to defeat the harshest sun I’ve ever seen (by the way, this does not work - 200ws+200ws+300ws does not make 700ws - it makes a slightly brighter 300ws!!!!), I tried to convert my soft boxes to reflectors (didn’t do much good either) and generally I kept trying and trying. And as I kept trying and failing, I made the even worse mistake of looking at the images at the back of the camera and planning to fix SOME of the horrible light in post! Nearly 30 years of experience down the drain in my frustration.
I came back, almost 2 weeks later, with over 2,000 images which I imported and started seeing on the big screen in glorious 5k, seeing all my horrible misses and freaking out. It was the most horrible feeling in the world, especially as, image after image, I realised that processing them the way I had hoped I would, was going to be difficult and maybe even impossible. And I handled that really badly - once I threw my chair across the room, I lost count how many times I screamed out of sheer frustration and I think I spent more than a week of 15 and 16-hr days working on 2-3 images! I knew I had failed and now I needed to see if there was anything worth salvaging. I’m telling you, when the images finished loading, I didn’t think so.
CaptureOne Pro came to the rescue and using the insanely powerful Luma masking capabilities and went through the most promising images and created a look which I thought - “thought” being the operative word here - was close to what I had envisaged at the beginning. By the way, I went through this whole approach 3-4 times, each time thinking I was fine-tuning and improving the images, sometimes scrapping everything and starting from the beginning. At the end, I was still massively unhappy and ever more frustrated and it was at this stage that I did the first right thing: I asked two friends, not professionals, for their opinion. I showed them what I felt was my final cut and, thankfully, they were brutally honest with me: they told me my images, well, sucked! They were over-processed, way too dark - artificially darkened way beyond what normal conditions would do - and the strobe light was too weak and lacked character. They also pointed out that they were somehow bluish. I was half-expecting that but it turned out that this was all the motivation I needed.
I went back to my images and started from the beginning. I removed more than 80% of the artificial darkness (to date, I still have no idea what drove me to add so much artificial darkness), cut down on the way-over-the-top desaturation (by a huge amount) and removed what was - admittedly by accident - a cool tint one of my presets had added to the image. As I slowly and carefully crafted this new look I started getting glimpses of the images I wanted and planned to get - I knew they were never going to be exactly there, but I was slowly getting there. And, more importantly, I saw what I needed to do the next time.
Please have a look at the final cut here and try, if you can, to imagine them 2-3 times darker and blue. Yeah…they were that bad!
What did I learn from this debacle? Tons!
No matter what ANYONE says, when the going gets tough, gear matters! And it matters a LOT! If I had a 600 or an 800ws light with me, you would not be reading this article!
You can never have enough light. Never. Expectations of ambient light will always betray you at the worst possible moment. If you think working inside a mineshaft at midnight would mean a 50ws strobe will be enough, take 400ws with you. And another 400ws as a backup. And maybe throw in a 600ws.
No matter what a manufacturer says about how much light a modifier cuts, when you are out there, I guarantee you, the simplest umbrella will cut more light that you ever thought normal.
You cannot fix lighting mistakes in post. You can manipulate light JUST a little bit, correct a tiny bit here and there, but you cannot fix what was completely wrong. If you failed on site, then assess the failure and if it was indeed a failure, don’t try to patch it up…it will show.
I am heading back to Africa in 2 weeks time for another trip, this time staying with the Samburu and the Kikuyu and maybe even working inside Kibera with the displaced and urbanised Maasai. This time I will be ready…but, knowing Africa and my luck, I’ll come across a hurricane amidst sunspots ;-). Wish me luck.