Your 7-year-old is dressed as Skeletor for a costume party. Your 10-year- old gyrates through a jazz routine for a solo number in the school dance recital. And your niece wants a romantic picture of herself and her fiance sitting beside a fire on a rainy afternoon.
Stock color snapshots for such occasions might find He-Man`s archenemy making a fiendish face framed by the roses that line the front porch, or the jazz dancer freezing into an electric pose against the pink-and-white frills of her bedroom. And your niece`s overactive sense of romance appears to require a rain dance, at the least, on the afternoon chosen for her portrait. But in each of these situations, simple props and lights–combined with a few sleight-of-hand techniques suggested by professional photographers–can set the stage for dramatic pictures with a flicker of humor.
The artists often call these techniques ”painting with light.” The commercial photographers refer to them as ”special effects.” The ones described here can be achieved when taking the photograph rather than in processing or printing, so they don`t require a home darkroom. The majority involve inexpensive materials and readily available equipment. Most of what`s needed is imagination, a spirit of experimentation and a rock-hard constitution that isn`t easily discouraged.
”You have to be prepared to accept five good frames out of 36 exposures,” says Harlan Wallach, partner in Chicago`s Avalon Studios, a firm that specializes in special effects.
With that disclaimer out of the way, the rest is meant to be fun. Skeletor, for instance, could be photographed accented in green light with shapes of snakes projected onto a white wall behind him. For a truly ghoulish effect, try the picture as a double exposure.
The jazz dancer could be photographed in a kinetic play of color lent by strands of Christmas-tree lights. And when the rain dance fails, your niece`s dream portrait can still be saved by borrowing on a technique used by photographer Chris Stadelmeier Royal, who moved to Philadelphia from Chicago last year.
Royal has adapted many of her techniques from her experience with costume and set designs for theater productions. Royal shot through a glass window sprayed with water to achieve the moody mystery of a glaze of raindrops for the setting of one photograph.
She also uses slides, projectors, filters and colored lights to achieve images that generate spatial illusions as well as metaphors about searching for meaning in human life.
”Most people have slide projectors, and they offer endless possibilities” for special effects, Royal says.
Shapes cut into a blackened, overexposed slide can be projected onto a person, or onto a wall behind the person, to represent anything from tiger stripes to lightning bolts. Designs drawn onto a transparent slide can be projected as eerie shadows or can drape an entire section of the image.
”The projector becomes a light source. You can make it focus the shapes you project, and you can project in any color (using sets of color filters mounted as slides),” Royal says. She also uses stock slides such as fine arts reproductions and NASA satellite images as well as images she takes specifically to project onto another photograph.
But photographic lights or common floodlights can also be used in a darkened room to act as ”projectors” of patterns cut into paper or cardboard and suspended in front of the lights. The patterns can be hung from the ceiling or anchored to the back of a chair.
You can change the size and focus of these cutouts to give endless variations just by adjusting their distance from the light source, Royal says. ”I`ll trace my own hand on a piece of thin cardboard, and, projected, it looks like a real hand moving into the picture.”
The natural light flooding through a window can also project patterns and shadows, of course, draping a subject in a pattern of lace hanging across the window, for instance. Simple props such as potted plants can be used to cast a jungle of shadows, Royal notes. ”Or you can hang Rosco gels from the window.” These come in sheets that are 20 by 24 inches and cost $4 each. The material essentially acts as a window-size color filter. The gels are available at large photo-supply stores.
”I also buy those stupid things called party lights,” bulbs that fit conventional sockets and come in a variety of colors, Royal says. ”They work well as fill lights” used with other light. For this type of shot, Royal says she would set the camera at f:8 and then take one-quarter-second, one-half-second and three-fourths-secon d exposures using ASA 64 color slide film.
Mixing light sources creates a dreamlike or fantasy effect in photographs as the warm tones of natural light contrast with the cooler tones of artificial light. Controlling these effects requires some experimentation, because no film is balanced for mixed-light sources.
Linda Ansay, a Chicago artist who works with a variety of unconventional photographic techniques, says she sometimes uses strands of Christmas-tree lights for background lighting, but the low light levels require time exposures of four to five seconds even with ASA 400 film. Flashlights are another simple way to highlight just a face or part of an image, she notes.
The pros recommend bracketing exposures, even when a light meter is used to gauge exposures. They recommend that photographers record the details of exposure settings and light levels for each image, so that optimal exposures can be duplicated.
Time exposures are the stock in trade of professional photographers who mix light sources for special effects or for an exaggerated treatment of the image in front of the camera.
Tripods are a must for this work, as are cameras that can be set for manual operation.
Wallach suggests attempting a portrait against a sunset with this equipment and a flash unit. Normally, shooting at the proper camera setting for the sunset leaves the subject of the portrait in silhouette; using a flash for fill light on the subject can mute the colors of the sunset.
To get the best of both worlds, set the camera for a one-second time exposure of the background and set the flash for the proper exposure of a conventional flash picture at night, Wallach says.
Trip the camera shutter and the flash will go off automatically, typically for 1/60 of a second, but the shutter will remain open for the time exposure, essentially ”burning in” all the sweeps of sunset colors right on the film. Wallach says he would use ASA 100 color print film for this shot and would bracket the f-stops at f:16, f:11, f:8 and f:5.6.
Wallach says the special effects technique of ”masking” one image into another also can be achieved right in the camera by making a double exposure. The 4-by-5- or 8-by-10-inch negatives used in large-format cameras can be exposed again and again with ease. But the technique works only with 35 mm. cameras where the film can be rewound manually frame by frame.
The possibilities with double exposure are endless. A miniature birthday party could be set beneath a canopy of daisies, or a pair of hands could appear folded beneath the moon.
The trick here is to preconceive the entire photograph in advance and compose the first exposure with the second exposure in mind, Wallach says. Typically, the first exposure should include a darkened area, such as the ground, a doorway or the nightime sky, that the second exposure will fill, he notes.
Zoom lenses offer another easy way to compose for special effects. Zooming in on the family Christmas tree while the camera aperture is open for a time exposure results in a image filled with ribbons of light, Wallach says. ”The zoom lens zooms to a center. You can get all the streetlights to zoom into a person`s face, for instance. It`s like the `Star Wars` effect when the spaceships go into hyperspace,” Wallach says.
Filters that fit to the camera lens are one obvious way to create special effects. The Cokin filter system fits to any camera with an adapter and offers rainbows, bursts of starlight, multiple exposures and dozens of other special effects. All the filters slide in and out of a single filter holder, making the system compact as well as economical. These are special effects that any amateur can try.
