This week, we’re revisiting the epic seven-hour colored gels session we did for filmmaker Drew Matthew Beyer’s film Even’s Elegy back in February. (Drew’s latest film, Morning Is Broken, is currently an official selection at the Museum of Pop Culture’s 18th Annual Science Fiction + Fantasy Film Festival.)
Ultimately for Even’s Elegy Drew needed four finished portraits—two for the film’s wanted posters, two memento photographs carried by the characters in the film. Rather than shooting four looks, however, we photographed seven—two for each character except for the character of Marl, for whom we only made one. Last time, we looked at the official photograph for the character of Mercer from the film, portrayed by Quinn Leary (seen previously in these pages as “The Muse, Urania” in The People of Light and Shadow series in which Drew Beyer portrayed “The Tataille“). In the previous Mercer photograph, we lit Quinn from behind with a large softbox equipped with a teal gel, and we lit him from the front with a magenta gel on one side and a blue gel on the other.
Photography
The photograph in this post is an alternate Mercer look for Even’s Elegy. In this lighting setup, we lit a gray background with two small umbrellas equipped with red gels and pointed a third light (with a grid attached in order to control light spill) onto our subject’s face.
Lighting with gels is very specific and technical. The placement, power, and location of the lights is key to success. Since the colored gels fill in shadow areas, you must ensure that you have a shadow for your colored gel to fill in. For this example, we wanted a dark red background, so we used gray seamless paper behind the subject and turned the red-gelled lights onto it rather than onto a white paper background, which likely would have reflected brighter, more saturated light.
It was also important for us to properly distance our subject from the background and to angle the small umbrellas behind him so that their red light only just brushed the perimeter of his body rather than wash him completely in their light (which would interfere with the blue light on his face).
These techniques, as well as the gels themselves, came from fashion photographer Lindsay Adler’s The Magic of Gels class.
Editing
There were many options open to us in editing. My first edits of this portrait corrected for the darkness and shadows in the image and presented a much flatter portrait of the subject. However, Drew’s objective with this photograph was to wrap Mercer in shadow and highlight only a part of his face. That’s the way we initially photographed it, but sometimes in editing for clients I’m compelled to overcorrect so that every part of the image can be clearly seen. But sometimes that’s not the objective! So as we consulted back and forth through the editing process, we refined the original concept, portraying Mercer as an individual in shadow, colored in reds and blues. These are some of the other results and editing experiments with Mercer’s look.
In future weeks we’ll look at the other subjects from this session and their various creative gel setups until we’ve assembled the whole Even’s Elegy miniseries on this blog.
Great thanks to Drew Beyer for creating this photography project for Even’s Elegy, to Dyllan Rodrigues-Miller for her makeup, and to Quinn Leary for being our very patient subject!
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