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The making of the forest series

I first came out with the idea to shoot the forest series in around 2005.  I meant to shoot something which would give me the opportunity to shine and to showcase and hone and my lighting skills.

Why the forest?

It’s important if you’re undertaking a long-term project that it should be something you have a passion for, something that you LOVE. I’ve always had a passion for the environment and I really love trees, they have the most wonderful fantastic form and I have always been drawn to them. Working in the forest has many key advantages, it contains lots of objects with beautiful textures , fantastic colours like subtle greens and some very vivid greens and browns and also gave me the freedom to create lighting with depth – this is actually easier than you might think and its all because of the trees. The trees give you many many places where you can hide lights and light areas without them being seen and they also give great opportunities to rig lights to them as well. Combined with the smoke machine which I have used extensively in my forest projects, remotely triggered battery flash has let me build my very own sets without huge cost.

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Smoke

By using a smoke machine it allows me to create depth and also get a really beautiful shafts of light as the Flash punches through the trees creating this remarkable lighting effect.
It is also a really huge amount of fun!

The making of the forest series
The making of the forest series

It really is key to point out that there is no substitute for a real safety checked smoke machine which does not operate at high temperatures as forests can be very flammable places the consequences of using improvised smoke such as smoke bombs or other incendiary devices could be severe and should be avoided at all costs after all you can rent a smoke machine for as little as £50 a day.

Using a smoke machine, as Joe McNally once said ‘is a bit like herding cats’
He’s not wrong-in fact I reckon that herding cats could be a little easier.

What Joe actually means is that it really is difficult to dictate where the smoke goes, on my most recent forest shoot‘The Elk’ I had huge difficulties with the smoke going just about everywhere but where I wanted it to go, thanks to an ever shifting breeze. The method I use is to test extensively on the day of the shoot to see just which way the wind is blowing and how far up wind by needs to put my snow machine team.

Why a team?

Typically i need two people in the smoke team one to the machine the other to waft the smoke with a board frequently though, this is a reflector. Using the board to waft the smoke to where I want it to be, and crucially at the density I want is truly one of the great ‘secrets’ of my forest shoots The temptation is to make the smoke too dense and it is the last thing you need as the Flash just bounces off the smoke like head lights in fog.

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The making of the forest series

Lighting

Lighting in ’depth’ staggering the lights from as little as one meter from the camera to as far away as 50 meters is the key to the effect I get. I use remote control battery backs, such as Elinchrom or Profoto and stagger the lights at different distances to give a truly 3 dimensional lighting effect. The lights heads are virtually always modified, typically with a soft box, such as a Lasolite for the model and with ‘Kill spills’ for the rest of the scene. I very rarely direct the light straight onto the subject or the tree, pushing the light in at extreme angles of up to 90 degrees of the subject to give not only maximum texture but for dramatic mood and emotion. The other key point to the lighting is balancing the ambient light and the artificial light with the shutter speed on the camera. It is a matter of trying it out on the day to see what lighting ratio works for you, giving you the look and the feel that you want – There really is no right or wrong.

Time of day

Visit the location before the shoot at the same time of day as you a re going to do the shoot. There are some very clever apps which tell you where the sun will be at any given time but there is no substitute for seeing how the light falls on a scene. I tend to favour first light for a couple of different reasons, it is when I’m at my best and it means you are not hunting round in the dark for lost pieces of equipment…this has happened to me and I lost quite a few little pieces of gear.

Summary

Even though I have shared my secrets of the forest series there is no magic wand to making the image work. Every time I shoot a forest pic I never know exactly what will happen or how it will work ouT, indeed there are a couple of images from the series that did not work out the way I wanted them to so they will never be seen. The important thing though is to get out there and experiment, I have learned so much about lighting, photography and myself in this process. We live in age of so many greta photographic possibilities we really don’t have an excuse of not going out there and exploring our photographic passions. If you are interested here is a full behind the scenes video which will give you some sort of idea of what goes into a forest shoot

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