The fountain of youth

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The mood gets a little melancholy when the carefree days of summer are nearing their end. At no time in this life does this seem more pronounced than when we are teens or are still in college. While shooting around Tyler’s Rose Garden with a model, I decided to depict the twilight of youthful freedom and ennui with a little abandon. Thankfully, Jackie was willing to go all out and step right in.

To me, it’s entirely believable for someone suffering from summer boredom to think it’s a great idea to go clambering through a public fountain, even if it’s not what the law might smile upon. Also, water is just fun to work with – all the reflections, refractions, colors and textures make things interesting.

The theme combines with my desire to target more tangible themes and magazine-style storytelling. This would be somewhat of a lifestyle shoot from a fashion-esque standpoint. (Of course, if it were full-on fashion, I’d just have her change clothes a lot more, which wasn’t really feasible or possible in this situation, but good to keep in mind for future reference.)

Making the best of a “test” shot before she dived in, so I’d be prepared to get good pictures right away in case we got chased off quickly.

Deepening the stylization was the lighting method. I thought briefly of running for a light stand and flash that I left in my car in favor of more spontaneous natural light shooting. By this point, the sun was useless for natural lighting, and I had to have a flash. But before I ran to my car, I decided to try what is usually a terrible idea: The on-camera flash.

Why is that a bad idea? Well, in short, it’s harsh, and usually produces only shapeless light. To combat this, I turned the flash levels way down, kept my ISO a bit higher than normal and shot with slower shutter speeds to bring in what ambient I could. (The ISO and shutter were for the ambient light, and the aperture controlled the flash output along with the compensation scale on the camera.)

I don’t fully understand what the whole flash compensation thing does on the camera, because I never shoot flash automatically, but I know it can dial down the nuclear blast of the flash, so I just use it as a way of lowering or raising the flash power, much like I would a studio strobe. That could be way wrong, but it seems to work for me.

After I got the levels worked out satisfactorily, I realized the light was just harsh enough that it matched the edgy, youthful and fashionable look I wanted. The direct angle was actually flattering to Jackie, too. So long as I paid attention to shadows and kept her far enough away from things to avoid the dreaded back shadow direct flash causes, I figured to be in good shape.

An interesting side effect to the higher ISO setting was also the increased presence of noise. It’s usually something I disdain, but it actually enhanced the edgy feel. It doesn’t hurt that Nikon’s noise greatly resembles film grain, either! I ran with this film-like look while editing the images, too.

As we started shooting, I realized how much water warps the appearance of bodies and especially limbs. I had to be careful not to warp Jackie’s legs and arms into odd, unflattering blobs. Also, I had her fully submerge herself quickly, because the half wet/half dry look was strange, especially with direct flash.

From there, I let her do her thing, and we tried as many ideas as we could in a short amount of time. I am still not sure how legal it is to use the fountains in this capacity, so I wanted to be quick to avoid a visit from Tyler’s finest. However, the nice part about smaller cities is that we didn’t have to have a photography permit for any of this, like we probably would have to have had in some larger cities.

After a few minutes of snapping around and flouting social acceptability, we called it a night. If you ask me, driving home while soaked from a spontaneous nighttime excursion through a public fountain is perfectly “summer.”

Note: This shoot is actually the second part of a longer session with Jackie. I’ll post the pre-fountain images soon.