light & (darkly)

Wall-e in Solitary Confinement. (And How I Did It.)

Nobody told you that I could just waltz through and shake up your style.
I’m inside–like a wrecking ball through your mind, and I change it all from inside.⁽¹⁾

That was how I felt today–cold, sick, and alone.

Just kidding. Ok, not really. I was all three of those things, but it’s not as dramatic as Wall-e makes it look.

Anyways, I know somebody will ask so here’s how the breakdown on how I made this photo:

1. I made a DIY snoot. A snoot is anything that forces your light through a tunnel–thereby creating a tighter spread of light.
2. I put said snoot on my flash.
3. I went outside and put some snow on Wall-e. Then, I found a nice untouched patch of snow and dug him in.
4. I used my voice-controlled flash holder device to position the snooted flash directly above him.
5. Here’s the tricky part: setting your exposure. To get this effect, what you need to do is make sure everything around your subject is dark. Counterintuitively, what that means is that you need more light, not less. You need to knock up your shutter speed and aperture high enough to make the exposure completely dark. If I were to take this photo without a flash, nothing around it would show up–f/11 @ 1/250th s and ISo200 would be like shooting in a slightly shaded area on a sunny day, but when you use that exposure at night (like I did), you’ll get nothing but darkness.
6. Once you’ve dialed that in, it’s just a matter of figuring out the correct amount of power that needs to go to your flash and the correct distance between the flash and the subject. An increase in distance will do two things: 1) it will require an exponential increase in power to the flash and 2) it will create a wider spread of light on the snow.
7. Take the photo.

Very little photoshop work was done here. Just sharpening and extending the canvas a bit to add a deeper sense of isolation. It really was just that black. Those really are just snow flakes that were in the beam of the flash. And yes, snow really does just look like that when you flash it.

My DIY snoot was just a dark blue folder I found lying around. Note: you would probably normally want to use a black one. You can see the blue tint of the flash on the wall below.

There are also photos of my custom cereal box softbox. Inside is lined with aluminum foil. Just cut out one side and put tissue paper over it. Cut a hole for your flash. Done.⁽²⁾

1. Interpol – Wrecking Ball [↩]
2. That’s for you, Hao. [↩]