I love Renaissance Faires, in spirit if not so much in participation. People dress up and go Elizabethan in a way that seems no odder to me than wearing football jerseys and getting lightning-bolt tattoos. I have photographed and videotaped the twice-yearly Escondido Renaissance Faire both for myself and for the Union-Tribune’s SignOnSanDiego website (2005 gallery; 2007 video), though in recent years I have wanted to go deeper. I was working on an online audio slideshow in spring 2009 when I came across the Vestrfolk, one of several guilds whose members populate the faire. I interviewed them for the project, they gave me water and kindly offered to let me shoot that’s afternoon’s big battle from the vantage point of their tent.

I had always wanted to do more with the faire and the people who bring it to life, and months later Mista and other Vestrfolk agreed to let me come back for a private project, spending a day of the faire photographing the goings on in their campsite and shooting portraits on location. Though it turned out to present many challenges, it was one of the most entertaining shoots I’ve ever done, and not just because of the free-flowing ale.

Given the size of Felicita Park, I hadn’t imagined that finding shooting space would be so difficult, but the guild tents face the broad field of what winds up as the afternoon battleground and sit in front of a sparse line of trees separating the park from neighboring homes. What I envisioned was shooting in a clear, shaded space with a clean background; the reality was shooting against hanging blankets in dappled sunlight. I brought my small off-camera flashes with me, but even though I was using a modern DSLR it seemed out of character to set up portable strobes on the side of a Norse campsite. We made do, and the Vestrfolk were very tolerant of my fussing and rearranging. (The ale helped here, too.) I didn’t have my big reflector panel back then, but I did have my Lastolite Trigrip and a succession of people willing to shine it into their friends’ faces…

In the dimming light I wound up shooting wide open with my Tamron 28-75 2.8 lens, meaning that I had a very shallow depth of field, which is normally desirable for portrait shots, but which can leave you too little in focus when shooting from 10 to 12 feet away. As I’ve discovered since, that means that locking focus on one object and then recomposing means that if you’re not starting with a focus on your subject’s eyes you can push your focal plane onto their ears or the back of their head. Also, without strobes or more powerful reflectors, I didn’t have much control over how the light was hitting my subjects, which is one of the keys to good portraiture.

The portrait work had to be fit in between the guildmembers’ other obligations — helping provide faire security, prepping to participate in the afternoon battle, participating in the afternoon battle and then drinking after the afternoon battle. But we were able to shoot almost every individual, couple or family arrangement people were willing to pose for, though I’m not sure how happy the Vestrfolk were with the results. Revisiting these photos now, I’ve reworked them in Lightroom 3 and given them all a consistent sepia-toned look that gives them more of a vintage feel while also giving me a couple of mechanisms to cover up the image’s shortcomings. I wound up applying the same multi-channel desaturation technique I described in last week’s post, then pushing up the Luminance levels in orange, red and yellow to improve skin tones.

Mista and husband

I haven’t been back to the faire since; it’s become a little like Comic-Con to me, where if I don’t bring my camera I feel like I’m missing everything and if I do haul around the gear it feels too much like work. We’ll see what April brings…

Aly Bucholz

This photo may look like a studio image, but it was shot along the edge of the Salton Sea at Bombay Beach. The subject is the stylish young photographer/model Aly Bucholz. The shoot was part of a large group event organized by The SoCal Photography Group, featuring a number of photographers and models of varying experience. The theme was to be post-apocalyptic, not that you could tell from this photo, though Aly was wearing some distinctive makeup.

Aly had also brought along her own props, including a small white vanity table which she set up in the sand a few feet from the edge of the sea. Here’s a wider shot showing the overall scene:

Wider shot of Aly Bucholz at Bombay Beach

Aly Bucholz at Bombay Beach

What I wound up doing with this image (aside from some minor contrast adjustments and the like) I did entirely in Lightroom 3:

• Reducing the exposure about half a stop to regain some detail in the highlights. I also slid Highlight Recovery up to 100
• More important was adding in some blacks and then offsetting that with a touch of Fill Light. I also bumped up the Vibrance about 30 points just because I usually add some, though I’m not sure how much it affects the final image.
• There are a number of ways to make black-and-white photos. One of the old standards is a full desaturation; Lightroom 3 also offers a B&W option that gives you eight color sliders for deciding how much each hue contributes to the mix. What I did was a variant of the two — using the color sliders, which allow you to adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminance of each color. Slide Saturation to 0 on all of them and you get a black-and-white photo. Slide Saturation to 0 on everything but red and only the red items in the image retain their color. (My apologies to my one-time Photoshop instructor Ryan Even, who forbade his students from making kitschy monochromes where only the rose is red.) Fiddle with the Hue and Luminance for red and you influence whether Aly’s dress, tattoo and lips are deep scarlet or hot pink. Take the color off the subject’s lips or hair by using an adjustment brush with Saturation set to 0.
  Those other colors are still contributing to the image, but mainly in terms of light and dark. Exaggerate pale skin by sliding the orange Luminance toward 100. Darken a blue sky by sliding Aqua and Blue toward 0.
• Cropping to a square format, because the background wasn’t really contributing much sense of the environment. I put Aly and her reflection a little off-center.

The result isn’t necessarily portfolio-worthy, at least, an entertaining photo. I’d have liked a little more atmosphere and a shorter depth of field with focus closer on Aly’s eyes, but I think this treatment, shape and cropping draw in the eye, if only by emphasizing the creativity Aly brought to the shoot.

And here’s a gallery of the whole bunch against a backdrop.

Self-portrait with glowing stones

Water splashing up onto an orange.

Water splashing onto an orange and a bottle of dog shampoo