As each week passes, fellow photographers ask me how I started Honl Photo so I thought my blog might be a good place to start explaining the whole process from the beginning, in hopes of enlightening and inspiring others to follow their dreams- whether it be photo related or not. It’s been almost a 25 year journey now (with no end in sight!) and for the most part the journey has had nothing to do with photography itself but more about relying on past experiences and relaying them into a dream. “Practice what you know” and common wisdom such as “write about what you know” is truly key to teaching. I hope to impart some useful information for all of you out there who simply love capturing images like I have my entire life. Photography is a very personal endeavor however there are basic rules and structures which might make the journey more enjoyable and save you some time and hassle by learning from my past mistakes and discoveries I have made which made my life as a photographer easier and more enjoyable.
As far as the little light modifiers with my name on them, I’ll begin with what I previously used for light, and how it ultimately impacted my need for Honl Photo products in my own work. In 1987 I bought a big and heavy Speedotron Black Line power pack and 3 heads, with a combined weight of what felt like 2,000 pounds. The weight of all the gear actually seemed light compared to my heavy fear of the concept of lighting in and of itself; a concept far too big to take on at once, you must break it down through experience and by utilizing various pieces of equipment and taking into consideration the situation, location and other external factors.
At the time I was shooting with either a Nikon F3 or a rented Mamiya RZ67, and anytime I shot with strobes I’d clip a Polaroid back to them to do lighting tests. I would then wait a day for the slide film to be processed to see if I got it right. I would also do what was called a clip test, where I would sacrifice the first few frames of the roll of film to have them processed first and see if any processing adjustments needed to be made for exposure adjustments or mistakes. Pretty clumsy process by today’s standards.
As I look back, I didn’t really conceive of what a hairlight or a mainlight or lighting ratios were, I just sweat through it and hoped for the best. So, my lighting usually ended up being just an easy, no-risk portrait shot with a single softbox and perhaps a white backdrop.
Stills I shot on the film Equinox
Years later, I dragged that entire Speedotron system with me when I moved to Istanbul, and the first time I had to lug it up a 5 story office building I was planning to sell it on eBay by the time I hit the 4th floor. There had to be a better way! I had a couple Canon 580 Speedlites, so I practiced with them for awhile (I was shooting digital now, with a Canon 1DS), mostly trying to rely on the TTL. It too was a disaster until I gave up TTL and went completely manual on both the camera and the flashes. Now that I felt like I had more control over the light, my creativity blossomed, and when that happens you start to imagine the possibilities of what you could do with the right tools. Sort of like the feeling of graduating from a point and shoot to a DSLR- with the right equipment you have so much more control over the quality of your photos.
I started taking the flash off the camera, putting it on a lightstand with painted aluminum foil around the Speedlite heads to create tunnels of light rather than wide beams of deer-in the-headlight type light (the foil was bought at koctas in Istanbul, Turkey’s equivalent to Home Depot). These things called snoots are certainly nothing new- they’ve been used in both still photography and motion pictures since the beginning of time. At this time, I started really thinking about how cinematographers light a scene.
I reflected back to around 1990 I was hired as the still photographer on the Alan Rudolph movie Equinox. Over a 5 week period on that movie, I got some fantastic pictures of Matthew Modine, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Marisa Tomei- it was a very artsy, well-lit film and alot of my stills ended up in both American Cinematographer and Film Comment magazines. I went back through my archives and used some of those stills to recreate what I had shot, only using Speedlights instead of the big and heavy movie lights already set up and in place by the grips for filming the scenes. One could call this my de-constructing or reverse engineering period.
More to come, as I gather some of those old portraits I shot in the early 90′s, as well as bring you into my apartment in Istanbul where I started hammering out prototypes…
