Photography News | Issue 38 | absolutephoto.com
17
Technique
vital to have such filters if you want the option of opening up the aperture. Focusing wise, I do tend to focus on the subject, because if the person is rendered out of focus, the shot is useless; it’s the only part of the frame that’s critical for focus. Because of the mix in styles, do you shoot these images with a tripod, like a regular landscape? Or handheld as would be more usual with portraits? If a tripod is used, is it down to helping with the finer points of composition, or something more technical, such as the need for stability at slower shutter speeds? I actually shoot both. All the pictures you see in this article, apart from one, I shot handheld mostly with a shutter speed of 1/1000sec or 1/2000sec. I used my monopod for the shot in the cave, as the light levels were so low, but I could have probably done with a tripod there. However, getting into the cave was not an easy task, andwould have been harder with more kit. I only use a tripod for stability purposes because a tripod will hinder my composition. I compose the frame using the LCD on the camera and I walk around the site looking at the two-dimensional image on the camera before I decide on final height and position to shoot from. It’s really hard sometimes to look
“On a whim five years ago, I bought the Fujifilm X100 and that was my first experience with the Fujifilm X-series. After a year with it, I went on a road trip across America on Route 66 and that’s when I first bought an X-Pro1 and three XF lenses. After three weeks, shooting every day, I knew this was the camera for me. When I returned to the studio, I never picked up my SLRs again. “The book, Portraits , covers the last five years of my work shooting exclusively with the Fujifilm X-series. Two years into using the Fujifilm X-series, I was invited by Fujifilm to become an X-Photographer and a further two years into my association, I had my first exhibition in Tokyo and was invited to become an ambassador for Fujifilm UK. The book itself was written, designed and produced in-house at Lovegrove Studios and it is a completely independent production from Fujifilm. They have not sponsored the project, however I am grateful for their assistance with some marketing effort.” Damien Lovegrove and the Fujifilm X-series
Above “This shot of Mischkah in a hidden cave in Spain is lit with natural light coming from a shaft to the surface. It was a wonderful sunny day above ground.” Below “Gabrielle’s face is back in the middle of the shot but the composition works because the green ferns at the top of the shot balance with the green foliage at the bottom.”
at a three-dimensional scene and distill it into two dimensions, so I find it much easier to work with the LCD and that’s one reason why using smartphones has become so easy for non-photographers. landscape-minded photographers out there, what can a figure add to a scenic frame; can it form a stronger focal point or provide a sense of scale? Both of those are very valid – a sense of scale especially. Using a figure-in-the-landscape composition also gives the opportunity to add a colour pop. Sometimes, I find that I’ve got green and blue in the frame and I want to add a splash of red. I often work with the primary colours of both light and pigment, so I like to include red, yellow, green and blue in some of my work. There’s an example of this in the picture of the girl sitting under a tree in France; it’s always lovely to see man and nature in a frame rather than just one or the other. What lenses would you recommend for this kind of work? I’m sure that, along with wide-angle options, almost anything could be used, but do you have a particular favourite? Well, I’ve been working a lot with the Fujifilm XF14mm lens, which is the equivalent of 21mm on a full-frame SLR camera. However, the opportunity for perspective compression for telephoto lenses is also a lure for me. I use pretty much every lens I have and there is no dominant lens in my kitbag really. Do you find you have to give any particular special instructions to your models? Are there different concerns to modelling for a regular portrait? Yes, unlike many other portrait styles, the direction that they face needs to be related to the position of light. The poses and shapes their body creates are important and it always helps to shoot with a dancer; it’s not often that I‘ve done this, but when I have the shapes they create are effortlessly wonderful! Many of your figure-in-the-landscape shots feature sophisticated costumes or nude subjects: what measures do you take to keep them comfortable, if, for example, they’re posing on hot sand or rock barefoot? For the more
The poses and shapes the model’s body creates are important and it always helps to shoot with a dancer
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