Gregory Heisler by Gregory Heisler

Author:Gregory Heisler [Heisler, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8230-8566-8
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2013-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

THOUGHTS ON TECHNIQUE

It’s not water. There’s no pool. Phelps is standing in front of a canvas backdrop painted with blue acrylic swirls. It looks like a watery surface receding into the distance because of a tipped lens. Phelps looks like he’s illuminated by the very same imaginary pool of water through the magic of lights and colored gels. It’s a complete concoction.

I knew we wouldn’t have access to the pool where he was in training. I also knew I wanted a pool picture. I looked for photographs of pools that I might photo-compose behind him (even though I was loath to do it), but as I searched, they all looked too real, too specific. I was stuck with the specific skies, specific angles, specific lighting dictated by the pool photos. So I thought I’d try one step less real. I looked at colored seamless paper. It was blue, all right, but had no sense of reality, of a place, whatsoever. I started combing the catalogs for painted backdrops. They can be either really good or really bad. Often their success hinges on how they are illuminated in the picture. They can look either like the real deal or like a parody. This one couldn’t look like a parody. I picked several to play with under the lights. Sarah Oliphant’s backdrop #1175 worked perfectly (she has created beautifully expressive backdrops for photographers for decades), but the image as a whole still wasn’t convincing. While the backdrop photographed well enough, the picture still had two distinct, unmarried planes: the subject and the backdrop. There needed to be a link to tie them together visually.

Somehow, I needed to connect Phelps to the “pool.” It struck me that he needed to be illuminated with “pool light,” as if he were standing next to an underlit pool at night, with cool hues washing over his body and showing off his sculpted Olympic torso. So I knew two things: the light needed to come from below (where the “water” would be), and it needed to be blue (the color of the “pool”). Achieving this seemed simple enough, but my assistants and I worked through an entire weekend with swimmer stand-ins, through interminable all-nighters, to come up with this picture. There were challenges.

My initial thought was to simply place fluorescent lights flat on the ground beneath Phelps to provide the cool glow. Their light was beautiful, but they were too dim for my 8×10 camera. He’d have had to stand still for a 10-second exposure. No way. So I switched to strobes. I positioned three long softboxes around him on the floor to mimic the look of the fluorescent lights. They were a little too big and sat up too high, almost waist height, which meant he’d have to stand on a platform, since I was looking for a three-quarter-length portrait. Not good. It was now well into the night on Saturday, and we had to board a plane first thing Monday morning. There was nowhere open to rent more gear from.

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