The B&H catalog contains pages of expensive tools to help photographers not ruin their pictures with harsh light and blown-out highlights. And God help a photographer naïve and uneducated enough to go out in the mid-day sun to begin with.
Luckily, fashion photography great Mario Testino chose to disregard such time-honored wisdom in a recent spread for the March 2011 Vogue UK. The whole thing takes place under a hot, drenching sun, and you can almost feel the heat just looking at the photographs.
Mario Testino can presumably get away with just about anything he likes, but part of his greatness lies in the fact that he doesn’t push the limits just because he can. It’s a photo shoot on and about a sundrenched beach. And if you want to show a beach drenched by an overbearing sun, well, you have to show it that way. Softening the sun or filling in all the shadows here would have softened the look, and turned it into something completely different (cue the generic, stock tourist shots). And for those shadows he did fill in, presumably he made a creative choice to do so.
Sometimes blown out highlights, sometimes filled in shadows…sometimes this, sometimes that…the path to creativity is not like following a recipe to bake a cake.
I think a big reason art directors and those paying the bills often want to punt and play it safe and stick to a recipe is that taking risks doesn’t work out so well every time. Better to be safe than sorry. But this leads to a mindset of always playing it safe, which paradoxically risks loosing viewers as they get bored with the same thing time after time. And that’s a much larger problem than a blown-out detail.
While it’s not always a wise choice to head out under under the noonday sun, sometimes noon is the exact right time to take some pictures.
And sometimes the best light-shaping tool is no tool at all.
