Joachim Ladefoged's technique

Hi,

 

I was wondering if someone could shed some light (sic) on

the lighting techniques of Joachim Ladefoged. Visit

his site http://www.joachimladefoged.com and you'll

see what I mean (especially the olympic series).

My hunch is he's using spot metering throughout,

but - admittedly - I have seen a few versions of

the same pictures here and there and Ladefoged seems

to be an able photoshop user. I also wonder if he shoots

digitally, but this will be hard to tell...

Basically he seems to be metering for the hightlights. There are several ways to achieve this and spot metering is one. For daylight outdoors the easiest thing to do is just set the exposure manually at 1/250 at f/6.3 at 100iso or any reciprocal. At other times of day you can either spot meter in the light part of the image or better yet, stick an incident meter there and leave your exposure at that setting until the light changes.

 

Still more important to his technique is the ability to see the light and understand how it reacts to whatever film or digital camera you're using.

Easy to tell. Just look at the Canon ad that's all over the photo mags.

 

They all shoot digital and are willing to be seen in the ad with Mark IIs.

 

And the ad is really beautiful. Check out the light there!

Just becuause he was photoshopped into an ad with a Canon 1D doesn't mean he actually uses it. The fact that he's transmitting from Athens and doing BW conversion from color images does lead me to believe that he's shooting digital. That said, shooting digital has nothing to do with how he sees the light and how he meters it.

Joachim use exclusively Canon Eos 1D mark II. After some time using Eos 1D, now he uses second generation cameras of 8 mega pixel. As a back up camera he uses Eos D20. None of the VII photojournalists nowadays use film cameras, and in general press photographers use digital cameras. They use a hard Photoshop technique to make pictures looking like film alike.

 

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