Illuminating Illustration

A photo illustration always opens up a creative window and gives a photojournalist some freedom to step outside of the box and to try something different. When making a photo illustration, you are essentially taking a story or a concept and portraying it through an image in a symbolic way.

The idea to demonstrate Facebook’s latest adjustments in privacy settings involved showing the urge to break through censorship. We wanted to take the concept and show it in a very literal way. We thought this could be done best by electing a model and using black Gaffers tape placed over his mouth to represent censorship. Obscenity symbols, which are frequently used in place of censored words or images, were written by the model onto the tape in bright white paint to make a big contrast from the black tape.

A photo illustration can be a dynamic picture just by adding some studio lighting. In this case, we used a small room as our studio, with a large black sheet for a clean, dark backdrop. We set up three strobes to light the model in a way that would give good effect to his face. One strobe on a light stand was placed behind the model, who sat on a stool in front of the backdrop, and faced the camera for rim light, which illuminated the edges of his face and visually separated him from the dark background. Two other strobes on light stands were placed in front of the model at about a 45 degree angle to his left side. These were used as fill light, and were faced into an umbrella, which bounced the light and reflected it onto his face.

After setting up and proceeding with some test shots, we noticed that we still weren’t achieving enough light on the model’s face. We then decided to bring in an additional strobe, which was held by hand to the model’s back left side and directed across into a white shirt which was used to reflect the light to fill in the model’s right side of his face.

In order to sync all of the lighting so that each strobe fires off at the same time for even results, pocket wizard transmitters are used, which connect with each other and trigger each strobe to fire simultaneously. Five were used in our lighting setup, four connected to each strobe and one in the hot shoe mount on the top of the camera.

We wanted to create a tight frame, which highlighted the obscenity symbols and the model’s expression. The idea was to show a breakthrough in censorship, so we urged the model to scream loudly with big expression to illustrate this. When the model screamed hard enough to literally break through the tape, we knew we had our shot.

(Sara Winkler/Staff Photographer)

Milford junior Nick Combs demonstrates censoring yourself on Facebook as he screams through a cracked hole in Gaffers tape to avoid the potential effects of the website's decreased default privacy settings. Facebook initially displayed significantly less personal information to anyone but friends the user voluntarily selected. 

Camera: Nikon D300s
Focal Length: 50mm
ISO: 1250
Aperture: 11
Shutter: 1/250
Program: Manual
White Bal.: Auto