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tips and inspiration:

Case study
Sulfur miners at rest

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 Background story

Ijen in East Java, Indonesia is an active volcanic crater. It’s also the workplace to hundreds of
men. They come to mine sulphur, armed with nothing more than their bare hands and metal
rods. I befriended one of these men – a miner named Paing. Over about a week I followed
Paing around and photographed his life.

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Ijen Crater, Java, Indonesia - 2008 | Canon 5D, 24-70mm@24mm, f/2.8, ISO 640,

This photo was taken early in the morning, well before sunrise.
The miners make their way up to the crater at this time to
avoid the heat and the scorching sun. It was dark. The flame
torches that the miners carried provided the only light.

On this trip I frequently used an off camera flash in a softbox.

That’s exactly what I did here to add a bit more light to the
scene. This allowed me to reveal a bit more detail without
increasing the ISO.

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 the aim

The flame-torches created a strong sense of ambience. They gave the scene warmth. I
wanted to capture this ambience, but also, to show a certain level of detail – who was in
the scene and what they were doing.

the challenge

It was extremely dark. The camera I had at the time was the first Canon 5D. It wasn’t
amazing at the higher ISO range, so I wanted to avoid going too high. Even with today’s
cameras, which perform amazingly well at higher ISOs there’s a benefit in using a flash.
You can use it to shape the subject and to reveal more detail.

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The solution Used a warm coloured gel over the

flash to more or less match the color of
the light that came from the flames.

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The flash in a sense boosted the light
which came from the flame-torches. It
was remotely triggered, in a soft-box
and off camera.
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Flash was at about a 45º angle to the
1 side of the miners.
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IMPORTANT: I used the flash at a
fraction of full power. This was done
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to ensure that the light from the flash
would not completely overpower and
kill the feel/mood of the scene.

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 Making it work

The flash alone wasn’t going to make this photo work. To make the
lighting effect look more realistic, I needed to turn to post-processing.
In this case I used Adobe Lightroom. 

My main task was to darken areas of the image which were

an obvious give-away of the flash. You can compare the “before”
and “after” photographs to get an idea of where I darkened.

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 before

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 after

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