This is not the expression you want to see if you encounter a big guy in a dark alley, especially this big guy: He’s four-time sumo world champion Byambajav Ulambayar (known as “Byamba”). This facial expression appeared just minutes before Byamba won the U.S. Sumo Open in 2010. “The emotion in the photograph was charged with the intensity of just having come out of the competition,” recalls Los Angeles sports and portrait photographer Dustin Snipes.

The opportunity came about because Snipes had an interest in sumo wrestling. He contacted the director of the U.S. Sumo Open years earlier to find out how to get credentials to photograph the event and wound up being invited back.

This portrait was Snipes’ first time photographing Byamba, so he didn’t know that although the Mongolian-born and Japanese-trained athlete “looks serious,” he “actually likes to joke around a lot.” (Since this portrait was made, they’ve worked together several times.) In a way, that unfamiliarity worked in Snipes’ favor. Speaking through an interpreter, he tried to quickly build rapport by connecting with Byamba’s energy; the photographer adapted his working demeanor to suit the wrestler’s state of mind.

“You need your subject to know that you are capable of making a great photo. So showing any type of doubt or not looking like you are prepared doesn’t help when you’re trying to get them to open up,” Snipes says. “Confidence is key, so when you direct them to do something outside of their comfort zone, they’ll be on board with your plan.”

In Byamba’s case, Snipes figured the sumo squat would be the best starting point. He showed Byamba what he wanted him to do, and through the interpreter he coached the wrestler on a few motions.

It was a small set: 9-foot white seamless with strip softboxes on each side. Snipes suspended a medium octabank overhead for dramatic contrast. He had only a few minutes to work, so he shot full-body first with his Nikon D700 and 24–70mm f/2.8G Nikkor lens. When Byamba lowered his icy gaze at the camera, this pro knew to zoom in for the tight shot. Click and done.

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There’s nothing like the freedom of experimenting: nobody to please but yourself, and mistakes are fine. It helps you develop a repertoire of strategies, approaches, and ideas that come together in unexpected ways. And you don’t give up when something goes wildly wrong. That’s just what helped fashion photographer and digital retoucher Julia Kuzmenko McKim create this image for her Flames portrait series. When shooting for clients, she posts a Pinterest “mood-board” to get everyone on the same page. But this personal project required only experimentation. “I really enjoy improvisations where we just get together and play,” she says.

It began one afternoon in McKim’s basement with some red and green cellophane wrap and a few strawberries. Her setup included a Paul C. Buff Einstein monolight with a beauty dish and a Canon Speedlite 580EX as a secondary source. For a dark, mysterious mood, she lit her subject with the monolight’s modeling light.

This made focusing hard, but her Canon EOS 5D was set to activate autofocus from the rear AF button instead of the shutter; she held focus by locking on once, then maintaining a consistent distance from the model.

At first she tried to capture motion blur, but that didn’t work. Then she used a macro lens to isolate the model’s mouth with a strawberry, but that failed, too. After trying a few more variations, McKim finally captured some poses she liked.

But another problem arose: underexposure. She had been shooting in conditions that forced her to set her camera’s LCD brightness higher than normal. Because she had forgotten to reset it when checking the images during the shoot, her exposures came out too dark. As she worked on fixing the images in software after the shoot, she realized she could enhance the pictures with blending modes in Adobe Photoshop. And while she was adding layers, why not add some dramatic interest as well?

In the end she made selective color adjustments and two layers of generic flames, one blended with Overlay and one with Soft Light. She sized and positioned the flames exactly with the Free Transform tool.

“The entire series is an artistic happy accident,” McKim says. “I didn’t know what to do in postproduction, so I tried a little of everything just to see what worked best.”

For more of Julia Kuzmenko McKim’s work, go to www.juliakuzmenko.com.

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In an age swimming in off-the-shelf digital special effects, it’s reassuring to come across photographers like the Washington, D.C.-based wedding shooter Sam Hurd. He describes himself as a hardcore digital photographer who also happens to like using experimental camera techniques. He finds that in the right situations, analog experiments can breathe life into his images without producing just another “cheesy digital” effect.

One of Hurd’s favorite techniques is called “prisming,” which involves holding a small prism in front of the camera lens while shooting. The technique results in a variety of effects from rainbows to triangular shapes to Holga-esque light-leak looks. The effects are entirely organic, changing from frame to frame, and almost impossible to repeat or create from scratch in digital postprocessing.

Hurd has found that getting the best results takes more than simply holding a prism in front of his lens. He tested to discover which prism to use, how to place it, what cameras and lenses worked well, and what situations (both subject and environment) best matched the technique. He finds a 6-inch equilateral prism made of glass (about $12 from scienceshopusa.com) optimum with full-frame DSLRs. “Smaller prisms don’t cover the whole lens and result in fingers getting in the way,” he says.

When positioning the prism in front of the camera, think about the direction of your light sources, Hurd advises. You can achieve light-leak effects when the light comes toward the camera, while reflections are generally more interesting with strong side light. “If you turn a prism on its side and shine a light on it, you can get flare in triangular shapes,” he adds.

He typically uses a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens on his Nikon D4 for prisming; a 24mm wide-angle lens works well, too. The key, however, is to use the live view mode on your camera to see your actual exposure as you change settings. Hurd says that his DSLR’s live view “takes a lot of the guesswork out.”

Hurd generally looks for textures when prisiming. In the portrait shown here, he used the prism to reflect the branches and leaves from above into the lower half of the frame. The technique not only wrapped the couple in a “wall of color,” but it also masked the muddy ground below.

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The text for an advertisement promoting a new housing development asked, “What would life be like if everything was the same?” Lincoln Barbour, a Portland, OR-based commercial shooter, took on the creative challenge of answering that question visually in a series of images that included this shot of an all-Souzaphone high-school band.

“The ad agency hired me based on my personal work, which is quiet, subtle, and candid,” Barbour says. “So the hardest thing for me was finding my personal voice in the shot while meeting everyone else’s expectations.”

Barbour’s first challenge? Simply finding enough kids who had band uniforms and tubas. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. “We had six tubas and ten kids,” Barbour recalls. “I had to shoot the same picture three times and move the kids around with the different tubas, and then Photoshop it all together so it looked like one photo.”

Working with the agency’s art director, Barbour determined that the frames to be composited would need to be captured from the back row to the front in order to get the right overlap. “I shot six people at a time with tubas, and there was always one person on the next row below, overlapping so I could line them up as we went along,” he explains. “We had to think about the kids and where they’d be in the picture, and, yes, there are two or three repeated musicians, but who’s to say they weren’t twins?”

Barbour also faced a tough task in getting even light and lots of depth of field in the cavernous gym. He used four Profoto 7B packs and heads with magnum reflectors, bouncing the light off the high ceiling at full power. The lightstands were placed at the four corners of the frame. The exposure on his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II was 1/125 sec at f/11 and ISO 320. The lens: a 24–70mm f/2.8L Canon EF zoom at 57mm.

“When this job came in, I took it on myself to do everything—all the production, prep work, location scouting, and prop building. I was exhausted when it was over,” he says. “I learned a lesson here: Next time, I’m going to hire stylists, a location scout, and a tech guy for all the Photoshopping.” No more allowing himself to become a one-man band!

Check out Barbour’s personal and professional work at [www.lincoln barbour.com](http://www.lincoln/ barbour.com).

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Henri Cartier-Bresson pop-ularized the “decisive moment,” and his style of 35mm candid photography owes a lot to anti- cipation and timing, not to men-tion a dab of good luck.

Fortune certainly paid a visit to photographer Kevin Meredith one cold day in May a few years ago at Brighton Beach in England. As he prepared to go for a swim with some of his close friends, this implacable shooter sensed a quiet moment coming together.

It was 7:30 in the morning, and the warm sunlight contrasted sharply with the cold water. “Brighton Beach has a steep drop-off, and you can get knocked over by its waves,” Meredith says. “My intrepid friends stood in a line waiting, and, when a gap appeared between the waves, they all stepped into the surf together.”

As a large wave formed and began to approach, he raised his old Contax T2 compact film camera to his eye, anticipating the subtle tentativeness just before his friends dove in. “Sue was facing the same direction as the boys, and I was waiting to get the three figures looking out to sea,” Meredith says.

As luck would have it, he didn’t catch the moment he had prepared for. And because you can’t chimp film (he was using Agfa Ultra 100), Meredith didn’t know he’d missed his shot until the resulting prints returned from his photo lab.

“It’s one of those fluke images,” he says. “As I began to press the shutter button, Sue got cold feet (literally) and turned as if to say, ‘Oh, blimey, I’m not getting into that!'”

For Meredith, the photo comes together in his subjects’ seemingly choreographed body language, from the cold arms and clenched fist on the left side to the reassuring hand on the hip and the twist of the body on the right.

Meredith now ranks this photograph as one of his all-time favorites, although he admits it’s a “photographer’s photo.” (Maybe that’s why we liked it so much.)

His friends? They were less impressed. “They’re like, ‘Well, you can’t even see my face!'” he laughs.

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How To: Creative Thinking Bowling

Pros know the secret to sustaining creativity over a long career. It’s called “personal work,” and New York commercial photographer Paul Mobley (www.paulmobleystudio.com) sums it up as “the joy that reminds me of why I became a photographer.”

Early in his career, he found that his technically beautiful photos still “missed the magical moments because I was screwing around with the lighting,” he says.

A prominent photo editor reviewed Mobley’s portfolio and prescribed the cure: “Carry your camera with you everywhere, and shoot personal work.” So he gave himself permission to “act on [his] daydreams and act on [his] ideas rather than shelve them.” It was a career-changing moment.

One night while watching the film Kingpin, Mobley thought, Wouldn’t it be great to make a funny picture of a classic men’s bowling team from the ’70s? The next morning he began to tackle the idea just as he would for a client.

That meant he needed faces, uniforms, and a bowling alley— and help. He contacted Mark Martin, the president of the United States Bowling Congress, explaining who he was and describing his idea for a portrait of an old-school bowling team.

Martin got the idea immediately and said, “There’s a giant tournament near Detroit—there will be at least 3,000 bowlers there. Let’s go and hand-pick the guys you want!” He also hooked Mobley up with a company that made vintage bowling shirts, and with a traditional bowling alley.

Mobley had 3 hours on location, but he planned to shoot the group in 20 minutes. Beer and pizza helped everyone loosen up beforehand. “I wanted it to be wacky, funny, colorful, and obnoxious,” he says. “I would scream or whatever, and at one point I said, ‘Aaargh!’ to get them to grimace. I was laughing so hard, I had tears rolling down my face.”

Lighting posed a challenge because of the large space. Mobley and his assistant used four Profoto 8 powerpacks and eight Profoto light heads—three in front and above the bowlers (two behind a diffusing scrim, and one at center with a beauty dish), one bouncing off the ceiling, two lighting the back wall, and two aimed across the men’s backs from each side. “This lighting is far from perfect,” he says, “but it’s exactly what I want it to be.”

So he’s still lighting-obsessed, but it’s worth the effort. “These shoots are good for the soul,” he says. “You can walk away from a shoot like this and say, ‘What a great day!’ And people love this picture.”

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Photography is like a muscle that needs plenty of exercise. Slack off, and your creativity may fail you.

Washington, DC-based editorial photographer Stephen Voss (www.stephenvoss.com) learned this by heart early in his career. Dragging himself out of bed at 5 a.m. each day during a workshop he was taking with the nature photographer John Shaw, he mentally (and with a silent grumble) repeated his teacher’s mantra: “Don’t be late for work.”

He has never forgotten that lesson. “People think they can walk out at 2 in the afternoon and get a great shot.” You can’t, Voss insists. “You have to leave while it’s dark and be ready when the light arrives. You need to be at the right place at the right time.”

Sure, that’s work, but “the potential for payoff gets me motivated.”

With that combination of discipline and inspiration, Voss went to the National Mall well before sunrise one morning to work on a self-assignment. He uses personal projects to stay sharp and challenge himself to see things with fresh eyes.

This time out, he decided to wait at the Lincoln Memorial to see if predawn sidelight would illuminate the face of the famous portrait statue.

He was scouting the location when he turned to see a platoon of Marines coming up one side of the reflecting pool. As they began their exercises, Voss sprang into action, too.

Here’s his advice for capturing an unexpected scene like this on the fly:

1. Study The Masters.

Voss draws on the lessons he’s learned from poring over the work of master photojournalists such as Eugene Richards and Paolo Pellegrin. “I often spend 30 minutes looking at a great photo, figuring out where the photographer was, how the light was, what lens was used,” he says. “This creates visual memories that come out in the photos you make.”

2. Zoom With Your Feet.

Back at the Mall, Voss sensed he was out of position when the Marines appeared. Seeing the size of the men against the pool, he realized that his high angle would capture too much of the pool relative to the Washington Monument in the background. He needed a lower angle to include enough of the obelisk to make it recognizable-the photo would be much stronger with the sense of place a landmark provides.

So he ran down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a lower platform. There he found the angle that properly balanced the silhouetted figures with the monument in the distance and its reflection in the pool.

3. Narrow And Compress.

Telephoto lenses bring things closer and crop the field of view. With a 70-200mm f/2.8L Canon EF IS lens on his Canon EOS 5D, Voss zoomed to compose and saw that a looser crop balanced the visual elements best.

Long teles also compress the apparent distance between the foreground and background. Here, this effect enlarged the men while bringing them closer to their surroundings. This created a more proportionate composition, and at the same time strengthened its narrative and emotional impact.

4. Meter For Exposure, But Shoot In Manual.

Voss was concerned that if the highlights got blown out, the ruffled texture of the water would be lost. To ensure proper exposure, he shot in manual mode and used his Canon 5D’s spotmeter on the brightest part of the scene.

He generally uses the center point for both metering and autofocus, then recomposes his frame for the image he wants.

“I’m always on spotmeter-I’m looking for something where I know what the exposure should be,” he says. “Often, that means skin tones, and whether the subject has a lighter or darker complexion. For example, with light skin you open up 1 to 1½ stops” because the meter gives you a reading for middle gray.

For this photo, Voss set exposure to 1/100 sec at f/2.8, ISO 800. That’s 2 stops (that is, +2 EV) brighter than his meter reading, ensuring that the rest of the scene would be exposed correctly, with just enough detail in the highlights. “You learn how much to compensate by experience,” he says. “With digital you can check it before you move on.”

He didn’t have long to check his exposure this time, though: Voss managed to fire off just three frames before the Marines moved on, too.

5. Always Shoot In RAW.

That’s what Voss does to gain more latitude for tweaking the exposure when he processes his images later on-just in case he got it wrong while shooting.

6. Be flexible.

Looking at his final frame, “initially I wasn’t crazy about how the men overlapped, but afterward I really liked it,” Voss says. “I’ve learned that a little mess, a little uncertainty, or some unanswered questions are a good thing. They make a photo more intriguing.”

That’s an argument for not deleting images when you first look at them.

In editing this photo, Voss punched up the orange, pink and blue a little, but otherwise he left it as he shot it.

7. Stay In Shape.

This begins with your eye-and your brain. “You have to see things clearly,” Voss says. “I’ve only gotten anywhere through hard work and a lot of failures-learning the subtleties within light, looking at photographs and figuring out why you like them. Being observant, being open to what’s going on around you. Understanding the way light hits things and, more importantly, how your camera sees things. It’s an ongoing process.”

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Sara Lando has developed a talent for photographically compensating for life’s ups and downs. In fact, the Italian photographer, based in the Veneto region in Bassano del Grappa (saralando.com), got her start in photography by making self-portraits that reflected on her life. “I did it in private as a cheap form of therapy. It was a secret that I didn’t want other people to see,” she says.

Several years ago, Lando injured her wrist and was given a medicinal clay to reduce the swelling. Twice a day, she made mud packs and applied them to her arm, waiting half an hour for the mud to dry and harden completely. Of course it inspired her to create a self-portrait. She first imagined a full-body shot, but she didn’t have enough mud, so a headshot had to do.

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Before shooting, Lando realized that the clay had a greenish tint she didn’t care for; plus, the color of any exposed skin contrasted awkwardly with the mud. A black-and-white image would be the best way to fully achieve the striking effect the photographer envisioned. “I knew what I wanted: a neutral expression, eyes right into the lens, with a gray face fading into a gray wall, and the cracked, hardened mud on my face,” she says. “But I also wanted to take the pictures of the wet clay becoming dry. In the end, I liked those better.”

On an overcast day, she shot the self-portrait on a balcony, using a plaster wall to add a subtle texture to the background. She didn’t have a tripod, so she just stacked some books on a chair and set her Canon EOS 40D with a 50mm f/1.4 EF lens on top.

With the cloud-shrouded sun behind her, Lando placed fabric on the back of the chair as a bounce-card. “The catchlight is weird. From very close, you can see the chair, cloth, and camera strap hanging from the chair.”

The photographer exposed and focused manually, making small adjustments along the way. After 28 frames, the mud began to fall off and she knew it was time to stop.

“Many people have commented on the fact that there is a sort of sadness in the picture,” Lando says. “In fact, my rabbit, who had been my pet for 11 years, had just died. So, yeah, there is a sadness, I guess. As I have said, I take pictures as a form of therapy.”

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Inspired by Impressionist paintings and intrigued by physics, Bengiveno sought out the things we don’t really see unless they’re captured by a camera. She spent time wandering the streets and thinking about space, time, motion, and light. She sought out places she felt encapsulated these elements, and tried to paint the motion and energy she found there.

Although she could have achieved a similar look with software, Bengiveno took a more traditional approach. “To capture the image in the camera feels more like photography, rather than postproduction, which seems more like graphic art to me,” she says. “I love the challenge of the pursuit.”

Here’s how to shoot a masterpiece en plein air, wherever you live:

1. Stalk The Light.

Bengiveno rode buses and subways looking for places to roam around, then returned when the light was right. The magic hours of sunrise and sunset are often best to blend artificial and ambient light. “I watched for things that we take for granted, like shadows, reflections, or spots of reflected light bouncing off a high-rise building,” she says. Other times she took advantage of the weather: City streets become darker yet more reflective after a rainstorm.

2. Seek Out Motion.

Bengiveno was naturally drawn to places where people are on the move. In New York, Grand Central Terminal during rush hour is a prime candidate, and that’s where she shot the image above. She found a spot near the train station where people would pour out onto a street illuminated by signs and other lights. Remaining unobtrusive, she used a handheld Canon EOS 5D with a 16-35mm f/2.8L Canon lens set to 28mm.

3. Shoot Slow And Low.

Blur from both camera motion and subject motion gives the image its painterly feel. The exposure varied from moment to moment, so Bengiveno bracketed her shutter speeds, shooting in shutter-priority mode. She found that exposures between 1/30 and 1/8 sec struck the right balance between form and focus. This is a situation where a low ISO (she used ISO 100) works to your advantage: It requires more light for exposure and makes longer shutter speeds possible. The trick is to capture a moment when the forms suggest motion while maintaining identifiable-though impressionistically blurry-shapes.

4. Go With The Flow.

Bengiveno held the camera steady and shot alongside the tide of commuters. She maintained her general composition and focused on different people that came into the center autofocus point, snapping over and over. “I concentrated on the composition staying in tune with how things were flowing. This can be risky because there isn’t any ‘do-over’- just ‘try-again’ and ‘keep working it.’ I probably crossed the street a dozen times,” she says. “I’ve been composing photos for years and striving to get the image tack-sharp, so it was refreshing to allow for blur and accidents.”

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When you want to dive deep into a subject, there’s nothing like immersion. And fine-art photographer Barbara Cole does just that—she finds inspiration deep in her pool. Based in Toronto, Canada, Cole has long been attracted to the reflections and patterns she sees while swimming. “The water puts me into a meditative state that allows me to think very creatively,” she says. So she wondered how she could “have fun” with a color palette you don’t normally see in water.

This photo, “Magic Carpet,” comes from her Chromatics series, an exploration of human figures combined with the spirit of the color field painting movement. “The water gives me a softer demarcation between colors, the way Mark Rothko blended the edges of color together,” she says. In this photo, “When the water moved, it would distort the edges of the purple on the red, and I thought of the flower-like shapes in Helen Frankenthaler’s work.”

The concept sounds simple, but her productions are anything but. Aside from the risk of working in and around water with electricity (for her lights), she must contend with bad weather and more.

At least her models—often dancers—love the work. “I tell them to imagine that they’re brushes dipped in paint,” she says. “They ‘paint’ a blur of color across other colors.”

Shooting from above, Cole uses a slow shutter speed with a touch of flash. The water’s surface texture is captured along with the model’s body movements. The texture is further enhanced by the light of the sky and reflected clouds.

Cole is a strong believer in doing as much as possible in the camera, thanks to years of experimenting with Polaroid instant films and cameras. Now that she uses Canon digital cameras, she finishes her images in postprocessing by “painting” in subtle enhancements to give the viewer something to recognize. Though she won’t divulge her technique, she “picks out certain things that your eye will be able to focus on so you perceive the image with a certain sharpness.”

After all her effort, viewers are sometimes conflicted by her extremely abstract work. “One guy said photography ‘shouldn’t do this,’” she says. “He felt it was too painterly. I always try to make people stop, wonder, and really enjoy it.”

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