Rankin has photographed many of the big names in fashion, music, and society. Known for his portraits of Kate Moss, David Bowie, and Queen Elizabeth II, he is also at the head of a creative agency with dozens of employees. When lockdown hit in March 2020, and Rankin could no longer work in his studio, he set up a camera in a spare room of his country house and started photographing dandelions. Then he started setting them on fire.

You lead a very busy life at your agency. When lockdown hit, was it a big shock?

It was a really big shock. I don’t think I was unusual in my experience of it. I was very anxious. I didn’t think I’d spend a day of work on my own for 25 years. And suddenly, I was on my own, in my spare room, taking photographs of flowers.

I had tried to photograph flowers so many times and had never been really that successful. And then suddenly, they were the only things I could photograph, apart from my wife.

‌Why did you choose dandelions to photograph?

During the lockdown, I first started photographing dead flowers, but I’d been looking at dandelions for so long… I live in the country and they’re everywhere; I’d started to see how many different versions of dandelions there were, and I’d begun to become a little obsessive about them.

I didn’t really think of it as a project, I just thought of how incredible nature is, but at the same time how fragile. [Dandelions] sum that up in a really brilliant way. It’s almost the most efficient natural machine that you could ever make. If you pick one up and blow it and you see the seeds flow, it’s absolutely extraordinary the way it works.

I was two or three weeks into lockdown. I started to look at them and wonder how I could bring them into the photos. I started taking pictures of them as they aged. And then I tried to burn a few and film them. It was really hard to do and make it look good. So I devised a way of shooting them. I was photographing these things at peace. They were very peaceful, almost morbid in a sense, quite celebratory of life, and very reflective of how I was feeling about aging.

The first time I photographed one, and it blew up, it looked like a nuclear explosion. And I just thought, ‘this kind of reflects how my feeling is about the world at the moment.’

On a moral level, I didn’t feel very good about destroying something that’s absolutely perfect in nature. But I did feel really good about how it symbolized so many things, about how I was feeling, and how I think a lot of people were feeling.

‌So this was a kind of liberation for you personally?

Related: Cig Harvey explores grief and death through the quiet beauty of floral life

Yes, through taking the pictures immediately, because there’s something very visceral about it, but also through [creating] the set of images. When you see them big, they’re amazing. Some of them are six feet by four feet.

It was really strange for me to do something so repetitive. I don’t normally do that. I jump around a lot, I am not somebody that is easy to pin down as a photographer because I love photography so much. I decided very early on that having one style of photography would be very limiting. I really get bored doing the same thing. Whereas with this, that was what was amazing about it. I must have photographed 500 of these dandelions. It was almost addictive because it really released something in me.

How exactly did you shoot these photos?

I was in the spare room and I was using natural light. I was shooting on a Canon EOS-1Ds at the highest shutter speed I could get. The ISO was always 100 because I wanted to blow them up really big. I was shooting about 12 frames a second.

When I’d tried doing flowers before, I’d always been trying to put jeopardy into them in some way. So I sometimes had them in vases on the edges of plinths, or I had them leaning up against walls, trying to put drama into them. Within a week, I was thinking about them as people. I was creating characters, I was giving them names, talking to them. That really got me excited because I was taking what I would do in a portrait session and bringing it to these photographs of the flowers.

‌If you take flower photos, you can approach them as you do with portraits because they’re like faces, and you work with lighting in the same way.

That’s exactly what I did. I got that idea really early on. And it was so natural, I didn’t force it. It just came from me not photographing people and suddenly changing what was in front of my camera.

The British call the dandelion seedhead a “clock.” Did you think of that time element when making these photos?

Photographers can’t not think about time. For me, personally, it’s there on my shoulder all the time. I think in fractions of a second and capturing fractions of a second with the intention of having them hopefully live forever.

A photograph is a slice of time, but in these burning dandelions, you have the dynamism of the fire knowing that it started and it’s going to end.

Absolutely, this is what the flowers embodied for me early on: the passing of time. That’s why I started with the almost dying flowers with petals that looked like decrepit skin, because the lifespan of the flower was really obvious to me. I was very aware of it at this moment when all our lives were being turned upside down.

I’ve always been obsessed by flowers, like every photographer, [but] I’d always had a bit of a love for the dying and the drying of a flower. And there’s a beauty in that. When that was happening, they had a pertinence that was underlining what we were all going through. And then I started to think that this is the best representation of how I’m feeling as a human being.

With dandelions, it’s a kind of destruction of time, like a nuclear explosion, like how within an instant something can go from being completely alive to be not alive. And you can see life being lost in the pictures. That’s, a powerful metaphor, but at the same time, it is visually stunning.

See more of Rankin’s work here, and pick up a copy of “An Exploding World” here.

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One of my favorite hashtags on Instagram is #FloralFriday, and it’s safe to say that Paris-based lifestyle photographer Katie Mitchell does it like no other. Follow her and your feed will be overrun with nostalgic, dreamy images of the City of Light—including the florists and flowers that seem to be on every corner. 

I’ve been following Mitchell for what feels like forever—maybe nine years, a significant chunk of my 25-year-old life. She moved to Paris from Australia in 2013 and built a successful wedding photography business, working with the likes of Monique Lhuillier and Jenny Cipoletti of Margo and Me—and that was just the beginning. With the arrival of her two children, she’s transitioned out of the wedding world but continues to document stories: families, love stories, and “branding portraiture,” as she puts it.

Her photographs are the ones that keep me dreaming of my own floral-filled Parisian adventure, and when she started sharing striking, monochromatic flower studies during the pandemic, it opened up a whole new world for me. Some things just demand color, but here I found dazzling, masterful proof that flowers have much more to offer than color permits. 

Pandemic inspiration 

Mitchell told me that her flower studies began in lockdown. In Paris, people were restricted to venturing no further than a kilometer from their homes. Though I left for the countryside with my host family (I too was living in Parias at the start of the pandemic), friends recounted being stopped by police on the street corners who would verify their papers. 

“A local florist gifted me a bunch of almost expired anemones which were too beautiful not to photograph and I just love how they looked in black and white,” Mitchell shares. “I usually gravitate toward color in my work, however, there just seems to be a whole other level of emotion when it comes to flower images being black and white.”

Paris kicks off a blossoming love for flowers 

Her love affair with flowers isn’t new, though. From her native Australia all the way to France, she’s always gravitated towards everything floral. But, it was Paris and its bounty of blooms that really let her work blossom. 

“Having an abundance of flower shops with a wide variety of affordable blooms on my doorstep is when the real ‘love affair’ began!” she says. If you happen to run into her and the season is right, there’s a good bet her arms will be filled with café au lait dahlias and coral peonies—two flowers that have won her over with their exquisite forms and tonal ranges. 

Her setup

Mitchell’s flower portraits pack a serious visual punch, yet her camera and light setup are incredibly straightforward. These days, simplicity is key for the photographer and new mom, who loves both film and digital but primarily works with a Nikon D750 for this series. 

“I’m a Mum of a toddler and a seven-month-old baby so keeping it simple is key,” Mitchell says. “I use a Nikon 105mm f/2.8G macro lens—I throw a piece of black velvet over whatever I can find (often a small chair or baby play gym!), set down a floral pin frog and one flower stem from the bunch I’ve chosen on that occasion, and let the exploration begin!”

Her lighting strategy, though it comes across in the final photographs as elaborate, is hardly embellished. She does everything in her living room by the window, staying true to her love of natural light. Mitchell allows the calendar to guide her subject selections, often choosing something in season that she’s stumbled upon at the florist. 

“I just let light and form lead the way,” she says. And the edits are just as simple. “In terms of my editing process, I shoot in color and convert to black and white in Lightroom during post-processing. Some florals tend to work better in black and white than others so I just feel it out as I go along! I like to keep the editing simple and let the flowers do the talking.”

On balancing creativity and parenthood 

Any artist knows that producing a body of work takes an incredible amount of time and focus. And Mitchell impressively manages to create stunning photography while also juggling two small children.

“Being a full-time Mum and photographer has proven to be altogether beautiful and rather challenging at times,” she says. “Balancing the artistic desire to create alongside sleepless nights and pairs of tiny hands wanting to touch everything is a skill I will likely never perfect!”

Though it’s a balancing act, Mitchell is committed to giving herself a creative outlet—to her, it’s important that her children see her doing something she loves. Though, she often works with a tiny assistant in her lap! 

“It’s become all part of the process and my journey through these early days of motherhood.”

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You’ve seen fashion photos in print and online, but have you ever wondered what—and whom—it takes to make them? We went behind the scenes at a shoot for fashion website Refinery29 to find out.

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Fashion photography is no longer the sole province of glossy magazines, as blogs and retailers produce and publish highly stylized work. Even for a relatively small operation such as the website Refinery29, which combines lifestyle content with a designer clothing store, producing a shoot can require as many as eight pairs of hands. The company recently moved into new digs in Manhattan’s financial district, outfitting an in-house studio for the editorials and advertorials that it regularly commissions.

Invited to shadow their crew for a day, we watched how each team member contributed to produce the final images for the story, which you can find at www.refinery29.com/fashion-fears.

Portraits by: Peter Kolonia

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Our friends at American Photo got the backstory to this eye-catching cover image on the latest issue of The California Sunday Magazine, which launched last year. Canadian artist Amy Friend was commission for the story “Death, Redesigned,” and came up with some very dreamy imagery which doesn’t immediately reveal how it was made. Spoiler: it involved needlework.

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High-end product photography is an interesting sub-genre. Often, shots are meant to look as clean, simple, and elegant as possible, but that can require lots and lots of preparation and setup. In this video, (which was made as a promotional tool for Broncolor who didn’t pay us to show it), Karl Taylor goes through his setup for what ultimately looks like a pretty simple shot of a bottle of wine.

As you can see from the video, you have to pay attention to a ton of different aspects from the color and placement of the lights in the background to the shapes of the highlights on the bottle itself. This kind of photography definitely isn’t my strong suit so it’s always fascinating for me to watch people who truly understand the process.

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The 119-year-old New York Times Magazine redesigned and relaunched this past weekend with four dynamic covers to their “Global” themed issue. Their team commissioned illustrations from photographers Matthew Pillsbury, Hannah Whitaker, Sara Cwynar, and the duo Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari “based on the idea of chaos in the world, and how this is something we have all learned to live with,” says design director Gail Bichler. For Pillsbury, known by his large-format long-exposures of crowded public spaces, shooting an inanimate object in a studio-like environment was a first. We asked him exactly how he made the chosen photo which conveys “the speed at which our world is changing.”

The image was shot in my basement on a black table using a Phase One IQ260. I ran long exposures and would spin the globe/globes in front of the camera using only their own light (they were all old school lit globes). I did over 300 exposures which for me is an incredibly large amount. By comparison when I used to shoot with the 8×10 I would only take a dozen at the very most. For the image that was selected, I used three different globes so that it was not only the spinning/stopping that was captured but an actual overlay of different maps. It very much felt like low budget sci-fi movie making where the behind the scenes looked totally ridiculous but the finished effect was quite surprising. The process was similar to my usual methods in that I used only the available light and how the camera captures movement over a long exposure but it felt quite different since I was shooting a single object without any people in the frame in what approximated a studio environment which is something I have never done.

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Want to get serious about the lighting you take on location? You’ll quickly learn the meaning of the word “compromise.” Your lights should be extraordinarily compact, with an ample set of light-modifying accessories that are equally packable. Yet they must have as many features and almost as much power as their heavier, studio-bound brethren. Since you may ultimately lug these lights to the ends of the earth, you want them to be rugged enough to suffer abuse, but also to weigh as little as possible and to be simple to operate.

The Mini Kit/Backpack Kit

There’s more: Your location kits should offer the option of being battery-operable—not yet a given today. Not even the convenient Multiblitz backpack kit with two strobes, stands, and umbrellas can be battery-powered.

Of course, shoe-mount lighting remains an option, but to obtain bright enough output to do battle with the sun in strongly backlit scenes, you might need a case full of shoe-mounters, plus as many batteries, cables, and wireless flash triggers to sync the units. We prefer a single 300 Ws strobe to a handful of shoe-mount flashes.

The Kit That Fits in a Trunk

Of all today’s backpackable lighting options, the photographers we’ve spoken with agree that the Elinchrom Ranger Quadra juggles all these compromising qualities best. Scottish photographer Niall Benvie (niallbenvie.photoshelter.com), who captured the moth shown here, often uses them (though not for this photo).

The Santa Fe adventure photographer Michael Clark is also a convert (www.michaelclarkphoto.com). His blog/newsletter is crammed with Quadra-lit scenes. “I carry two complete Quadra setups (two packs and two heads) along with wireless triggers (Skyports or PocketWizards), reflectors, a shoot-through umbrella, a lightweight stand and even a small Elinchrom softbox with a grid all in a Lowepro Vertex 300 backpack,” he says. “I can also usually squeeze a camera body and a few lenses in there, too. It makes for a very versatile and portable setup.”

What do we like best? You can keep the Quadra kit packed and ready to go for spur-of-the-moment photo shoots.

The next step for strobe-loving photographers on the go is graduating to a studio and lighting kit that can be carried in an automobile trunk or a van. The additional gear this lets you bring on location can be liberating and will open up numerous lighting possibilities for portraits and interior architecture.

Jeff Green (jeffgreenphoto.com), who made this view of a Las Vegas restaurant’s private dining room, knew that he would need numerous spotlights to open up shadows and draw viewers’ eyes to the room’s most interesting features.

Green uses Arri hot lights exclusively for this type of location lighting, and carries everything needed to the site in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“I usually take three to four cases and a folding cart,” he explains. “Hot lights go in hard-walled Pelican cases, while the strobes and softboxes go in a large Tamrac rolling case.”

Continuous light sources like his Arris let you see their effects as you set up, and are a must for shooting video indoors. But hot lights, of course, generate a lot of heat. That is one reason that many location shooters prefer cooler and easier-to-handle strobe lighting.

The Stow at Home Studio

The good news? You can choose from dozens of location strobe kits, all of which would easily fit in a trunk. One of our favorites is the Multiblitz GlamKit 2 based on a Profilux Plus strobe like the one on our opening page. This $1,899 (direct) kit includes the strobe, a portable battery, trolley, an umbrella/softbox, stand, and case.

An important consideration for hauling lights around in your car: Protecting them. News and wedding shooters often line their trunks with foam padding, adding foam walls to create sections that separate grip (with little protection), lighting gear, and cameras (with lots of protection).

Semi-pro photographers who are serious about lighting and prefer studio to location work typically fall into two groups: Some want studio lighting that they can permanently set up in a dedicated bedroom or basement. Others—and we imagine this includes most of you—want a more temporary lighting solution, one that can be folded up compactly and conveniently slipped into a hall or bedroom closet.

You might be shooting tabletop products or crafts for online auctions or catalogues, taking portraits of children or pets, or selling headshots to actors. But if you’re just starting to get serious about lighting, and aren’t yet sure how much of your home—or budget—to dedicate to gear, there are some important factors to consider.

First, tailor your lighting purchases to suit your subjects. For a closet-based product studio, we like the compact proportions of easily stored LED lights, for example. They’re cool-operating, are a pleasure to work around, and their continuous output lets you evaluate your lighting effects as you work. LEDs are especially well-suited to small and stationary subjects such as these sunglasses.

But if you work with active subjects—young children or pets, for example—you will need the action-stopping capability of instantaneous studio strobes. If action-freezing is important, shop for strobes with extremely short flash durations, such as the 1/6500 sec White Lighting X-Series monolights (paulcbuff.com/whitelightning.php).

The other crucial consideration is, of course, the size of your storage space. In closet-stowed lighting setups, compact and collapsible products are musts. We prefer small, four-section lightstands over stands that have three-section legs, for example, because they fold more compactly.

To make the most of that closet space, New York-based pro Brian Klutch, who shot these sunglasses (brianklutch.com), also recommends hard-sided cases for their stackability.

The Bedroom Studio Kit

The good news? Almost every lighting tool under the sun is available in a compact, collapsible closet-storable version. Examples range from Chimera’s collapsible beauty dish (chimeralighting.com; $230, street) to the inflatable EPS El Macho Photo Studio (www.massieraindustries.com; from $1,899, street). This automatically inflates from suitcase-sized to a weather-resistant 15x11x9-foot studio you can set up in your backyard in minutes.

You will find many benefits to setting up a dedicated studio at home. Alas, few of us enjoy the luxury of a spare bedroom, basement, or garage that can be converted to a full-time, permanent photography studio.

Still, photographer Carol Weinberg did, and she reaped this wonderful portrait as a result. If this is something you’ve considered—and the room is free—you’ll enjoy many advantages.

For one thing, you can purchase more durable lights. Because the gear you buy for a permanent home studio will probably stay put, its size and weight won’t have the importance they do for location kits. This lets you invest in heavier, more solidly built equipment that could last a lifetime.

With your lights permanently in place, you won’t have to dedicate large swaths of time to setting up and breaking them down. That leaves you considerably more hours for shooting and creative exploration. Similarly, you can shoot whenever the mood strikes.

Having full control over the studio gives you the ability not just to place and store your lighting tools exactly where they feel right to you, but to customize the whole room. If you enjoy using contrasty, dramatic lighting for your subjects, paint the walls black. If you like a softer, more suffused, diffused light, paint them white. Can’t decide? Paint them a neutral gray. A large, heavy frame will let you hang a variety of backdrops, including big rolls of seamless paper.

The ability to work, session after session, with the same lighting equipment deployed in the same way, gives you the luxury of long-term continuity. This can make for a great learning opportunity that photographers who must pack up after every shoot never get to experience.

Explore all the effects your lights are capable of creating. Because the setup is permanent, you can work for a few hours, experimenting with small, incremental changes in light placement and power. After a shoot, you can leave everything in place and later pick up your work exactly where you left off.

This strategy allows for trial-and-error experimentation over long periods of time. For many of us that is the key to lighting—and photographic—success.

Besides, nothing shows your family, friends, and prospective clients that you are truly serious about photography than installing a fully dedicated studio in your home. Now go clear out that garage!

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It didn’t start out that way. In the beginning, I traveled alone. I carried my equipment, and if I used a light, I would set it up myself. Some people took the results as a style. A writer for American Photographer once said that the umbrella and strobe reflected in the mirror in my portrait of Jimmy Carter was a “skillfully implemented device.” As I recall, I walked into the room holding the light and set it down and plugged it in and started taking pictures. I didn’t think about it.

CAMERAS

My first camera was a Minolta SR-T 101. It came with a 55mm lens. Working with that lens was a good learning experience. Many of the other students at the San Francisco Art Institute used 35mm lenses. You can be a little sloppy with a wide-angle lens. The 55mm made me very aware of what I was putting in the frame. When I decided I was serious about photography, I reluctantly sold the Minolta and bought a Nikon F with a 35mm lens.

In the early days, Rolling Stone was printed on cheap paper in an 11×17-inch format and distributed folded over. The cover image was an 8½x11-inch vertical. The format of the magazine became squarer after 1978, and I decided to try a Hasselblad for the covers. Most of the pictures for the inside were still shot with a Nikon because the Hasselblad seemed unrealistically sharp. The bigger negative made for a handsomer image, but you couldn’t convey the sense that you were simply in a room taking a picture. Combined with my over-lighting, the work got further away from natural. Most of the early conceptual pictures were taken with the Hasselblad.

In the mid-1980s I began using a Mamiya RZ67, which I handled like a 35mm camera. When I began shooting digitally, I put a digital back on my Mamiya. This was not ideal, since you couldn’t use the full frame. And the camera body and back were hard to handle. The camera’s processing time made shooting very slow. I experimented with a digital SLR, a Canon, when I photographed Mary J Blige for the Gap and wanted to shoot her singing. There was going to be a lot of movement, and I needed a camera with a faster shooting speed. When I looked at the files and realized they were perfectly usable, I decided, What the heck, and stopped using the medium-format camera for the time being.

LIGHTS

Helmut Newton used to tell me that I should throw away my strobes. Helmut was a master of natural light. He’s the only photographer I’ve known who could shoot in twelve-noon light. He used it to his advantage-those hard shadows, the contrast.

Natural light is the greatest teacher. You place the strobe so that it follows the direction of the natural light. Adding strobe to the natural light outside makes a daylight studio. When you’re working inside, you try to remember what natural light looks like and see if you can re-create it. I’ve never been able to make strobe light look as beautiful as natural light.

My key light is most often a single strobe. A single umbrella. I like the simplicity of that. The strobe emphasizes the direction of the light and illuminates the subject’s face. The rest of the picture can be lit with natural light. But you have to be prepared to use a backup fill light, which comes from the direction of the camera.

With digital cameras, you can shoot at higher ISOs, and you use less light. I’ve pared down the list of things we take on a shoot. I can go out with two battery packs and two small Profoto umbrellas.

LIGHT METERS

A light meter is only a guide. It shouldn’t be used literally. When I toned down the strobe, we made it even with the natural light rather than being a stop over. Then we went a stop or two under the natural light. I liked the way things looked when they were barely lit. The darker pictures seemed refined, mysterious.

TRIPODS

The original tripod is my two legs. Being able to move, to go up and down, is an important part of my work. When the camera is put on a tripod, it looks different than when the camera is held in your hands. My assistants will set up a tripod right next to me, and I won’t use it. With a tripod, you have a tendency to straighten everything out. With your body, you unconsciously tilt yourself in. You’re not coming straight-on.

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Photographers are no stranger to jerry-rigging gear to save a buck (or a thousand) and getting that perfect shot when a piece of equipment breaks. From adjusting flashes and lens hoods, to building portable studio-sized lightboxes, DIY is a staple of the craft.

And, for the enthusiasts and burgeoning professionals who want to create studio quality images, but don’t have the physical studio or equipment, Cooperative of Photography has you covered. With their new DIY video on using household objects to create a home studio, you can learn some tricks on photographing different objects without leaving the comfort of your home or breaking the bank.

From Legos to bikes, COOPH demonstrates how to turn the likes of parchment paper into a light diffuser, stationery paper into a backdrop and adjusting your household lamps into studio stand-ins among other quick and thrifty fixes.

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Although there was plenty to gripe about after this year’s Best Picture mix-up during the Oscars, we can all agree that Mark Seliger‘s intimate portraits of the night’s big winners are as good as ever.

In what has now become an annual tradition, portrait photographer Mark Seliger teamed up with Instagram and Vanity Fair to capture some excellent portraits during the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

Check out the buildout of his set in the hyper lapse video below.

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These were some of our favorite looks from the night. What were yours?

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