Harold Ross

Interview

with Digital Transitions

Describe your approach to Photography— What makes your work unique?

I call my image-making process “Sculpting with Light”. It is light painting, and I use the light to create exceptional depth, dimension, and detail, so I think of it more like sculpture, in a way. Of course, Photography is two dimensional, unlike sculpture, but my goal is to make photographs with the feeling of depth.

I began light painting 30 years ago in my commercial advertising business. I originally started using light painting to solve specific lighting problems that I would run into occasionally while shooting an advertisement. Some challenging areas were challenging to get light into, and I started playing around with small flashlights to solve those problems.

When my assistant and I would look at the polaroid tests, we realized immediately that the light painted areas were more beautiful than the non-light painted areas! I just decided to start light painting everything in the image!

So after that point, every image I made used light painting, and of course, that means that I light painted on film, and in the advertising business, in those days, the film was actually 4×5 and 8×10 transparency film, which is really slide film. Of course, there was no Photoshop and no correction or interpretation of that piece of film…it HAD to be perfect. This was a real challenge!

What caused the greatest impact on your style of shooting?

I learned, when I was attending art school, under the tutelage of Richard Kirstel, that controlling the tonality in a black and white image was incredibly important. Of course, by pushing certain things to the dark side, and bringing other things to the light side, we are making the most important decisions when making a print. A lot of that was done through specific techniques of exposure and development of film, and then of course in the darkroom, by dodging and burning, and by using other methods to control those tonalities to make a gorgeous black and white print.

Of course, today we do this on the computer using Photoshop. I don’t dodge and burn, but I do use masking. As humans…we perceive light things as coming toward us, and dark things as receding. I use that principle a lot in my images To answer your question further, I believe that light is very transformative. That means simply by applying light in a certain way to an object, we can reveal, what I believe to be, is the essence of that object. 

And for me, that is the basic form as well as the details; the surface qualities, the shape, and I hope in some way to record in my imagery the basic essence of what this object is, and by using certain lighting, and of course using certain masking techniques in Photoshop, I feel that I can get this across somehow. It is both a challenge and extremely rewarding to photograph a mundane subject in a very simple way, but to use light to make it into something extraordinary. I’ve been using light painting for 30 years and I am still excited every time I make an image!