Using that philosophy as a touchstone, Kernan has built an engaging, yet deceptively subtle style of lighting in which he believes light should be the narrator--but not the storyline--of his images. "In any photograph there is the story and then there is the language that you choose to tell it in; you can blurt it out or you can tell it in a crafted way where things are revealed--if you want them to be revealed," he explains. "And lighting is, I think, the vernacular, it's the syntax and the poetry of the story you're telling--it's how we tell the story."

Using a technique that he describes as a dynamic "modulating" of light, his goal, he says, is to take the eye on a guided tour--however subliminal--through a scene. "What I always try to do is break up light into controllable shafts, so to speak," he explains. "I try to keep the eye moving with light. I try to get people to notice one thing, then notice something else."

In many ways, Kernan's lighting provides an almost theatrical presentation: not surprising considering the fact that his first exposure to light came in the theater. Immediately after college he joined the stage crew of the fledgling Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut and within "just a show or two" he was doing all of the lighting. "There I was at 22 years old with hundreds of lights that I could do anything I wanted with," he recalls. The possibilities of what light could do to a person standing on a stage were an instant buzz: "I realized that you could give them enormous stature, you could make them seem distant, you could make them seem hot or cold--and you could create incredible planes of depth." He also discovered that by manipulating light, he could lead the eye not only where he wanted it to go, but how long it lingered there. "You could control how long it stayed on things and exactly where it went next," he says. "It was wild!"

Kernan's real dream though was to be the next Eugene Smith and work for the big pj weeklies of the day like Look and Life . He eventually shot for both of them--though both went under almost immediately after (a situation he disclaims any responsibility for). "Suddenly there were 50 guys from Life and Look on the streets with 20 years of tear sheets--who was going to hire me?"

Kernan turned to commercial work and has since enjoyed a virtually perpetual work flow: "I got so lucky, or so stupid, I had this delusion that it was going to be easy for me to get work...and on that delusion I've cruised along forever." During the early years he split time between Connecticut and New York and eventually settled in the small seaside town of Stony Creek in the early 1980's.

Today he pursues two streams of his craft simultaneously: about 80- to 90-percent of his time is spent shooting an arduous commercial schedule, both on location and in the studio, for an impressive clientele that includes: Tropicana, Strathmore Paper, Polaroid, Heublien, IBM Credit, GE, Exposures, Chemical Bank, Pratt & Whitney, People's Bank and both the New York and American Stock Exchanges. (He has had the same rep--Molly Birenbaum--for more than 20 years.) What's left of his time he spends on a series of diverse personal projects, including a black and white portraiture series shot in Mexico and another series of still life images that feature antique books [see: PDN TK] and other found objects that have been compared to the box constructions of artist Joseph Cornell.

PDN: Outside of your theater experience, how did you learn to light?

Kernan: When I started there was no real option to study anything, there were no workshops; I guess I could have gone and worked with a photographer and picked up things that way, but I didn't. I actually just looked at people's work all the time and asked myself 'How did they do this? How did they do that?' I made a series of bad mistakes and missteps, but over time I accumulated a working method of breaking things down into components and solving them one at a time. So I'm basically self taught--with a lot of good thievery from people who were much better than I was.

PDN: What is the essence of learning how to light?

Kernan: The first thing you have to do is see light. I've taught workshops for many years and one of the first assignments that I always give to people is to go out and take a picture in which light is the principle subject. Photographers, all of us, and I include myself, are so enslaved by subject in a way: 'What is this a picture of?' But I don't think you can work with lighting if you can't see light.

PDN: Have you ever really blown the lighting on a shot?

Kernan: I'll tell you a funny story. The first big lighting number that I ever had to do was for this company that made electrical fittings. They had this interesting idea, they wanted to put millions of them around on a factory floor and have these three guys standing in a great sea of these things. They hired me--not knowing that I had no idea how to do it!

I got the whole thing set up and lit it; I knew it had to be a little soft, so I put lights through gauze and stuff all over the place. Then they put me up in a fork lift with a borrowed Hasselblad and I took my readings. What I didn't know was that a Hasselblad has two shutters: my reading was for a half-second exposure and that's what I set, but I was taking my finger off of the first shutter after about a quarter or an eighth of a second. The whole thing came out like one to three stops underexposed. When I saw the film I thought 'Oh damn, there is nothing I can do about that! I'll just have to go to the client and admit it.' I even practiced my speech, how I'm going to re-shoot the whole thing at my expense. But when I walked in and handed the film to the art director and was just about to launch into my speech, he looked up and said 'Love the darkness!' And I said 'You like that?' I changed my speech really quick!

PDN: Is there a particular look or feel that you're after with your lighting?

Kernan: My original lighting, which wasn't very good, was sort of "one note" lighting--it came from one direction, it fell across something and that was it. More and more as I began to look at things, and not so much photography, but paintings and rooms with pretty light in them, I realized that there is a lot of modulation and dynamic energy going on even in simple lighting--and that that's what makes light interesting. So increasingly my light has become something that keeps changing within an image, something that modulates as you look at it; it has moved away from flatness. One way that I do this is to break things up into planes: What is near? What is far? Farthest? And then I try to control those areas separately.

PDN: And what is the goal of modulating the light in a particular scene?

Kernan: In Stephen Spielberg's movie Amastad, there is this incredible scene that probably only a lighting person would ever notice. It's the big scene where John Adams gives his great speech; in it, he walks around this set and he moves in very small increments, but the light changes dramatically so that as he looks this way or that way or moves his head slightly, there are two and three-stop changes in these little "micro lightings." It's vibrant lighting, it's like the equivalent of a tremolo in the voice or a violin string; it doesn't just come out, it modulates. There is variety even in the smallest increment. So that's what I'm trying to create: the lighting should move, or shimmer in some way as your eye moves around in it.

PDN: In a lot of your location work, like the shot of the carousel artist, you're able to create this very "found" lighting look--as if you stumbled upon this perfect vision. How do you create such a natural look?

Kernan: Well, in that case, the first thing I did was stumble into the room and look at the light and think 'Oh, man, this is awful!--what am I going to do?' There were a lot of great elements in there: there were all these incredible artifacts around, there was a wonderful looking guy, there was an amazing painting in the background. Unfortunately, this jumbled and fascinating place just happened to have big fluorescent lights above it all--and so it was green and horrible.

But there were these big windows in the building and I wondered what would happen if we turned off all of the lights--how would the scene look?. That's often the best place to start, just shut off everything and see what's coming in the window. One thought would have been to drag everything in the shot over to a north-facing window, but we couldn't do that, so we had to, in effect, drag the window over to the set by setting up light banks. But that one [shot] working is based on dozens that don't or that almost did or pieces of shots that worked or didn't. That shot has it's roots in a hundred other shots.

PDN: Do you always go to preview locations before you go to shoot them?

Kernan: I love to be able to go up the day before. I can't think about a space, I have to see it and suddenly I can light it in my head.

PDN: In general is product work more stifling creatively than more conceptual still lifes or location work?

Kernan: One of the things that can be stifling in product work is that the product has to look in pictures like it looks on the box or when they [the customer] get it. In a sense you're more constrained because the colors have to be accurate, or if you're going to let color go in some way, you have to at least give them a pretty good idea of what it's going to look like.

PDN: What is the most difficult challenge you face in lighting still lifes?

Kernan: The hardest thing is when there is just no content. I guess I'm a fantasist, I also write, I write fiction, and I love to pull stories out of myself. It makes photography easier for me when there is some hint of a little story that I can start with. In the end you want someone to look at your photograph and have a story available to them--a story they can follow.

Lighting is part of the narrative. It's this: there is the story and then there is the language that you choose to tell it in; you can blurt it out or you can tell it in a crafted way where things are revealed if you want them to be revealed. Lighting is, I think, the vernacular, it's the syntax and the poetry of the story you're telling--it's how we tell the story.

PDN: What is the worst thing that clients ask for when it comes to lighting?

Kernan: The worst thing is when they ask me to do something they've seen somewhere else--without understanding that it may or may not be appropriate. So much of commercial work is driven by "style" or a certain "look" and once a look gets moving around, people just want that look without understanding that it may not be appropriate or that it's been beaten to death.

PDN: You've been shooting the Exposures catalog for a number of years. Is your imagination stifled by having to keep a certain continuity when you're photographing an entire catalog?

Kernan: Exposures has been interesting. They sell all sorts of picture frames and related products. When we first started doing it about eight or nine years ago, it was very successful and so they weren't really open to having a photographer say, 'Let's change everything!' But rather recently we were able to start to change the way it looks and try and make it look more spontaneous. They were willing to see things, say, a little out of focus at one corner, or not lit evenly all the way across. We had never really planned that the look would change, but they said, 'Let's just try something' and so we shot some film and the president loved it. The whole book completely turned around; there was a transition where the new stuff and the old stuff didn't go together all that well. It turned out in that case that you can be inhibited by an old look, but when they decided they wanted change, it went very quickly.

PDN: Do you work mainly in strobes or hot lights--or both?

Kernan: We use mainly strobes. In some circumstances we'll add other sources; in the shot of the jet engine we added a light painter.

PDN: What particular lighting-painting device did you use?

Kernan: It was a Hosemaster.

PDN: What types of shots do you use the Hosemaster for?

Kernan: I like to use it in such a way that you would never look at it and say 'Hosemaster.' In the shot of the engine and the sunflower, both halves were both light-painted to some degree. The sunflower to me had to look almost like a cartoon with almost no modeling; I wanted to flatten it out, to keep give it shape but still to flatten the light out a little bit in various specific places, so I used the Hosemaster to fill shadows.

PDN: What specific strobes are you using?

Kernan: We have some old Normans, which are about the first strobes I ever had and we have some Profoto stuff, which we've been tending towards because of it's versatility. Also, at a certain point they were the only people making a big focusing spot that you could put 4800 watt-seconds through; so I got one and once you have one, you need another...and that's the beginning! We have five or six Profoto packs with various heads and they range over time--we've had some Pro 3's and some Pro 5's, we have some Acutes. We haven't gotten the Pro 6 yet because the dollar isn't strong enough to afford one easily, but at a certain point we'll get into those too. [Writer's Note: I need to check exact names of above lighting heads.]

PDN: Why did you choose strobes over hot lights?

Kernan: It's like heroin I guess--you buy one and you're hooked! But probably because strobes were around a lot when I was starting. I have subsequently used hot lights and I've used HMI and I like them a lot, but you can get an awful lot of control form high to low power on a strobe Also, with strobes, you can cut the power down with just a click, whereas if you're doing that with a hot light you're throwing things in front of the lights that burn your fingers and melting things and you end up with puddles of plastic on the floor. Strobe is very versatile if you're working quickly.

PDN: What type of heads do you use most often? Softlights? Spots?

Kernan: We use a lot of focusing spots, not so much to focus, because you don't necessarily see the edge, they are just used to bring the eye someplace. One of the things that I like about focusing spots too is that if you put a break-up [cookie] in and defocus it, then the light is no longer flat; it not only changes intensity, it changes color slightly.

PDN: What do you mean the light is changing color?

Kernan: The front lens of a focusing spots is basically a very cheap low-grade lens, so if you throw it out of focus it fringes. So if you throw the light out of focus, suddenly a line not only goes from light-to-dark, but it will go from warm to cool. You have to throw it out far enough so that, again, people won't look at it and say 'Oh, look at that color.' Film magnifies things anyway, so you're not only changing contrast, but you're changing color contrast too.

PDN: So you're getting a rainbow-type fringing but it's so far out of focus that you it becomes a gentle color gradation?

Kernan: Exactly and if anybody noticed it, it would fail.

PDN: Do you think that, for photographers who are just starting out or just finding their own light, that going beyond the parameters of film and reproduction is a worthwhile experiment?

Kernan: What I would say is that you can't go past it if you don't know what you're going past; it's like a musician having to sit down and learn keys and notes and knowing that when his finger goes here or there this sound will occur. Once you know that you can forget about it and you're free to make music and bend it. Once you know things about light, you know how far over the line you can go. At what point does something get "glowy" and at what point after that does it just get blank? At what point does something get interestingly dark--just before it turns to mud? You have to find the line not only in your eye, but then you know where the line is with film--and in reproduction where the line is.

PDN: Has there been a particular artist or another photographer that inspired your love of lighting?

Kernan: Yes, with regard to lighting I would say Irving Penn. He was one of my early Gods and I go back and revisit him periodically and when I do, I realize--particularly in his portrait work--how willing he is both to bring things under control and then let them go and be very simple.

PDN: Do you have any lighting secrets that you don't like to share?

Kernan: No, anything that I have or do is totally available to everybody and there is really not much that hasn't been done. What can you even have? A little box of torn up reflector cards, that's my special magic! Really, there is no thing --a lot of the stuff that I use either puts light there or takes it away and how you combine those two is how you light things. Again, it's just like music where something is louder or softer and one sound comes forward and then other things come forward and my job is to control the timing with which that happens. Someone once asked Harold Edgerton, who was the father of strobe lighting: 'How do you protect your ideas?' And he said, 'It's very easy, I tell everybody everything.' If all you've got is that technique and feel you need to protect it, then you really haven't got much. It's vision and imagination, it's not technique; if all you have is technique, you're poor.

PHOTO #1: Fibre Optics on Globe

This richly colored conceptual still life was assigned by the Monadnock Paper Company to illustrate how well their press sheets were able to take strong colors.

Subject matter was left up to the photographer and the designer, Jeff Pollard. "The principle idea was that it had to be colorful," says Kernan "and what I had to bring to it was something energetic and interesting." After picking through his "compost heap" of studio props, the photographer settled on this arrangement of a glass globe (it's about four inches in diameter) and a bundle of fibre optic strands. The shot he was after, says Kernan, was something that was abstract enough so that it wasn't about a particular subject, but something that "delighted and moved" the eye.

"To me the most interesting part of this shot," says Kernan "is that everything that's in the shot--the globe, the fibre optics, the plexi sheet that it's sitting on and the Translume behind it--is either translucent, transparent or reflective. It's all completely colorless and if you put a light through it or on it, it just passes it through." How the objects in the shot modify light, he says, defines how the objects become visible.

Kernan placed the globe on a sheet of black Plexiglass and used a sheet of white Translume for the rear of the set. The impression of the globe floating in space was created by keeping the depth of field limited to blur the line between background and tabletop. The set was lit by two basic lighting units: the fibre optics (which run out of the shot to the left of the glove) were illuminated by attaching them to a Hosemaster colored with a heavy red gel and the main light of the shot, a focusing Profoto spot (on a Profoto 4800 pack at 2400 watt seconds) set behind the translume

The tough part, says Kernan, was to get the light to pass through the glass in an interesting way while still creating an interesting light shape in the background. Creating that effect was a matter of experimenting with changes in the distance of the light from the Translume--and the distance from the Translume to the globe. "I knew we could make this nice circle of light around the globe in the background," he explains, "but we didn't know what would happen in the globe and mercifully what happened is that nice circle of bright light." Another key to the success of the shot, he says, is the contrast of both the bright and dark blue circles of light within the globe itself that makes the shot. "Without that secondary dark circle in the globe it would have been a much blander shot," he says.

A small circle of pink light visible at the lower portion of the globe was created by bringing a single strand of fibre optic so close to the lens that it went out of focus.

The shot was made on a Fuji GX680 camera using a 100 mm lens. A base exposure was made with one pop of the strobe at f/5.6 and then brackets (from one to four seconds) were made to adjust exposures of the fibre optics. It was shot on Kodak Ektachrome (EPP) film.

This shot of a carousel horse restoration artist was made in Bristol, Connecticut for Cigna and was part of a print campaign advertising small business insurance. The shot was art directed by Wayne Waarama, then an art director for Keiler Advertising.

The atmosphere of the location, says Kernan, was fascinating: "We walked in and there was incredible collection of stuff--brushes out on the bench and shellack spilled and patina everywhere." The lighting though was horrible. "There was a window, but it was about 200-feet away and we really had no option to move the stuff to the window," he recalls. Instead they opted to bring the windows--in the form of a bank of soft boxes--to the subject. "First we created a general window light with three 4 x 6-foot Chimera light banks (each powered by a separate Profoto pack) placed in a straight line to the right of the camera," he explains.

In effect, he says, that created a 6 x 12-foot wall of light. In order to have the light fall-off slightly from front to rear, and to avoid burning out the painting in the background, the front two Profoto packs were set at 150 watt-seconds each and the rear-most one was set at half that power. To accent the main subject, Kernan placed a single gridded medium Chimera soft box, powered by a Profoto pack set at 2400 watt-seconds directly in front of the rear-most bank. Some of that light from that box is also hitting the fronts of the horses in the left of the shot. One additional light, a small gridded Chimera box, was placed above and to the left of the camera (set at about 1200 watt seconds) and aimed right into the subject's face. "All of the lights are being separately controlled," says Kernan "so that once we laid down the base light and the side shaft on him, then we played with the power on the front light so that we're just bringing some detail into his face." Kernan also used a variety of warming techniques. Overall warmth was introduced by placing an 81B filter over the lens and using various orange Rosco gels over the heads in the various soft boxes. He also let the mirrored light burn in to add warmth to the bench area. "I knew that little tungsten kick would just be gorgeous," he recalls. The final element of atmosphere,was created with a Rosco fog machine. "The fog sort of knits everything together in an interesting way, so you're no longer struck by how sharp everything is."

The shot was made on with a Hasselblad using a 80 mm lens on Fuji RDP film. Exposure was done at f/8 1/2 with one pop after Polaroid tests.

"This was an incredibly cool series that we got to do for a company called Rowenta who make small appliances," says Kernan of the assignment that included this shot of a Sumo wrestler balancing on a small scale. "The concept was to create a series of shots of people using things that are completely inappropriate--but they're really happy customers." The shot was one of twelve used in a calendar (one of the other shots in the series was a Bhuddist monk using hair dryer). The series was art directed by Alan Shapiro.

A decision was made early in the process to use the same grey background in all twelve shots, but, says Kernan, it was important to make the background as elegant and interesting as possible. "I wanted to spend as much time on the background as most people spend on the foreground," he recalls. "We spent hours draping the backdrop before each shot while people were getting made up."

In order to light background and subject separately, Kernan set up a series of three banks to the right of the camera. A medium gridded Chimera set at 2400 watt seconds and mounted vertically was positioned closest to the camera and aimed so that it's spread was limited to lighting the wrestler from top to bottom. Next, a small gridded Chimera (at about 1200 watt seconds less power) hung vertically, was aimed just at the backdrop. The main purpose of that backdrop light he says to create a glow in the background--to focus the eye in the area of the figure. "By using a totally separate light for the background, we could fine tune it below his feet or above his head--wherever we wanted it," he says. Finally, a large Chimera (without grid and set significantly lower at about 150 watt seconds) was placed between the two smaller lights (and slightly behind the front-most light one) and aimed to gently soften the edges of the light wrapping around the face of the wrestler and in the folds of the back drop

Kernan captured the shot with a Hasselblad with an 80 mm lens; exposure was at f/11 on Fuji RDP.

To create this interesting image pair, Kernan had to take two stunningly disparate subjects--a jet engine and a sunflower--and find a method to light them so that the two halves would share a feeling of visual unity between them. The shot was part of a series done for a Pratt & Whitney print campaign and was conceived and art directed by Su Strawderman for the Mintz and Hoke agency.

The effect that Kernan was after was of a single source of light coming through the engine from behind. The problem was finding a way to get light behind the large turbine blades. "As it turns out, behind the fans of an engine, there is all this stuff," he says. "It's not open in there so if you just shot a light at the back of the engine nothing would come through." With no way to get light through from behind the engine, the photographer began disassembling three strobe heads (each powered by a 2400 watt-second Profoto pack set at full power) and then snaking the bare heads into the engine casing. To prevent three separate hot spots, he placed diffused over the lens to kind of "knit" the light together.

The next step was to light the front of the engine. To provide an even overall light over the front, Kernan hung a large Chimera bank near the camera and aimed down at the engine. He then used a Hosemaster to light-paint the front--both to create a highlight on the "hub" of the engine and to go around each blade and "sculpt' their shape. "The Hosemaster let me get in a put highlights right in where I wanted them," he says. The toughest part of exposing film, says the photographer, was finding a balance between the strobe exposure and the light-painting. Bracketing both strobe and Hose became the key. "We basically had to set up a matrix where for each back exposure, there would be three of four front exposure variations."

The sunflower was photographed by Kernan in his studio. "The situation with the sunflower was that it had to look big and it had to look cartoony in a way," he says. To provide color in the background, he first lit the area behind the flower by bouncing a focusing spot with a light blue gel off of a light blue paper. The flower itself was lit with an extra-small Chimera box; it's front masked down to a light area of about eight by eight inches. "At that point it look alright, but it didn't look the same at the engine," he explains. To give the two a "closer family resemblance" he then took a Hosemaster and filled shadows on the petals so that the flower still had modeling, but was kind of shadowless. Both halves of the pairing were shot were with a 4 x 5-inch Sinar camera and a 150 mm Nikkor lens on Kodak Ektachrome (EPP) film.