I taught at a local college today. A real pleasure, teaching bright young enthusiasts.
However, due to scheduling the two hour lecture turned into a barely one-hour lecture. This forced me to take some shortcuts. I taught some fast hands-on lessons. One was how to shoot indoors with a bounced on-camera flash. The other lesson was all about studio light.
“Studio? But surely, Michael, that takes a lot of time”, I hear you say.
Not necessarily.
- Set the cameras to 100 ISO, 1/125th second, f/8.
- Attach a sending Pocketwizard to the camera.
- Put up one strobe on a light stand.
- Attach a receiving Pocketwizard to it.
- Fire into an umbrella (I could not find a white shoot-through umbrella quickly).
- Set it up 45 degrees to the side of your subject, 45 degrees up.
- Fire and meter the light using a light meter. Adjust light until the meter reads f/8.
- add a reflector on the opposite side to bounce back a little light.
What does that get me?
This:
Nice light, nice catch light. So I handed the Pocketwizards to the students,one by one. They all got similar shots.
Why did I say I would have preferred a shoot through umbrella? Here’s why:
See the flash in the umbrella? If we had shot through, no flash would have been visible.
But that’s a minor quibble. Nice portrait, took only a minute or two.
