400-40-4 reminder

You remember the student I shot yesterday with split lighting? Well, here he is again, in the same classroom, a few minutes earlier, with the exact same conditions:

Compare the two.

Yesterday’s photo was made with the camera in “studio settings”, which makes indoors ambient go away. This one was shot using the well-known “400-40-4” settings of 400 ISO, 1/40 sec, f/4. The “indoors flash starting point“, if you will.

That makes ordinary indoors light a little brighter than it is (the room was fairly dark), but still about two stops below ordinary lighting; the subject is lit with my flash bounced behind me.

These two settings should be ingrained in your flash brain as good starting points for very different requirements. Study the two and associate each one with a setting.

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Portrait lesson

A quick portrait lesson today.

Here’s student and photographer Emma, in a coaching session on Friday:

For this photo I used a 16-35mm lens, set to 16mm. On my full-frame Canon 1Dx camera, that is a proper wide angle lens – like a 10mm lens on your 5D, 60D, Rebel, D90, or similar.

So first, let’s put paid to the adage that “you cannot make portraits with a wide angle lens”. Yes you can: environmental portraits, where you do not fill the frame with the subject. Distance between subject and photographer is the only important thing, not lens angle. A wide lens gives you that wonderful “wrap around” effect that we love in this type of portrait – the subject in, and as part of, her environment, rather than as a standalone object.

So that out of the way, what about camera settings?

I used the Willems 400-40-4 rule for indoors flash. Since our indoors environments are often roughly the same brightness, a manual setting of 400 ISO, 1/40th second, f/4 will give you a starting point that is ambient minus two stops.

Which is what I want if I want to see the background, but not too brightly: just like Rembrandt, I want to make my subject the “bright pixels”. Because as a reader here you also know Willems’s Dictum: “Bright Pixels Are Sharp Pixels”.  So that means a slightly darker background.

OK,  so that is the background  taken care of: -2 stops, give or take. How about Emma?

I used an off-camera 600EX speedlight, driven by an on-camera 600EX that was set to only command the other flash (using the new radio interface). I equipped the flash with a Honl  photo Traveller 8 softbox for that wonderful light – and that wonderful circular catchlight in Emma’s eyes:

Good, so we are set.

But what about the idea of making it a monochrome image, to stop the red distracting us? In Lightroom, simply select “B/W: in the Develop module:

You may or may not prefer that to the colour image. If you do, then consider dragging the red to the left a little in the B/W module. That means red light will be used less in the conversion, i.e. it will be less bright in the black and white image:

Now we have gotten rid of the red place mat almost entirely, allowing us to concentrate on Emma. That is often a good reason to go to black and white: you get very extensive creative options.

Mission accomplished, in a very simple-to-do shot that is miles beyond a snapshot.

Yes, simple – once you know how (this is what I do, and it is also what I teach).  Invest some time and effort in learning these techniques – you will love what your new photography allow you to do creatively.