..questions. Time for another Q&A round: let me have your questions about any aspect of photography, and I will answer them here in the next little while.
Remember: as I often remind students, there are no stupid questions.
…with a hand, if you want a foreground object to light up with your flash, when for effect the background needs to be darker. Like just now in The Distillery District in Toronto:
Another snap:
Again, using flash for lighting up the foreground, while exposing down to saturate the background on a bright day around noon. Sure you can take pictures at mid-day.
Here’s the workshop I taught last week in Phoenix, AZ, with David Honl, at Studio Moirae in Phoenix, AZ:
I like teaching small, intimate workshops like that, and Studio Moirae was a great environment for this.
So is my country home in 15 acres of Niagara Escarpment land in Mono, Ontario, an hour north of Toronto, where in a week’s time, Joseph Marranca and I are teaching a two-day all-in Weekend Workshop on Advanced Lighting: information here.
Good news: this too will be a small workshop, and there are still several spots available. This will be a very intense two-day workshop where participants will learn about lighting, including:
The emphasis is on doing, not just sitting and learning. A model will be provided to shoot.
The great benefit of these workshops is that they are two days of living, talking, breathing and doing photography. If you are interested and have an SLR and know how to use it, but want to learn contemporary pro lighting, this is your chance. Go to the web page and sign up.
Look at this, from yesterday’s pic:
The Canon 7D can direct other flashes with its popup – unique for Canon, and that is what I was doing in this portrait (the main flash is a 430EX with a Honl reflector).
But when you do this, even when you turn the popup flash off (it only commands the other flashes), there’s a tiny residual glow! Every time. That is the little white dot.
Tip: cover it with your hand when shooting (or use Photoshop).
You all know you can sign up to the RSS feed, here?
http://blog.michaelwillems.ca/feed/
That way you get notified of posts as soon as they occur – and I write one every day.
But Wait! There’s more! Scroll down to the end of the right hand column and you can choose to subscribe to this blog as an email feed. That way you get an email every time I write a post!
Your assignment for today, should you choose to accept it: shoot a picture of a machine.
Use, if you can, a 50mm lens.
Tips (since this is a teaching blog): Try to fill the frame. Consider shooting in black and white. Avoid direct light.
Remington
And have fun!
Here’s a “quick start” for lighting a face:
The latter looks somewhat like this:
I took that snap at last Tuesday’s Phoenix “Advanced Flash” workshop. And you can see how: another course participant is holding a 430EX flash off camera, which I am firing from the main camera using TTL light control. Aperture and shutter speed, and ISO, are set so that available light is two stops darker (i.e. it provides the fill light).
Why this rule-of-thumb of “from straight in front” for women? Because it minimizes texture and features, and hence best shows beauty.
Please do not be hung up on these “rules” – they are merely good start points.
To some extent this snap is also an example of “short lighting”: I am lighting the side of the face that is narrower to the camera. This thins, which in the case of this beautiful woman is not necessary, but in case of larger people, or people with very round faces, can be a useful technique.
..and there are still a couple of spots left for the small two-day intense light workshop that Joseph Marranca and I are organising two weeks from now, on 10+11 April at my country home in Mono, an hour north of Toronto. Details here.
If you use an SLR and already know all the basics but you have always wanted to learn how to “do” all manner of lighting, this is not to be missed. Studio srobes, speedlites, reflectors, modifiers; fill, ambient and flash: you will learn many cool techniques. Including how to do shots like this:
That used three off-camera speedlites.
See you in Mono!
Uh oh: my laptop, an old Macbook Air, just broke – the hinge. This means that Ill need to shell out $2k for another one tomorrow. Painful, very painful. But life without a good laptop is impossible to imagine, now.
From this (Phoenix):
To this (Indianapolis, on my way to Toronto):
Which was not, of course, altogether a great feeling.