Category Archives: Light

Lights

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Sometimes, light can be simple.

Like here: One TTL flash, bounced to my right (in order to ensure that light goes onto the subject’s face, not onto the back of her head):

But sometime, for creative reasons you want more lights.Look at the following studio setup from a course the other day:

  1. Backdrop from www.backdropoutlet.com
  2. Main light is a speedlight with a softbox
  3. Right fill is a reflector
  4. Back fill, a flash bounced off the ceiling
  5. Edge light, two strobes
  6. Tow background lights: one white, one yellow (flagged with  Honl gobo)

Camera on typical “mixed light indoor flash” settings: 1/30th second at f/5.6, ISO 400.

Like this, demonstrated by my student, photographer Laura Wichman, the other day:

Camera on typical “Studio flash” settings: 1/125th second at f/8, ISO 100.

Because all that gets you light like this:

Both good, but both very different. And as a shooter you need to know how to handle both types of setup. Which is why I strongly recommend training. Because the good news: this is simple, once you know how.

 

Let there be…

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To those of you who are new on speedlighter.ca – this daily blog (yes, I write every day) is your resource for photography knowledge – and very often, speedlight knowledge. Speedlights, as you know, are small flashes, and as you may or may not know, they are wonderful.

When used well.

That implies that you can use them badly. And yes, you can, and that is easy. So here’s how not to do it:

Typical “this is why I hate flash” snap. Of two kind student volunteers yesterday. Shot at f/8 at 400 ISO at 1/125th second. Ouch. Thanks, guys!

To improve this – nay, to have fun and make it good – I would do the following:

  • Set my camera to a better exposure setting for the background. In my case, this was  f/4.0 and 1/30th second, which made the light meter show “-2 stops”.
  • Set my white balance to “tungsten” to make the background blue.
  • But at the same time, add a Honl Photo Full CTO gel to my main flash, to keep the subjects neutral.
  • Now add a second flash to light up the wall.
  • Add a Honl Photo red gel to this second flash.

Then I would get this:

Looking Skyward (Photo: Michael Willems)

How long does that take? Mere seconds. And it results in a great picture, that belies the idea that you cannot use direct flash. When you are mixing light, you can.

What if I had had more time?

Then I would have added one more flash with a gel: a green one.In the bottom left corner. Red-Green-Blue, the three primary colours in one image, adds visual interest.

 

Light meter know-how

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If you are a photographer, you will need to use a light meter sooner or later. Like in studios, when shooting flash, or when shooting outdoors in mixed light. Or for when you want it accurate. Light meters, like my Sekonic L-358, are invaluable.

But light meters are not perfect. They can vary between modes, between measurements, and between light meters. Even between ISO settings, or times of day.

The good news: modern light meters can be calibrated, i.e. adjusted, when necessary. The bad news: this is sometimes a little similar to black magic.

If you doubt your meter’s accuracy, here is what I would suggest you do:

  1. Set your camera to aperture mode, f/5.6, 100 ISO
  2. Filling your entire viewfinder, shoot a grey card, evenly lit by diffuse daylight. Avoid reflections. Avoid standing in the light (d’oh).
  3. Check if the histogram is neutral in color (Red, Green and Blue channels, if you can display those, are equally bright).
  4. Now check if the histogram is in the centre. If not, adjust the exposure using exposure compensation, until it is in the middle.

You should now see something like this on the back of your camera:

If instead you see a histogram like the one below, the image is too dark – use + (plus) exposure compensation:

If you see the type of histogram below here instead, then the image is too light – use “-” (minus) exposure compensation:

So. Done? Now repeat the process until this is right.

Now that you have adjusted the exposure to get the histogram into the centre, read the shutter speed you now achieved.

Now:

  1. Set your light meter to f/5.6 and 100 ISO.
  2. Dome extended, put it on the grey card.
  3. Without blocking the light, measure the light.

If your light meter indicates the same shutter speed as you got on your camera,you are good. If it indicates something else, you may need to calibrate your meter.

On my Sekonix, this is done by pressing ISO1 and ISO2 together while you turn on the meter – and keeping them pressed. You can now adjust the meter, + or – as needed, then repeat your measurement. Repeat this until you see the same time on your meter that you saw on the camera before.

Now, take some shots metered with your meter, in various light intensities and types, and verify that the grey card peak is in the centre for most images.

Like I said, black magic.  But now you know. Bet you were not aware your meter was adjustable!

 

Ready.. aim (flash)… shoot!

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An event shoot the other night prompts me to point out how important it is to bounce your flash into the right place.

When you shoot an event, you:

  1. Set your camera to a good starting point: Manual mode, 400 ISO, f/4.0 and 1/30th sec.
  2. Use the right lens: perhaps 35mm prime (on a full-frame camera, or 24mm prime on a crop camera).
  3. Aim your flash roughly behind you.
  4. Fire.

That gives you images like this:

You now adjust aperture, shutter and ISO according to ceiling height, available ambient light, background colour, and “how you like it”. For a neutral, normally lit background you want your in-camera meter to read roughly -2 stops when taking an average reading. So take a test shot, adjust where needed, and carry on.

Fine. But where exactly do you aim?

You aim the flash:

  1. Where you want the light to come from. Usually this means behind you.
  2. And it should throw light into your subject’s face, not onto the back of their head.
  3. This flash bounce area must be outside the image area.
  4. And it must have a nice bounce surface (not too far, not too coloured).

If you do not get the bounce area right, you get this, where I got it wrong (I aimed the flash too far forward):

Instead of this, where I did it right (I aimed it behind me):

Because I aimed correctly, the wall behind me became a big virtual umbrella, and cast natural light throughout the room, not mainly into one area like in the previous shot.

Another couple of shots from the event:

I like warm backgrounds. That’s my style.

Dancing in dark rooms is hard to capture. Shoot a lot.

Yes – you can shoot in wood-paneled rooms too, but it can be challenging.

Want to read more? Watch out for the June/July issue of Photolife Magazine, with my article on “Flash: 20 problems, 10 solutions”. It should be in the stores any day now.

 

Best light for macro

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Today, allow me to talk again about “best light”.

And I would like to do this because quite often, there is no “best” light -just alternatives. Sure, there are big differences in light. But the best light, as so often, “depends”.

Take Macro shots. Sure, the conventional wisdom is that you should use cloudy-day light. And that is often true: lack of harsh shadows, and colours that “pop” with wonderful saturation.

But there are circumstances where direct sunlight is best, because it is bright. Bright means

  1. Small apertures (needed for macro)
  2. Fast shutter speeds (also needed, since the wind keeps moving the plants you are focusing on with millimeter accuracy).

So a shot like this…:

… can be lit with direct sunlight. Because:

  1. The dandelion is lit by a shaft of direct light, while the background is not
  2. Because the seeds are not large leaves, so they do not throw shadows.

Another example:

Are there alternatives?

Sure. Sometimes the wind blows too much, so the shutter speed you get will not stop the motion. One way to handle that: increase the shutter speed. But how? Well – increase the effective shutter speed, by using flash light.

You see, if you shoot outdoors at, say, 1/200th second, that would be the shutter speed, 1/200th second. But if you use flash, whose duration is perhaps in the order of 1/2000th sec, then never mind your shutter: that flash duration becomes your “effective” shutter speed. Like in this shot:

So I now shot at 1/200th, but because I used flash, I got an effective 1/2000th second. And because of the greater light intensity, I was able to shoot at f/16 or higher – in this shot, f/20. Which in macro shots, I often find I need.

Here’s the softbox being used – top left corner:

And yes, this is a sunny day. A sunny day at 1/200th and f/22 at 400 ISO looks black to your camera, so your only light source is the flash. I used a Bowens 400 Ws light with a battery pack for outdoors use.

And that also gave me some nice portraits, like this:

So here an outdoors shot is lit with flash light,which gives me better light than cloudy day light. And the macro shots looked better with direct sunlight than they would have looked in cloudy light.

There is no one source of light – there are many alternatives, and sometimes the best choice is not the obvious one.

 

Colour technique

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Take a room lit by light bulbs. You have probably noticed that these often turn out slightly orange/yellow in photos taken with the automatic white balance setting (AWB).

But this can be solved: you can set your white balance to Tungsten or Incandescent (the “lightbulb” symbol). Then you get neutral colour (i.e. white looks white, not yellow):

But what if want this, and I also want to use flash?

Then I would put a CTO (“Colour Temperature Orange”) gel onto my flash, and it would look the same as the rest of the light. So the picture above would not change at all in terms of colour.

But when shooting events, I like a different look. I like the background to be warm, while the close-by subject is a neutral white. So I do in fact like a colour difference.

To achieve that, I do the following:

  1. I use my flash, without a gel.
  2. I put my camera’s White Balance setting to “Flash”.

Now, the background is warm (it is yellow with respect to flash light, and it shows as yellow), while the foreground subject is neutral. Like this:

Now that is my personal taste – yours may validly differ. The important thing is that you know how to create colour differences, or to minimize them.

 

Studio light note

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Welcome, all, including new students and reader.

Continuing in the studio lighting technique series of posts, today, let’s look at the effect of a background light.

A simple portrait (yes, as you see, I am my most patient model):

That was lit with one strobe in a softbox on our left. Simple, nice, soft light.

But wait. Perhaps a little more light on the background would help offset the model from the background a little better. For this, we use a speedlight, with a grid (so as to avoid the light going everywhere).

Like this, using a 430EX (similar to a Nikon SB600) fired with a Pocketwizard, and fitted with a Honl grid:

And that gives us very different light.

Now we could turn that background up, or down; or change the direction.

The point is that this allows us to play with “foreground versus background” a little. Offsetting your subject from the background is always good – dark background and light subject or light subject and dark background are both good. There’s no one way – it’s more that there are a number of ways of doing things. And by controlling liught, you control those ways.

 

Designing a one-light self portrait

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Here is a self portrait, and the process that went through my head making it. I thought that would be good to share. Here’s how to make a dramatic self-portrait in ten steps.

  1. First, I thought “let’s do a quick self portrait, indoors, lit by simple TTL flash”.
  2. I then thought “But let’s make it off-camera flash”.
  3. I went on to think “I want a dramatic image, so let’s use only flash light: available light should play no role”.
  4. To achieve that, I set my camera to manual exposure,  1/125th second, f/5.6, ISO 100. I took a test shot: black. Good, just what I wanted.
  5. Next, I aimed a single 430EX flash in slave mode at the wall diagonally from the side.
  6. Next, I attached a 1/4″ Honl Photo grid to the flash to avoid lighting up the whole wall; instead, I cast a nice parabola. That grid is my most used accessory, I think.
  7. I added a projected image of a set of lenses, only just visible.
  8. Now I put myself into that parabola: light straight into my face. Diagonal to the camera.
  9. I selected an almost-standard lens length (28mm on a Canon 7D, meaning a “real” 45mm) and off-centre composition, with a heavy shadow dramatically cast by me onto the wall.
  10. Finally, to take the shot I would have used a tripod, but since I had a student available, I asked her to shoot for me (Kayleigh, you know who you are).

And the result? Here it is.

Photographer Michael Willems

Photographer and educator Michael Willems, Oakville, 16 May 2011

(For best results, click and  view at original size)

What do you think? Me to a T, eh? This entire shot took just a few minutes to set up. You can do this too!

 

More on those lenses

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Fast lenses, and why do you need them for portraits?

“Fast” lenses mean lenses with a large aperture, i.e. a low minimum “f-number”.  Like an f/2.8 lens, or even an f/1.4 lens. These lenses allow shallower depth of field, but they also allow in more light.

Imaging shooting in a studio. Like this, at today’s Imaging Show, at which I spoke about lenses again:

All sorts of lights, operated by Pocketwizards. Yes, true, you do not need a fast lens for this. A simple f/5.6 lens will do since you will shoot at f/5.6 – f/8. (Though a fast lens stopped down will be sharper than a slow lens wide open).

But. Imagine you want to shoot there using available light. Not the flashes, but the available modeling lights. Or perhaps window light in your room.

This you can do only if you have a fast lens. Set it to f/1.4 and it lets in so much light that in that situation above you can shoot at 1/100th second at 100 ISO (or if you wish,  1/400th second at 400 ISO):

Isn’t that amazing? handheld, Canon 7D, prime 35mm f/1.4 lens, set to f/1.4 at 400 ISO and 1/400th second. And it looks like a studio shot. Due to my use of a fast lens.

(Oh – why did I shoot as I was, at f/1.4 and 400 ISO? Because I was carrying a heavy bag with speedlights and lesens, and two cameras, and a laptop. So I had no spare hand. That’s why!)

 

Lens thoughts

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Lenses make all the difference to your picture. Talking about lenses in the four presentations I wrote for the Digital Photo and Imaging Show at the International Centre makes me realize this more acutely than ever.

And the most important thing, of course, is aperture. A lens needs a large aperture, meaning, as I am sure you all know, a low minimum “f-number”.Like f/2.8 for a quality zoom.

Many people today tried out the various lenses money can buy:

One reason you need fast lenses is the low-light ability of these lenses.

Let me say here now: there is (almost) never enough light.

Let me illustrate what I mean.

With an f/2.8 lens I can get a picture like this at 800 ISO and 1/100th second:

If I had had an f/5.6 lens, that would have been either 3200 ISO, or 1/30th second – both of which would have spoiled the image.

f/1.8, on the other hand, in this type of light today gave me as fast a shutter speed as 1/320th second for some shots, which is enough to show dancers blur-free as they lift off the floor:

And there really is little alternative. If I have to shoot faraway moving objects in low light, therefore (like animals at dusk), I can only do three things other than go to a lower “F-number”:

  1. Add light.
  2. Tell the subject not to move.
  3. Shoot at very high ISO values.

So if I feel wealthy, I might want to buy this, a Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8 lens.

Beautiful. Here it is one more time:

(Of course I also shot those images with a fast lens: a 50mm f/1.2 lens set to f/1.8).

One last picture – again, f/2.8 at 1/100th and 800 ISO.

I could not have done this any other way without getting too much grain, or too much motion blur.

More about this tomorrow at the show: I present Portrait Lenses at 11:45 and unless I am mistaken, 1:45 is Travel Lenses.