Category Archives: Light

Adding flashes GOOD.

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As readers here know, “one flash” gives you “OK light” – provided you bounce it off a wall or ceiling, usually behind you.

But off-camera flash is better. This image would really not be as good if the flash was on the camera:

Jason in July 2010

Jason in July 2010

That is because good lighting is all about what you do not light.

And multiple off-camera flash is better still.

The great news is that all modern camera systems support multiple off-camera TTL flash.

TTL flash is enormously sophisticated. For instance, a modern TTL flash will tell the camera its colour temperature with each flash fired (yes, it can vary per shot); that way, as long as your camera’s white balance is set to “Auto” or “Flash”, each picture will automatically have the right colour temperature set. Bet you did not know that.

This site is called “speedlighter” for a reason: I teach people this stuff (the last Mono workshop, on April 23, contains a full “Advanced Flash” course). Even before or without that, I strongly recommend you all try some off-camera flash using TTL remote control.

  • On Nikon cameras you need just the camera and its popup flash and any remote flash (SB700, SB900).
  • On Canon 7D and 60D cameras, the same: just the camera and its popup, and any Canon slave flash.
  • On other Canon cameras, a 580EX flash or a wireless IR transmitter on the camera

Attention Canon users: two new small flashes are now available. I love the specs on the all-new 320 slave flash, which brings remote flash into many more people’s reach:

Get a few of those and you have a full flash setup. Full slave functionality. 32 Guide number. It also has a continuous LED light for video, and a remote switch – it is a remote control for cameras like the 7D, 60D, 1D, 5D and so on. I am getting one or two as soon as I can!

Metering outdoors

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A modern light meter is a flash meter as well as an ambient light meter. And that can be good, but it can also be confusing. How do you meter when using a flash outdoors, when you meter both types?

For instance, for a shot like this?

Here is how I do it:

  1. I set my camera to the mode I want – manual, usually in this case.
  2. Now, I decide on ISO. Say 100.
  3. Then I decide on shutter speed – say 1/200th sec. No more than the camera’s fastest flash sync speed, usually around 1.200th second.
  4. Now I set those values on the light meter and I press the button to meter the ambient light and read the aperture that this gives me. (I can use the light meter in ambient mode, or I can use my camera. I prefer the light meter. )
  5. Then I set my camera to what I want with respect to that, say -2 stops w.r.t ambient. So if the meter reads f/4. I may use f/8 instead.
  6. Then I switch to flash meter.
  7. I now fire a test flash with my flash – and then adjust flash power and distance to give me exactly this aperture.

In fact it is often a bit of an iterative process:if step 3 does not give me a good aperture value (e.g. it gives me f/2.0 or f/16), then I will choose different shutter speed or ISO values until I get a value I like. Or if even at full flash power I cannot get the desired aperture in step 7, I adjust ISO and go back to step 1.

Try this technique: all you need is a manual camera, a manual flash (and a way to fire it), and a light meter.

And then you too can make shots like this:

That shot was taken at one of Joseph Marranca and my Mono workshops.

And there is good news: the last ever Mono workshop, on April 23, is open for booking. And it will be a very special one. Can you say “green screen”, “waterboarder”, and “amazing portfolio shots” as well as “learning great light and flash technique”? Sign up now if you want to have a great photographic learning experience.

Grain

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I recently, while preparing for a commercial shoot, took a few self-portraits. Including this one:

Michael Willems, Photogrpaher (self portrait, December 2010)

Michael Willems, Photographer (self portrait)

As always, click to see it large. (You really do need to see this one at original size to see the full effect.)

To do a portrait like this, I did the following – and I thought it might be useful for me to share the thought process:

  • I decided I wanted black and white, and to shoot it that way.
  • I set up the right studio lighting. I used a softbox on camera left; an edge light on camera right at the back; and a fill light using an umbrella on camera right in front.
  • I metered for these lights, with a fairly high key:fill ratio. In other words, I wanted the less-lit part of my face to be much less lit. To get this, I set the fill light around three stops darker than the main light.
  • That in turn allowed me to set up an edge light, to show the contours of my face.
  • I set up a white background.
  • I positioned myself at a distance from the background that would ensure a grey (rather than black or white) background.
  • I set up the main light, in a softbox, such that I would get nice catch lights in my eyes.
  • I pre-focused (on a chair), then set the camera to manual, and then used the camera’s timer to take the shot.
  • I used a horizontal layout, to create enough “negative space”, by using the rule of thirds (i.e I did not put myself in the “Uncle Fred” position right in the middle).

Finally, in post-production I added some film grain. This is one of Lightroom 3’s Develop module’s “Effects”, and it is one I really like. Tri-X film, anyone?

I am about to set up the same setups for Saturday’s workshop. Deciding on lighting is a photographer’s major job!

Yesterday’s workshop

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Yesterday’s workshop was “the art of shooting nudes”. Joseph Marranca and I and a roomful of students went through theory and practical tips first, then made a number of shots. Like this one:

Kassandra Love (Photo: Michael Willems)

Mono, Ont., 2 April 2011: Kassandra Love

This pretty picture makes me want to mention a few points, namely:

  • Yes. You can use a muslin background. It can be cool. A lot of people think “Oww, that’s Sears, and boring, and for old people. Not so… but you need to light it properly. That means “not light it all over”. You keep it dark, mainly.
  • Then you light a little with a gridded light. That’s the circle of light behind Kassandra.
  • That gridded light is gelled blue – blue goes well as a contrasty colour against white (really, “orange”) skin.
  • White balance is important. That skin should be the colour you want it. In this case I made it warm. A “desaturated” look (where, using Lightroom’s HSL pane in the Develop module you desaturate red and orange) would also have done well. Matter of taste.
  • The eyes must be sharp.
  • We shot at f/8, 1/125th second, 100 ISO.
  • Props and the subject are important also. The hat with the lipstick work well here.
  • The model is lit with softboxes, thus ensuring soft light and soft shadows.
  • They are positioned so as to give me a nice catch light in the eyes.

Simple light (three strobes: one on each side with a softbox, and one with a grid to light the background)can make interesting and artistic images.

A product shot or two

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Today I taught Merav, a student, a few product photography tricks. Perhaps I can share one or two insights here and take you through how to do this.

The brief was: shoot some products using simple means. “Simple” to me means speedlights (bad knee – don’t ask). So the setup I decided on was simple: a table, a white cover, and the product. The white wall serves as a backdrop.

And the lights?

  • We used one main light, a 580EX flash controlled through a Pocketwizard, through an umbrella. (A Flashzebra cable was used to connect the Pocketwizard to the SB-900 flash).
  • The fill light was simply a reflector. Held in place with a stand.
  • We lit the wall behind the product with a Nikon SB-900 flash in SU-4 mode.

The setup was thus:


You can make out the background flash behind the product.

  • You first set the camera to f/8, 1/125th sec, 100 ISO.This means the ambient light does little or no work, just the way you want it.
  • Then try the main flash at, say, 1/4 power. Meter using a light meter set to flash mode, 100 ISO and 1/1/25th second.
  • The light meter showed a close-enough value (f/6.3). Moving the main light closer made it f/8.
  • The reflector was just moved closer to make the light nice.
  • The background light was set at 1/8th power, so the background blew out completely (but only just). A bit of trial and error and the “blinkies” on the camera LCD display was enough to get this done: no metering was needed.

Bingo, end of setup.

  • Now make sure every product is the same distance away (even an inch farther = darker!)
  • Focus carefully, using one focus spot.
  • Use a tripod to ensure all images will have the same layout.
  • Do not forget to minimize distortion by using a long-ish lens (70mm on a crop camera, in this case).

The resulting shots looked like this:

Easy, and portable. And it can all be done in a living room:

If you have never done product photography, please give it a go. It is fun and rewarding.

Metering muddles

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A word about light meters again – this time, on how to use them.

1. First turn on the meter.

2. Then move the white dome out, not in.

3. Now set the ISO to your camera’s ISO (press ISO and hold it down while turning the dial, until your camera’s ISO is indicated).

4. Now set the metering mode. A modern light meter has two separate modes:

  • Ambient metering (the “sun” symbol at the top left on the display above);
  • Flash metering (the “lightning bolt” symbol on the display above).

If you want to meter available light for a normal available light photo, select the sun (press mode button and turn dial); but for metering flash, where the meter measures brief flashes of light, select the lightning bolt.

Assume for today’s post, that you only have flash light to worry about in your shot. So you set the mode to flash, and set the shutter speed to your camera’s shutter speed. Set the camera to 1/125th sec, and set the meter to this time as well.

Now when the camera measures, since you have told it your camera’s shutter and ISO, when it measures the light it will tell you the aperture to set the camera to. (After all, exposure is a triangle of “ISO – Aperture – Shutter”.)

5.  Now hold the meter where the subject will be, and aim the white dome at the camera.

6. Now press the big “reset/test” button on the side. The aperture now reads “0”.

7. Finally, fire your flash.

The meter now indicates the aperture you should set set your camera to. If this is different from what you wanted

  • adjust the flash’s power;
  • repeat the procedure, until the meter indicates the aperture you had in mind.

This is how you use a flash meter.

In future posts, more.

Cheer for an old tool

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…where “old” does not mean “outdated”.

I am talking about the light meter.

Some of you may think this is a tool that rusty old photographers used to use in the 1960s.

Not so. Modern, cool, young photographers like me (you are as young as you feel) use them too – every day.

The light meter is different from the light meter built into your camera:

  • Unlike that camera meter, it is not a reflective light meter, but an incident light meter. It measures light falling onto your subject. Unlike your camera, which measures light reflected from the subject. So for the camera, the subject affects the measurement. A dark subject will reflect less, a light subject, more. So the camera will expose a dark-skinned person in a black suit differently from a light-skinned person in a white suit. And that is wrong: the camera should not care about the subject. Light is light. (Yes, true: keeping the exposure constant means that a dark subject will look darker than a light subject. But hey – that is exactly the way it should be!)
  • Also, the modern light meter is a flash meter as well. It reads the bright pulses of light emanating from a strobe (or a speedlight set to manual). Which is exactly what the photographer uses it for.
  • It is more accurate, sensitive, and quantitative. It can read light in stops or EV (exposure values), and it can read up to tenth of stops.

If you have never used a light meter, I urge you to start. When you shoot portraits, you have little choice, but even for outdoors light, and especially for mixed light, a meter will make your images’ exposure guaranteed good.

Use your mter as follows:

  1. Set the meter to the right mode (Flash, or ambient);
  2. Set the ISO to your camera’s ISO;
  3. Set the shutter speed to your camera’s shutter speed (e.g. 1/125th sec);
  4. Press the reset button, so the aperture displayed is zero;
  5. Hold the meter where your subject will be;
  6. Fire the flash;
  7. Read the value;
  8. Set that value on your camera.

You will not look back, once you get the hang of this excellent tool!

The importance of being hairlit

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Portraits look better when a bit of kick is added. An edge light, or a hair light.

The following two shots, straight out of the camera and unedited, from Tuesday’s executive shoot in Toronto, service to illustrate this point quite well:

Without hair light:

And with a hair light:

The hair light is 1-2 stops overexposed. It is provided by an assistant holding a light stand with a snoot, aimed from behind at the person – and aimed carefully, or bad shadows will result.

Here is one more sample, from the same business shoot:

You see how well that shine works?

More on this in the Henry’s workshops I teach and in the Mono workshops: three more, on 2, 3 and 23 April. If you have always wanted to come on one, then act fast: these will be the last ones ever in Mono, so book now!

Since you asked…

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Since some of you asked: a few more things about that type of flash portrait I talked about yesterday (and that David Honl and I showed some of you during Saturday’s workshop):

Photographer Michael Willems

Photographer Michael Willems, Self-portrait

Here’s how this shot was made:

  • It is lit with two speedlights with a grid (left and right)
  • …as well as a speedlight above and slightly off-centre in front, equipped with a Traveller 8 softbox.
  • I fired all three flashes with Pocketwizards.
  • The camera was set to my standard studio settings of 100 ISO, 1/125th sec, f/8.
  • Side lights have a grid fitted, and are overexposed by about a stop.
  • The fill light is underexposed by about a stop.
  • To achieve this, side lights were set to 1/16nd power.
  • And the front light to 1/32nd power. Why? They are all about the same distance away – why so high? Surely that should be lower, like 1/128th power? Ah – no. The softbox loses you a stop or more, so you need to increase power to compensate for that.
  • TIP: the flash in the softbox should have its “wide” adapter out.

This is done in my case by trial and error and experience, but you can of course meter the lights to get really accurate settings.

How did I manage to focus on myself? I focused on a light stand, then set focus to manual and used the 10 second self timer and while it was counting down, moved myself where the stand was.

Finally: in “post”, I used the HSL “saturation” setting to decrease orange saturation somewhat. That makes this into a “desat” portrait.

And now I am already preparing for the next few workshops: “The Art of Photographing Nudes” with Joseph Marranca on April 2, “Shooting Events” on April 3, and the last Mono workshop, “Advanced Creative Lighting”, also with Joseph, in Mono on April 23. Booking is open for all three, and they are all strictly limited in numbers.


It’s all about…

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….what you do not light.

Here is a shot of impromptu model George, who was on the course:

David Honl and I lit George from the side with a single 430EX flash using a Traveller 8 softbox, during the”Advanced Flash” workshop Dave helped me teach Saturday in Toronto.

This shot illustrates the “it’s more important to think about what you do not light” principle you often hear me mention.

The following shot illustrates another principle: “light from the sides, fill from the front”. Here, we are lighting George with two 430EX speedlights, each with a 1/4″ grid, from the side. Another gridded speedlight is aiming at the background, and a final speedlight, in a Traveller 8 softbox, is aimed at his face.

We used manual flash for all these shots, and the flashes were connected to pocketwizards via Flashzebra cables.

Since we are using only flash (ambient plays no role), the settings are the standard 100 ISO, f/8, 1/125th second.

All these shots can be set up in just a couple of minutes, as Dave is explaining here to some of the students in this packed workshop:

If you were one of those students, I hope you’ll add some comments here about what you found most useful or most fun. I know many of you read this blog daily!