Category Archives: Light

Using light today.

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I shot Victoria Fenner today. But only, you will be glad to know, with a camera.

Let me talk you through that, shall I?

Victoria is an audio expert. She used to run the studio at McMaster University that we shot this in. We decided to shoot her doing her thing – and sound is her thing. So we shot in a studio first:

Camera: I shot her with a Canon 1D Mark IV. The camera was on manual at 100 ISO. I used a 24-70 lens set to around 24mm – meaning around 30 “real” mm.

Light: the camera was equipped with a 580 EXII flash to act as e-TTL “master” to drive three 430EX speedlites:

  1. The “A” flash through an umbrella on camera right, shining into Victoria’s face. An umbrella throws nice soft light, great for faces. (There is a certain irony in the fact that we use the word “umbrella” to name this thing that throws around this nice light. Umbra means shadow!)
  2. One “B” flash with a green Honl Photo gel in the background – I love adding a splash of colour, and green goes very well with purple.
  3. Another “B:” flash, fitted with a Honl Photo 1/4″ grid, as hair/accent light shining toward the camera. You can see it just outside the field of view.
  4. I set an A:B ratio of 4:1 to 8:1.

All this took about ten minutes to set up, and ten minutes to take down.

Then we shot some outdoors. For this, I used two flashes off camera: one into a Honl gold/silver bounce card; the other using a grid, as before. Yes, in bright sunlight you can fire these flashes using light-controlled TTL.

This was a bright day in April around noon. But it does not look like noon light, does it? I shot in Aperture mode, with -2 to -3stops exposure compensation. That darkened the background to give it colour saturation. The flashes took care of the foreground.

Balancing light

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One subject photographers need to learn all about it balancing light. In particular, I mean balancing background light with foreground light.

If you take one of my workshops I’ll teach you all about “overpowering the sun”.

As an illustration of that, three years ago almost to the day I took a few snaps of my son in Army Cadet uniform. The sky was mid-day light blue, but I used three off-camera flashes, two of which were in umbrellas and one was direct, to overpower the sun and make the sky dark:

I used the 5D in manual exposure mode, set to -3 stops from ambient, and used TTL metered flash. Piece of cake. And yes, remote flash using light control does work in super bright sunlight, as long as you keep line of sight between the master and slave flashes.

Can you also see that for this portrait I used a very wide lens? Even though you are not supposed to do that for portraits? That is because it is a situational portrait. Where the environment is as important as the subject. Just keep your subject’s face away from the edges – centre, or near the centre, is good.

Son in car

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My son, just now, in a car in broad daylight, in a shot that took only a couple of minutes to set up:

I used three speedlites on light stands; all three were fired using e-TTL light control from a fourth one on the camera.

One speedlite is on camera right, one on the left, and one in the middle using a new Honl softbox to light up his face.

Of course with a few more minutes I would have

  • Moved the softbox so it did not reflect,
  • Positioned the other better
  • Used more gels to add more colour
  • Cleaned the car more

… but with a teenager, even three minutes is a rare gift.

A portrait with three speedlites

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Here’s a portrait I just shot.

I used the Canon 1D Mark IV with a 580 EX II flash on the camera, used only to drive three 430 EX II flashes using remote e-TTL. This is easier than ever: with the right knowledge and tools it takes mere seconds to arrange.

So here’s how I did it.

I used a 50mm prime lens (meaning 65mm effective focal length) with the camera on manual, 100 ISO, f/5.6 at 1/125th second.

The lights were:

  • One 430 speedlite, the key light, is on camera left one foot away from the subject and is mounted on a cheap light stand. It is equipped with a new Honl Traveller 8 softbox.
  • The second, the accent light, also on a light stand, is one foot behind the subject, is aimed forward at her, and has a Honl 1/4″ grid fitted.
  • The third flash, aimed at the wall, is mounted on its little plastic light stand and has a green Honl gel fitted to its speed strap in order to add a splash of colour to the background.
  • I set an 8:1 A:B ratio to stop the accent lights from becoming too bright (the key light was A). I also used – 1/3 stop Flash Exposure Compensation, since the initial frame showed the face a bit bright.

That setup was:

Simple and effective. And if I say so myself, I think the green gelled background accent was an inspired choice.

Today, with small flashes and modifiers, using TTL, you can do professional studio work in no time.

Fun with gels

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Look at these images, and see why you need gels.

A gel is a piece of sturdy plastic that you put in front of your flash. (At least if you use something like the Honl Photo system it is sturdy; the ones that come with your SB-900 flash are very fragile and will melt quickly).

So assume you have some good, easy-to-use gels. Look at what just two gels and a bit of knowledge of my camera can do. And this takes mere seconds to set up!

Case One: Warm Face, Neutral background. Flash equipped with a CTO (“Color Temperature Orange”) Gel, white balance set to “flash”:

Case Two: Neutral Face, Cold Background. Flash equipped with a CTO Gel, White Balance set to”Tungsten”:

Case Three: Neutral Face, Warm Background. Flash equipped with a CTB (“Color Temperature Blue”) Gel, white balance set to “Shade”.

I mean – is that fun, or is that fun?

Note that the effect may not be totally right in camera – gels do not exactly correspond with white balance settings, which in any case vary per camera – but that is unimportant: you can fine-adjust later in Lightroom. The essence is that you throw different light onto the subject than onto the background.

Now do you understand why photographers are always going on about gels? Secret weapon – but now you know the secret, too.

The importance of being saturated

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…as in colour. Today:

I took this picture yesterday and it shows a few things:

  • Lower the background’s brightness = increase its saturation
  • To add excitement, add a splash of colour!
  • In particular, add red to the green and blue you find in nature
  • Dramatic lighting = contrasty lighting

Five speedlites were used in the production of this picture. Four on the sides and one behind me. they were fired via pocketwizards.

In any shoot, the worst thing a photographer can encounter is bright light.

Why?

Here’s why. Think along.

  • The available (ambient) light will be fill light.
  • That, and the fact we want these saturated colours, means it will have to be darker (say, two stops darker) than the main, flash light.
  • That means the flash light has to overpower it (by, say, two stops).
  • That means the flash has to be two stops brighter than the sun.

That’s why we call this “nuking the sun”.

For which we needed five flashes, four on the sides and one behind the camera. Firing at full power, mostly.

(That much because ambient is controlled by ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Shutter speed cannot go beyond 1/200th second (or whatever your synch speed is).  ISO is low already. So aperture is the only way to affect the background.  But Aperture also affects flash exposure so for each stop you close the aperture you need to double flash power.)

Grids and why you might like them.

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Grids,  like the Honl grid attached to my flash here, are very important modifiers. A grid ensures that the light from a flash does not go “everywhere”. Instead, it goes to one cone of light, that drops off softly at the edges. This was taken by a student a few hours ago:

Oddly, that cone is a bit softer than the straight flash.

TIP: Use a gel if you want to see where a light is going, That way you can identify easily which light is shining where:

And have fun.

Improvise

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Sometimes you need to improvise. Scrap that. You always need to improvise.

For a model or portrait shoot I would like at least several lights.

Recently, on a shoot I had only one available flash, a 430EX speedlite in an umbrella on a stand. So I used the 580EX on my camera to fire that 430EX flash through the umbrella on the camera left side:

I did that as follows:

  • 1D Mark IV with 580EX on the camera as “director” (master) only, otherwise disabled
  • 430EX in slave mode firing through a useless Opus umbrella (useless because it broke and kept coming apart) on a stand
  • Flash compensation of +2 stops – this is what I needed because of the white wall. I set the Flash Compensation so that the histogram went exactly to the right edge.
  • I moved the umbrella as close to the moel as possible. This makes the light softer. Farther away makes it harder.

I would have liked the umbrella on the right, since that is where she is looking – but during a model session you cannot keep moving the umbrella.

And it worked, didn’t it?

Flash from behind

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Look at this picture, which a student took of me in a class the other day:

Michael Teaching

Can you see how she turned her flash behind her, so it aimed at the wall above her, which in turn lit me with soft, gentle light? Otherwise, if she had aimed it at me directly, we would have seen all the things that people hate in flash:

  • oily skin
  • flat face
  • dark background
  • overexposed subject
  • shadows under the chin

Instead, we get soft, natural looking light.  And it’s easy: turn the flash so that the light bounces behind you. With TTL, it’s easy: the camera does the math. You just push the button.