Category Archives: Light

Gold and blue

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One more “blue background, gold foreground” picture for you all. No, two.

Here is Christy, of Studio Moirae, looking radiant, mainly because she looks radiant – but also perhaps just a little because I lit her with a CTO gelled flash (with the white balance set to “Tungsten”, which turns everything blue except the bits lit by my gelled flash)?

And one more lovely participant in the course, who soon will be two:

Add a splash of colour

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Look at this recent portrait:

You will see standard lighting with a softbox on camera right, a fill light on camera left, a hair light behind him, using a Honl Snoot, and a background light aimed at the background.

This background light has a subtle blue Honl Photo gel on it. Can you see how much of a difference that makes? No gel would mean a grey background, and blue adds a touch of interest as well as a hint of corporate soldity.

More technique:

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Here’s me, shot by Christy Smith of Studio Moirae:

Yeah, I model too.

But wait. That cool blue urban look. Was it actually like that?

No. The actual scene was like this. Here’s Christy and David Honl taking a test shot:

So wait. How come it’s all blue?

That’s because Christy and Dave set their camera’s white balance to “Tungsten”. That will turn daylight blue.

But then I would be blue too!

Except they are lighting me with a flash with a CTO (“Colour Temperature Orange”, i.e. Tungsten-coloured) Honl gel and with a Honl Grid to make the light go mainly to my head and shoulders. The flash was aimed straight at me and set to manual, and it was fired with pocketwizards.

That’s the kind of cool technique Dave and I taught the participants who came to the workshops Monday and Tuesday in Phoenix, Arizona. If you have the chance, come to a future one: they’re fun and you will lean sooo much.

Today, part 2 of Phoenix

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Today, part two of the Phoenix workshop at Studio Moirae. A repeat with a different emphasis; we go a bit deeper into the technology and we practice TTL multi-flash (both Nikon i-TTL/CLS and Canon E-TTL).

Yesterday, David Honl (yes, the David Honl) joined me, and he and I presented the workshop together. And we had fun: did we ever. A bright and energetic bunch of local photographers here in Phoenix.

Here’s David getting ready. In this shot I set my White Balance to “Tungsten”, which makes the background blue. Then a full CTO gel on the speedlite ensures that the subject, which after all is lit by the flash much more than by the ambient light, does not turn blue, but looks normal:

Here’s one of the set-up shots:

David setting up a speedlite, fired with a pocketwizard, with a half CTO-coloured Honl 8″ gold/silver reflector (while I blind Christy by actually firing the flash):

David carefully adjusting the subject’s head:

Tough job, but someone has to do it.

And here’s my shot of Christy, using this light:

All I can say is, I am glad the model we hired did not show up, because Christy is an amazing subject to work with. Which is rare for photographers.

And finally, fair’s fair: one more picture by Christy of David and me. Slow shutter, turning the camera during the shot.

Can you see that direct flash can be great light? And that shadows do not necessarily need to be avoided?

Does TTL work when bouncing?

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Does the fancy automatic “TTL” flash mode work when you bounce your light off the wall behind you?

Yes, and that is exactly the point of TTL (“eTTL in Canon terms; iTTL for Nikon).

You press the shutter button: Click.

But it is not one click! In the milliseconds after you press the shutter, your camera does all the following:

  1. Fires a low power test flash
  2. Measures light returned
  3. Calculates power needed
  4. Raises mirror
  5. Open shutter
  6. Flashes with power setting calculated  in step 3
  7. Closes shutter
  8. Drops mirror.

Steps 2 and 3 are crucial: that’s why it works wherever you are pointing the flash.

And that is also why you see the flash through the viewfinder: you are seeing the pre-flash. Try it: look through your viewfinder and shoot. If you see a flash, that cannot the be real flash – after all, the mirror is up when that goes. It is the preflash that you (and your camera’s light meter, near the pentaprism) are seeing!

Reader question

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“Why are you in Manual exposure mode when shooting flash indoors?”, asks a reader. I thought that would make an excellent blog question.

So why?

Well, when I shoot flash indoors I have options. These include:

  • S/Tv mode, which is fine because I set the shutter to any value I like, but this has the big drawback that the lens will quite probably not have the aperture value needed to expose well – and also, aperture is the one thing I want to control.

So then next, there’s Aperture mode or Program mode. This works differently on the main brands:

Canon:

  • P: flash speed will not go below 1/60th. This simple engineering decision makes sense, but it can give me dark, “cold” backgrounds. When using a wide lens I want to be able to go slower, like 1/30th, to let in more ambient light.
  • Av: now shutter speed can go as low as it needs to in order to light ambient normally. The big drawback: in a dark room this could lead to very slow shutter speeds – even seconds, which would lead to totally blurred images.

Nikon:

  • A or P: flash speed will not go below 1/60th. This simple engineering decision makes sense, but it can give me dark, “cold” backgrounds. When using a wide lens I want to be able to go slower, like 1/30th, to let in more ambient light.
  • A or P with “slow flash” enabled: now shutter speed can go as low as it needs to in order to light ambient normally. The big drawback: in a dark room this could lead to very slow shutter speeds – even seconds, which would lead to totally blurred images.

So none of those seem quite ideal, do they?

Then there is manual (“M”). In manual exposure mode,

  • I can simply set the aperture and shutter speed that I want. The background will be lit accordingly.
  • But as long as my flash is set to TTL (Canon calls this eTTL; Nikon calls it iTTL), it is still fully metered and automatic, and the camera varies the flash power to light the flash portion of the photo properly. So “manual” is not manual flash – it is just manual background light.

So for that background light, my starting point is to set manual aperture/shutter speed to give me an exposure two stops below ambient. That means the meter points to minus two when I aim at a representative part of the room. That way I get these advantages:

  • Ambient light becomes “fill light”, which is usually 2 stops below the key light.
  • If I aim at a brighter part of the room, is it not likely to be two stops brighter, so it will not be overexposed.
  • If I aim at a darker part of the room, it is still likely to be light enough to be seen.

So try it next time?

Camera on manual and set time and aperture to a value that gives you -2 stops on the meter. Then bounce off a wall and you get well lit images. Like this one, of two very nice young people at the event I was a forum member at, tonight at UofT’s Mississauga campus:

This also shows that I have taken over 10,000 images with my new 1D Mark IV already. And that I always carry a camera, even when I am a speaker, not a shooter.

Jewellery

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Thanks to fellow local photographer Anita, I shot Jewellery yesterday, on location in St Catharines. This was the setup in the store:

An improvised table with a curved white background, lit by two speedlites in an umbrella, with an opposite reflector; then one”sparkler” speedlite in a Honl snoot to aim at the jewellery.

I used

  • A 580EX II on the camera
  • Two 430 EX flashes in an umbrella
  • Wireless TTL with +2 stops flash compensation
  • A 100mm f/2.8 macro lens
  • A Canon 1D Mark IV camera.

A few tips:

  • Use aperture in the 5.6-16 range. More is better, except when you go much above f/8-ish, most lenses get blurrier again.
  • Use a tripod!
  • Focus using manual focus. Use Live View and x10 magnification to set this focus accurately.
  • Expose carefully, using flash compensation as needed. Use the histogram and “highlight alert” to verify.
  • Use the sparkler straight on to add life, especially to diamonds.
  • Watch reflections carefully
  • Use a black reflector if needed to add the black reflections in diamonds.
  • White balance carefully.
  • Clean the jewellery well.
  • Use Photoshop to clean up any remaining dust. Jewellery photos need to be finished in photoshop.
  • Use Play-do to mount rings, etc.
  • Consider an acrylic stand to separate jewellery from the background – this avoids shadows.
  • Black acrylic works too – nice reflections. Black slate can work, too.
  • Did I mention you should use a tripod?

This got me shots like this one:

Jewellery can take many hours to shoot, so yesterday worked out well – 20 products shot in four hours.

High speed flash

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Tip of the day:

When using your flash outside, you have to be careful: you cannot exceed your camera’s maximum flash synch speed – normally around 1/200th second. This means in bright light you cannot use a wide aperture like f/4 (which after all might mean you would need 1/800th second, say, even at 100 ISO).

But if you have a suitable external flash you can exceed that speed (the flash pulses at 30 kHz-50 kHz instead of flashing all at once).  If so, high-speed flash, or FP Flash, can be engaged on your flash.

On Nikon cameras, and on Canon cameras built after 2005, you can leave this on, and it will engage when the speed exceeds your flash sync speed, but it will not be used if not needed.

The drawback of fast flash: you get less effective power. Half at best, at smaller apertures much less. Meaning less flash range: but at least you can get outdoors portraits with large apertures.