Oh daddy…

…I know I shouldn’t have  crashed your plane!

Yasmin Tajik in Nelson, NV

Yasmin Tajik in Nelson, NV

This photo, which I took in Nelson, Nevada of friend and photographer Yasmin Tajik, shows how useful a flash can be when fitted with gels.

I took the picture with a Canon 1D MkIV fitted with a 70-200 2.8 lens and a 580EX II flash. The camera was set to Aperture mode (Av), at f/4 and 100 ISO, which gave 1/320th second when I used -2/3 stop of exposure compensation.

The light was a setting sun.

But the setting sun was not lighting up Yasmin at all. So I used the flash.

But to keep the “golden hour” light quality, I fitted the flash with a Honl Photo Speed Strap and a  1/2 CTO Honl Photo gel.  That made Yasmin look like she was in the setting sun. When in fact she was not.

Portrait note

One more from Sunday’s course.

This time, a portrait of model Tara that I made to help explain multiple flash TTL. Straight out of the camera it is:

Multiple-flash TTL lighting

Multiple-flash TTL lighting

How was this made?

With a small Traveller 8 softbox on the main light, a gridded gelled flash for the background, a snooted flash for the fill light, and a gridded gelled flash for the edge light.

Four speedlights, and all using TTL.

A few things to remember in such portraits:

  • You need a catch light in the eyes.
  • Set your white balance to “flash”.
  • If you have space, longer lenses are good (in this case, though, I use a 50mm prime lens).
  • Avoid the ambient light doing any work: choose 1/125th second at f/5.6 or f/8, say; and be sure to disable “Auto ISO”.
  • Lighting is all about what you do not light: avoid bathing the room in photons. Think about what you light, and how.
  • With Canon’s e-TTL or Nikon’s CLS/iTTL, you only get two or three groups of light. So if you have four lights, some of them will have to be in the same group. My fill and edge light are thus both in group “B”.

Keep those in mind and your portraits will be well lit.

What is in my bag?

I am often asked “what is in that Domke bag of yours”?

Here. Too much, many would say…:

Photo Bag by Michael Willems

Photo Bag by Michael Willems

The bag is a Domke bag, and it contains:

  • Two lenses (Which ones? That varies per shoot).
  • A speedlight (Canon 580-EX II).
  • My off-camera flash cable.
  • My point-and-shoot camera (a Panasonic Lumix GF-1 Micro Four Thirds camera).
  • The indispensable Hoodman Hood Loupe (Get one. Now.)
  • Memory cards… always carry spares.
  • Fong Lightsphere – for safe shooting when I need safety rather than creativity.
  • Honl Photo reflectors/gobos.
  • A Honl gel set in a Honl roll.
  • My iPad .. plus, just in case, its charger.
  • Spare batteries for every camera and for flash. Never travel without spare batteries.
  • Lens caps for the lenses that are on the camera. I do not use them on the cameras I am using.
  • Cloths, plastic bags, headache and stomach acid pills.
  • Note pad, pens, comb, small brush, business cards.

And an important note: no camera. That is (or more accurately, those are!) over my shoulder.

Colour has to be real

Right?

Um, no, of course not: colour is a tool for you to use in your artistic endeavors.

And colour can be anything you like.

A few nights ago, I though I would see how long it would take me to recreate a lighting setup that my friend Dave Honl (yes, he of the excellent Honl Photo modifiers) did recently. So I looked at his shot and put it together the same way he shot it, in exactly 20 minutes:

Fun with gels, Photo Michael Willems

Fun with gels

That is including:

  • Setting up four light stands.
  • Connecting four flashes (3x 430EX, 1x 580EX) to Pocketwizards using Flashzebra cables.
  • Mounting these on the light stands using ball heads etc.
  • Equipping the key light with a 1/4″ grid and an Egg Yolk Yellow gel.
  • Equipping the fill light with a 1/4″ grid and a Follies Pink gel.
  • Equipping the hair light with a small snoot and a Steel Green gel.
  • Equipping the background light with a long snoot and a Rose Purple gel.
  • Setting the power levels correctly (by trial and error, combined with histogram: key light = 1/4 power, fill=1/8, hair=1/8, background=1/16).
  • Setting the camera up correctly (I used the 7D and set it to manual, 100ISO, 1/125th, f/6.3).

Huh? Egg Yolk Yellow, a crazy bright colour, to light the face? Are we crazy?

No, just having fun. Yes, of course Dave could have made his shot using no colour. Here’s what the same shot looks like without the gels. (Of course I switched the camera to an aperture one stop tighter, namely f/9, to compensate for the extra light once I removed the gels):

Grids and snoots, photo Michael Willems

Grids and snoots

Yeah, nice, and appropriate for a corporate head shot. But compared to the previous, it is kinda boring, no? So next time you shoot someone, unless they are a law firm executive, you might have fun and try some colour. You don’t need to go crazy and use four colours, but a splash here and there can really help your picture come alive.

By the way, what was the colour of the backdrop?

White.

Remember the following equation:

White – light = black

Similarly, in practice, black + enough light = white.

And finally, a real person: my son Daniel (“sigh, not again, Dad”):

Daniel, photo Michael Willems

Daniel in colour

But here’s the thing. After seeing it, he grinned and said “Rad.”. That‘s a first!


Afternoon = Gel

Another flash tip for you today.

Later afternoon pictures. You can make them look better by adding your own “golden hour” glow. Like this:

Patio at dusk, photo by Michael Willems

Patio at dusk, photo by Michael Willems

To take a picture like this, you might do the following:

  • Use an on-camera flash while there is still light;
  • First set your camera’s exposure (ISO, aperture, shutter) to get a nice background sky. Ignore the foreground for now.
  • Then position yourself such that there is no close subject (remember the inverse square law).
  • Use a half CTO gel on the flash (I used a Honl Photo half CTO gel on the speedstrap on my 580EX);
  • White balance to “Flash”.
  • Take a test shot. If the flash is too bright or too dark, use Flash compensation (+ or 1) to adjust. If the background is not right, adjust ISO, shutter or aperture.
  • A wide angle lens makes it easier.

And Bob’s your uncle: nice colours.

Setting sun

Look at this photo I shot of Yasmin Tajik, Sunday in Nelson, outside Las Vegas, NV:

Yasmin in Nelson, NV, photo by Michael Willems

Yasmin in Nelson, NV

Nice late afternoon light, and lit by the late afternoon sun.

Except it wasn’t. Yes, it was late afternoon, but Yasmin was not lit by sunlight. She was lit by my flash.

  • The flash was on camera, since I was traveling without light stands. I would normally take it off camera. But when you can’t, as long as you are mixing light, it is OK to shoot with the flash on camera. Outdoors, therefore, straight into your subject’s face is OK, if you have to.
  • Since both I and the subject were moving constantly, I used TTL rather than manual flash.
  • The nice late afternoon colour on Yasmin? Glad you asked. A 1/2 CTO Honl Photo gel on the flash’s Speed Strap, and the camera’s White Balance set to “Flash”.
  • I ensured that the shutter speed would stay below the camera’s sync speed of 1/300th of a second, in order to give the flash maximum range (“Fast Flash/FP Flash” would decrease available power drastically, which at this distance is not a good thing). Doable late afternoon, when the light is not as bright.

As you see, even very simple means can lead to well-lit pictures.

Flash tip

When your flash is grossly overexposing your pictures…

  • The flash is not seated correctly, or the contacts are dirty
  • The flash is set to MAN (manual), instead of TTL
  • You are using + Flash Exposure Compensation (or on a Nikon, also Exposure Compensation).
  • You are simply too close.

Those are four obvious starting points.

Here is me, pictured by David Honl in Las Vegas the other evening. Using a Leica X1 with off camera flash equipped with CTO gel and Honl Photo Traveller 8 softbox.

Michael Willems, shot by photographer David Honl

Michael Willems, shot by David Honl using a Leica and flash

Quick flash tip

It is July 4 in the US, so my American friends will all be taking pictures today. So here is a quick tip for you flash users out there!

If you want a slightly warmer look – the “late afternoon light” look – to your flash pictures, simply do this:

  • Put a slight warming gel (e.g. a quarter CTO gel, or a half CTO gel) on your flash (i.e. slightly yellow). I use a Honl gel with a Honl speedstrap on my 580EX flash.
  • Set your white balance to “flash”.

Result: your subject (close by, lit by flash) looks slightly warm.. instant late afternoon “golden hour” light even at noon.

Student by Michael Willems

Student, slightly warmed up

That was a student at last week’s “Creative Urban Photography” course. In not very warm light!

Flash consistency – a note

So you are surprised that your flash pictures always turn out differently and unpredictably, especially when using automatic (“TTL”) flash?

Then this may help:

A. First, worry about the background, ambient light:

  1. First, decide “should the background light do any work?”. If you are using an automatic or semi-automatic mode, like P, Av/A or Tv/S, the camera will try to light the background well. so it will not just be the flash doing the lighting.
  2. Realise that there are limits to the previous: on Canon always in P mode, and on Nikon in P and A when “Slow Flash” is disabled, the camera will limit shutter speed to avoid blur.
  3. So if you want total predictability of the background, use manual, and set your meter to the desired ambient lighting level (I recommend you start at -2 stops, i.e. the light meter points to “-2”). See a recipe below.

In a typical room, a starting point might be 1/30th second, f/2.8, 400 ISO, and the flash pointed behind you. Auto ISO is not recommended!

B. Then, concern yourself with the flash:

  1. The foreground is mainly lit by flash, not by your Av/Tv/ISO settings.
  2. Canon cameras in particular try to avoid overexposing part of the picture, so even a small reflective object in the flash picture can result in a dark, mainly underexposed photo.
  3. The flash exposure metering is, on most cameras, biased toward your focus points. So the camera looks mainly where you focus.
  4. If you take a picture of something bright (a bride in the snow) the camera will underexpose it to give you a grey bride. If you take a picture of a dark object (a groom in a coalmine) the camera will overexpose it to give you a grey groom.
  5. To fix this, you can turn the flash up and down using flash exposure compensation (“Flash Exp Comp”).
  6. Play with the light: aim your flash at walls or ceilings if you can. and create a “virtual umbrella”.

Try it and see if you get more consistent!

Here’s a typical recent flash picture, of a nice photographer I met recently:

Flash picture

A flash photo - yes really.

Doesn’t look like your usual “deer in the headlights” snap? That’s because I was following my own suggestions above. Note I also used a Honl Photo 1/2 CTO gel, to make the flash light look a bit more like the background Tungsten light. I like warm backgrounds, but I often make them a tiny bit less warm this way.

Reiterated Trick

I mentioned this once before as an aside, but it is worth a post: a trick that tells you which flash is casting what light in your images.

Say I am lighting a person (like me) with a flash outside. Nice:

Subject lit with an off-camera flash

Subject lit with an off-camera flash

But how can I be sure this light is from the flash? I mean, is that really all the flash? Or is the subject in the sun? Or in a mix of light?

Solution: put a coloured gel onto the flash. Now you see:

Subject lit with an off-camera gelled flash

Subject lit with an off-camera gelled flash

Ah. So it was the flash! Not only that – you can see exactly where it is -and importantly, where it is not – illuminating the subject.

Useful trick, eh? One more reason to always carry gels along with you.