A new feature has been added to this blog – a listing where you can see which posts have had comments recently added to them.
I try to reply to all the questions posted on the Tangents blog, but quite often it is on a post that is buried deep inside. So you wouldn’t see it automatically unless you RSS that particular feed. And how many of us do that anyway?
I felt that a lot of the information and usefulness of this website were hidden to the view of even the regular visitor. And quite often the value of a post is expanded by the comments that are added later.
So now there is a feature in the side-bar at the top right, where you can see which posts here have been active. It’s a small thing but I really believe it extends the value of this site. So get in there and explore some of the older posts which are still very much active … and add your own questions and comments.
Something I kick against when I try to teach others about flash photography, is the use of short-cut phrases. Those truisms that are supposed to help the understanding of how to mix flash with ambient light, can often mislead you since they don’t give you all the information.
These are reductions of the way that shutter speed, aperture and ISO inter-relate with available light and flash … and then those two phrases become misleading. On top of that, they become meaningless when you work with TTL flash.
Instead, I would really urge anyone who wants to come to grips with understanding how flash and available light correlate via your camera settings, to try and get the wider view on all of this, and understand how manual flash and TTL flash differ.
I encountered another one of those misleading phrases recently while teaching someone. When I showed a sequence of images as part of the explanation of balancing manual flash with available light, the reply was … “shutter speed controls the background exposure”. Except .. in this case, the automatic answer was entirely wrong.
I believe many photographers hesitate in spending money on a full-featured flashgun, thinking it is better to start off with a smaller and less expensive flashgun until they “get more into it”, or understand flash photography better. Yet, this conservative approach to getting a full-featured powerful flashgun works against them being able to achieve the results they would like.
The top-of-the-range speedlights offer features and abilities that will enable you as a photographer, whether it is because of the extra power, or the way the flashhead swivels and rotates, or some of the other features. All of these combine in making the more expensive flashguns the better choice, since they do make it easier to bounce the light from your flash .. and it is in bouncing your flash when indoors that you get the best results from a speedlight when it is mounted on the camera.
The recent flash photography workshops have expanded a bit in scope to include video light. Since part of the program is how to deal with balancing flash with video light, and overcome the widely different colour balance .. it was a short step to just include the use of video light. Whether using available light or flash or video light or any kind of lighting, at the heart of it is the idea of looking at the light you have .. and the direction and quality of the light.
The effervescent Katie was one of our models, and here you can see how the background light turns a deep shade of blue when the colour balance is adjusted for Tungsten light. (The light in the background is daylight filtering through skylights over the courtyard.)
Thank you again to everyone who made this workshop a success!
Precious was one of our models at the recent workshop in Hoboken. This image was taken during part of the practical session in the afternoon where emphasis was placed on getting soft directional light from an on-camera speedlight. The trick here is to absolutely have no hint of light coming from the camera’s view-point. To do this, I once again used the Black Foamie Thing ™ to control the light from my on-camera speedlight, shielding the light from the flash. I pointed my speedlight 90′ to my left, so that the light reflected back towards Precious from that direction, to give this striking portrait.
I’d like to thank everyone who attended this workshop and once again made it a great experience for everyone.
This workshop was the second-to-last of the current series, and like most of the other recent workshops, was sold out. So if you’re interested in attending one of the workshops taking place during the rest of the year, or would like to help arrange a workshop in a city local to you, drop me a note.
Valerie is the striking model I used for my flash photography workshop held in Nashville the past week. As I mentioned in that post, I will explain a bit more about how I meter for manual flash when using the softbox outside. And just to bring everyone up to speed, here is the set-up as I use it - a speedlight set to manual, pointed into a softbox, and triggered with a PocketWizard.
The lighting is simple – the softbox is held to the my left-hand side in this instance. The colours and contrast is something I adjusted in ACR (hosted in Bridge), as part of my usual post-processing workflow. And here is the available light image before flash was added.
As you can see in this image, I let the available light under-expose by a stop. I metered for the available light with a hand-held meter here, but I could just as well have used the histogram method .. and then I take my exposure down by 1 stop. I could do this via my shutter speed or aperture or ISO choice .. or a combination of those.
The lightmeter that I use is the Sekonic L-358 (B&H). I have it with the built-in module that triggers the PocketWizards as soon as you press the metering button on the flashmeter. It makes it much less clumsy to use. But using the histogram and selective metering off her white shirt gets you there as well with as much speed.
My settings for the sequence of images here were: 1/200th @ f5.6 @ 200 ISO.
The ambient light was metered at 1/200th @ f4 @ 200 ISO. Once again, this could’ve been done with either the flashmeter here, or by using the histogram.
I then changed my settings so that I would underexpose the ambient light by a stop. I could’ve changed any of those settings, or a combination of them. In this case I simply dialled down my aperture to f5.6 since I was already at the minimum ISO for this specific camera. Then I set my speedlight to a specific power setting …
Manual flash is determined by 4 factors: – aperture
- ISO
- distance from the light source to subject
- and flash power setting.
In this instance, we have determined what aperture and ISO we would like to be at … which just leaves distance and power of our speedlight to be determined.
So how far do we hold the softbox from the model?
This is where we balance out the decision based on a couple of factors. The larger the light source (in relation to our subject), the softer the light .. but we also need a comfortable working distance so that the softbox doesn’t appear in the image. If we hold our softbox too far away, then the light progressively becomes harder. Therefore, in practice, we would slow ourselves down if we worked precisely according to textbook formulas and set-ups. It is just easier to be flexible about it on a shoot, and find that sweet spot where the light still wraps around your subject to an extent .. and you have enough space to move around without having to change the light’s positioning too often.
Here, as part of the workshop demonstration, someone was holding the softbox up for me on a monopod. This makes it much easier to change the position of the light as the model moves around.
When we’ve figured out the approximate positioning of the speedlight and softbox, then we need to adjust the power to where we get f5.6 – but there is some flex built into doing it this way. If we need a 1/3rd stop more or less light from our speedlight and softbox, we can just move the softbox closer or further away by a slight amount. This is an easier way to adjust the manual flash that continually hoisting it up and down to adjust the power ratio on the back of the speedlight.
And then of course there is also the leeway built into using the RAW file format. In the image at the top, I had to pull down the exposure slider in ACR by 2/3 rds of a stop. It seems that somewhere during the shoot the person holding the light up, might have moved a little closer. But this is less of a concern while taking the photo, than keeping the rhythm of the photo sesssion. Rather than a stop-start way of adjusting the lighting, it is better to take up that slack in exposure precision, while editing the image.
So while it might seem that there are a confusing number of settings we need to adjust, they aren’t entirely random and they do fall into place with a certain amount of logic.
And to re-affirm everything, here is a previous post which also covers this topic - so, what are your settings?
Stephanie Zettl, who attended the flash photography workshop in St Louis, sent me a few photos of me busy during the workshop. It’s funny to see myself so absorbed in the middle of teaching others. Even more so with the titles .. there’s How To Work A Lightmeter Neil and there’s Explaining Neil and even Praying Neil. So instead of my usual write-up as a review on a workshop, I thought I’d just post these images.
Thank you Stephanie! And thank you to everyone who attended, and a special thank you to Barry Davis who graciously hosted the workshop at his home, and arranged for the various venues and models.
The recent workshop in Nashville, TN was a great success – kindly hosted by Harry and Karan Simpson in their studio; with a guest spot by Chuck Arlund who did a presentation on how he uses video lights. Thank you to all the cool people who attended!
I even got to explore some of Nashville the previous evening with Valerie (the model above), and her husband. Some of the images from that has already been posted here. And the next blog posting will be on how we set up our lighting for this image. Check back in!
Something I was looking forward to this past week when I visited Nashville, was to meet Chuck Arlund. I’ve been an admirer of his Fashion photography for quite a while now, ever since he started posting on the Digital Wedding Forum. To my eye, his work stands out above pretty much anyone else. Chuck isn’t that well-known yet outside of the DWF, but I have no doubt he will become a big name in the industry. His lighting ranges from interesting to impeccable. His lighting and styling of his photos, as well as the styling of his models are always something to be studied.
Chuck Arlund has just started a new blog – Arlund, the blog – where he now only shows his work, but also shares his techniques and ideas, and the way he uses lighting. And lots more. Even though he has just started the blog, I know he has a ton of info and photos ready. There are more posts brewing! So check his blog out, bookmark it, RSS it .. whatever you do, make sure you check it out often.
Chuck was kind enough to actually help me out on the day of the workshop in Nashville. Ever the clown, I caught him in mid-air while he was carrying the softboxes we had been using. I tripped the speedlights with PocketWizards as he jumped.
So just for those who would be interested in the details of the shot, I was at 1/250th @ f5.6 @ 400 ISO. As always when using non-HSS flash in bright conditions, I was at maximum sync speed. I didn’t want to go lower, because I wanted to minimize blur from his movement. I had the speedlights in the softboxes set to 1/16th power because I didn’t want the white diffuser panels to completely blow out. The highlights on the sidewalk were enhanced in post-processing, and the entire image was popped a bit with some of the Totally Rad Actions. And here’s the link for the details on the softbox set-ups that are used in the workshops.
The light on Valerie here is from the evening sky, some city lights, and some of the parking lot’s lights. All of this added up to give me enough light to use for a lovely impromptu available-light portrait of her, right there in the middle of the parking lot.
My settings were: 1/160th @ f1.4 @ 1250 ISO
My equipment: Nikon D3 and Nikon 85mm f1.4
The light was soft, but wasn’t necessarily the best for a portrait where she is simply looking at the camera. Because of the surrounding buildings, the light was fairly top-heavy. So I asked Valerie to lift her gaze slightly – and in this way more light fell onto her face and kept her eyes from being shrouded in shadow. I controlled how the available light appeared in this image, by directing Valerie and positioning her.
This brings me to a point which bugs me when I see it mentioned on the forums – the idea that using a high-ISO capable camera will necessarily free you from using flash. This simply isn’t true. Being able to shoot in low light doesn’t necessarily mean the lighting on your subject is good. Very often you can improve on the existing light, whether with some flash or video light or a reflector.
Here’s an example from the same photo session out on the streets of Nashville, where Valerie and I were roaming around in the early evening, seeing what interesting portraits we could come up with.
Using the same camera and lens, I liked how the defocused background lights (traffic lights, cars and buildings), appeared behind her. The background looks great, and I have a beautiful model .. but the lighting on her is very uneven and unflattering.
I decided to improve on this by bouncing flash off that side of the building you can see in the top image. It is quite far away – maybe 5 car lengths or so – a fairly extreme example of on-camera bounce flash.
But what gave me the ability to do so, was the fast aperture lens, and the high ISO.
The additional light from the bounced flash, opened up her features. The lighting isn’t perfect, but to my eye it is a huge improvement on the original image where I simply relied on the available light as presented to me. I do like the way though that the light on her now varies and creates a soft random pattern on her skin.
The point I am trying to make (or perhaps labour here), is that simply having a camera that gives you the freedom to shoot in low light, (and having fast lenses), don’t immediately imply that you can forget about looking at the quality of light that you have.
You still need to figure out if the light is ideal or interesting or complements your subject … and then supplement your lighting if you see fit. In other words, having the ability to shoot at a high ISO is no substitute for continuing to look at the direction and quality of light.
