It’s a constant debate whether it is a good idea to use a UV / skylight filter on your lens for protection. There are viable arguments for either choice.
During this recent shoot with Jeannie Dee, I immediately noticed that with these heavily backlit portraits, I was getting an unusual amount of flare …
… and removing the filter on front of the lens immediately helped. Noticeably so!
Shooting towards a bright light source or a bright background,
is one time where NOT using a filter makes absolute sense.
You risk getting lens flare, no matter how good the filter is.
This amount of flare doesn’t necessarily mean the image is unusable though …
In many of the articles on the Tangents blog, I’ve described the way that I bounce flash indoors when photographing events. This photo is an example from a recent wedding – the bridesmaids are watching the bride and groom dancing.
The important thing to notice here is that everyone there is evenly lit, whether closer to the camera, or further away. This is achieved by NOT bouncing the flash off the ceiling towards my subject … but rather to flag my flash so that there is no direct flash falling on my subject. And then I bounce my flash off some point equi-distant to everyone. Then the light has the same distance to travel to everyone … and everyone will be evenly illuminated by the flash. NO need for the local correction brush in ACR / Lightroom. It’s all done in camera!
This technique is also very useful when photographing corporate events. You will inevitably have someone closer to the camera – possibly with his back to you. The way then to get everyone equally well exposed, is to bounce off a wall or the ceiling to the side of everyone … in such a way that there is equal amount of light on everyone.
A regular reader of the Tangents website, Alex Perry, works as an event photographer in Washington DC … and he just posted an insightful article about this technique on his blog. With his kind permission, I’m including the illustrative diagrams here. But check out his blog post to see his description of how he uses this at events.
The idea here is that if you bounce flash towards the group using a bounce card or that infamous piece of tupperware … you still have the people closest to you over-exposed compared to the rest of the frame.
In contrast to that, here is what happens when you flag your flash, bouncing your flash ONLY off a surface parallel to everyone in the frame …
Hopefully these diagrams will help in making the concept more clear. Thank you for this excellent contribution, Alex!
This enigmatic image of the courtyard behind the Palais Royal in Paris,
is my choice for this week’s entry for the Alive for 365 project.
I was captivated by the architectural art, and waited quite a while until ‘something’ happened. This was in the days of still shooting transparency film, and not digital where you can shoot something near endlessly. I had to wait for the shot … and when these two women walked across the frame, I waited until the moment when I felt they were in just the right spot.
For me, in this photograph they are visually in a position where your eye follows the lines in the frame. If they had been in a different place such as between the rows of striped pillars stumps, then your eye would’ve stopped there. Instead your eye now roams across the image.
Chuck Arlund is a Fashion photographer based in Nashville whose work constantly impresses me. As a friend, I occasionally have the privilege of getting to interrogate him on his technique. What surprises me every time then, is the simplicity of his lighting. His setups are rarely complex, but always effective. I feel quite fortunate that he agreed to a guest spot this week to explain more about his approach to on-location lighting. (Also check out his blog for photographers.)
simple and effective on-location lighting techniques
Nikon’s TTL flash system is generally accepted as being quite exceptional. The camera and speedlight working together according to various algorithms to control the flash exposure. The TTL flash exposure will depend on various factors – the tonality of the subject and scene; the brightness of the scene; and how the camera interprets the sections of the metering pattern. The other factors quite possibly also includes data from the lens.
How these factors inter-relate, we can only guess at. We can make educated guesses; and many photographers have taken time and effort to do test shoots to see how the cameras and speedlights work. To make things even more interesting, Nikon offers two modes of TTL flash metering: TTL and TTL BL.
The way I understand this to work, is that with TTL BL flash metering, the camera takes the ambient light into account when calculating the flash exposure. With TTL flash metering, the flash metering would appear to be de-coupled from the ambient metering.
Similarly, with Canon, you have Average / Evaluative flash metering for TTL flash. (This is set on the camera body via the custom functions.) Again, the way I understand this to work (and I’ll gladly be corrected or fine-tuned on this), is that with Evaluative TTL flash metering, the camera takes the ambient light into account. And with Average TTL flash metering, the camera is less biased by the available light..
So which TTL flash exposure mode to use? TTL or TLL BL? In the end, I work in a fairly simplistic way …
Last weekend I had the great pleasure of photographing Jeannie D, a well-known South African TV personality. Actually, “well-known” is an understatement – she’s a bit of a star.
The shoot was for the cover of Top Billing magazine. The cover image had specific requirements for the setup of the scene – a Manhattan apartment, with a view of the city in the background. I’ll post more of the actual cover shoot later on, but in the meantime wanted to show some of the portraits of Jeannie D that I got in between the TV crew setting up, and the setting being prepared …
For the shoot I brought in 3 Q-flashes and a barrage of umbrellas and softboxes and reflectors, as well as a Profoto AcuteB 600R kit (B&H) with softboxes. But I photographed a number of portraits, such as the one above, using just the available light in the apartment. The apartment was a corner apartment, and so had a lot of light flooding in from two sides. The light then reflected back from the white walls inside. It was like shooting inside a massive softbox. You just couldn’t go wrong!
It’s done! As mentioned a few days ago, the entire Tangents blog has been moved over to a VPS. The site should now load markedly faster for everyone, and be a less frustrating experience to try and navigate.
Also, it would have been a seamless transition for everyone. Thank you to the techies at Bluehost who helped me move this blog over without a hiccup … and thank you to the techies at WiredTree (the new host of the neilvn site and Tangents blog), for making it a painless transition.
Those who would scrutinize a little closer, will notice the URL has changed. No more planetneil. The splash page for planetneil will remain for now .. but the Tangents blog is now in a new home … neilvn.com/tangents/
You can update your bookmarks if you want, but the redirects should take care of it all.
So let’s get down to the important stuff again … photography!
This week’s guest blog post is by a Calgary wedding photographer, Mark Pawlyszyn. He is one of the standout members on the Digital Wedding Forum, where his work easily caught my eye. His style in his wedding photography has steadily become more impressive over the course of just a few years. As such I am very honoured that he agreed to a guest spot on the Tangents blog.
Before I start into the main area of my blog article, I wanted to say that I really admire what Neil has done here. Tangents has always been one of the best resources around for learning flash and photography techniques. When I first discovered this place there was a wealth of information about how much you can do with very little equipment, and although over the years a lot has been added to this foundation, what Neil does so well is to show how great lighting techniques can be readily accessible to just about anyone.
But what if you actually enjoy time-consuming or complicated setups? For good or bad, this is something I tend to do. My motto is, why use one flash when you can use ten? (To be honest, I think the most I’ve only ever used at once was eight). I also like to plan things in advance, to have certain ideas for a wedding and try something new. It’s cool to have new poses and locations, but I also like to have complete concepts, like a theme within the images.
This image is one example that comes to mind is from a wedding I did last winter. The bride contacted me shortly before the wedding to say that she wanted some photos in the nearby cemetery. She wasn’t into anything dark or gothic; she just wondered about the lives of the people there and if anyone still thought of them. So she sometimes visited, just to kind of make sure someone still thought of them. When she told me this I had an idea for an image—something positive, but with a moody atmosphere. I sketched it out and sent her an email to see if she’d be up for it …
There are some changes and improvements to this site coming up ..
The biggest improvement is that I am moving the entire site to a new web host. As the Tangents blog gradually got more visitors over the past few years, it has outgrown the capabilities of the web host I’ve been using. I’ve had people tell me about slow access times and time-outs – things which I’ve also experienced.
So the entire site is being moved over to a completely new webhost offering VPS and much much faster access times. So in the next few days I’ll be busy with that change-over. Hopefully it will be a smooth transition and all that you’ll experience is a sudden surge in speed sometime in the next week!
