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 …
My pick for this week’s image in the Alive for 365 project, is this previously posted image of Manhattan being engulfed in a rain storm. This grand view of Manhattan across the Hudson river, was from the top floor of the Jersey Hyatt. A quiet moment while waiting for a bride to arrive …
This topic – balancing flash and ambient exposure – seems to one that many newer photographers struggle with. The big hurdle seems to be the basic starting point – how do you decide on the exposure for each?
I’d like to explore this topic a bit with this post. The trigger for this was a question that someone emailed me regarding an image in my book on flash photography. Instead of answering the question directly, I thought that a wider answer might be more illuminating. We’re still on that perpetual quest for more aha! moments. So let’s see where we head with this. (I’ll come back to the specific question and answer at the end of this.)
But why do we even want to add flash to a subject when the available light is soft?
The answer is that with flash we can control the direction and quality of light, and create a more dynamic image.
We don’t necessarily just use flash to avoid camera shake and / or poor exposure in low light. We use flash to create better light on our subject. We can ‘clean up’ the light that falls on our subject. Or to create more dynamic and interesting light. It’s about control. We decide. So where do we start?
The simplest approach for me, when I work in fairly flat and even ambient light, is to under-expose the ambient light by a certain amount. Then we add flash for correct exposure. So how much do we under-expose the ambient light by? Well, it depends. Usually a stop is good. Two stops can also work. If you’ve seen some of the images in fashion and music magazines where the subject is in a pool of light .. yet, the sunlit cityscape is darker, then that is because the photographer under-exposed the ambient light by 2-3 stops. Even in bright sunlight. So we have some leeway. That should ease some of the anxiety.
Under-exposing the ambient light by a stop, and then adding flash … is but one scenario, and one recipe. This approach won’t apply to every possible situation you might encounter .. but it’s a good starting point in grasping that Big Question – where do we even start in balancing flash and ambient light?
Let’s start of with an example where the previous method wouldn’t work:
settings: 1/125 @ f3.5 @ 800 ISO
lighting: Q-flash T5D-R, in TTL mode diffused by medium softbox to the right
(A speedlight in the softbox would’ve worked just as well here.)
Here’s the image without flash, just so we have a reference ..
Beach houses at Muizenberg Beach, South Africa; Sept ‘92
In trying to find an interesting image for my entry this week in the Alive for 365 project, I went back into my archives to some colour transparencies I had scanned. It’s still too cold to venture out and hunt new photographs, so I took the comfortable way out. In going through my older photographs, I noticed that in my landscape photography, there were two common links.
The second link isn’t a thematic one, but rather based on technique. Most of them used a polarizer filter. For me this was, and still is, my most useful accessory when photographing landscapes. .
The complementary yellow and near-violet colours here are saturated to a deep colour. The red and white lighthouse is then neatly positioned between these two bands of colours.
Lighthouse at Cape Aghulas; Sept ‘92
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One of my favourite landscape photos at the time was this backlit scene, taken near Fouriesburg in the Free State, South Africa. May ‘95
At one point, while walking around in the veldt here, I turned around and looked back from where I had come … and saw the landscape looking entirely different when partially backlit. A simple change of viewpoint completely changed the way I saw the light fall on the landscape. What appealed to me here was the subtle way the lines and colours converged. A polarizer filter saturated the colours even more by cutting down on the glare.
I have already posted several images from the extended photo session with Sarah and Mark – but here is the epic video. The intention with these photo sessions was to expand Sarah’s portfolio as much as we could.
We started off at Coney Island, doing a session with Sarah and Mark at the edge of the beach with Sarah in swimwear .. and from there it went into more of a lifestyle shoot with the two of them on the boardwalk. Later on we had Sarah run towards the camera in sportswear. But we rained out with a massive thunderstorm rolling in over New York. We picked up the photo session again in Battery Park. Much of this session and onwards weren’t caught on video since the-other-Neil, who assisted me, had to stay with the van and drive around looking for parking while we continued with the shoot. There is a short section though, showing some of the Battery Park session. From there we moved up to Times Square to photograph a very glamorous looking Sarah in evening wear in Times Square.
Hopefully all of this will be a great view of the approach during a photo session, and how there is no single static way of doing things. Various techniques are used; the lighting too is varied; all to give a wide range to the look of the final images ..
Because of the positive comments I’ve had to the recent addition of video clips that show a glimpse of how I work, I thought I’d show the progression of an idea. Not just how the actual image was made, but how the idea progressed.
The photo above of Sarah and Mark at Coney Island, is from the day-long photo session where we went to different locations in New York. Where this image above started, was in a previous sequence ..
On Friday June 19th, (along with my assistant, the-other-Neil), I met up with 3 models in New York for a photo session with each. The intention was to try out different lighting techniques, different equipment .. and just to have fun and see what we can come up with.
First we roamed the Meat-packing District and Greenwhich with Aleona and Laura Lee, and then later on met up with Sasha in Brooklyn. This video clip will be a glimpse of working with three gorgeous models in an ever-fascinating city. Enjoy! : ) I think what might be interesting with this video, is to see the wider view in relation to the resulting image.
Some of the images have already been posted here, and you will see more of them over time. And some will eventually appear in a book on the topic of off-camera lighting to be published next year.
The lighting ranged from just available light, to using off-camera Q-flash with a softbox, and later on with Sasha, some video lights. A flexible approach that allows for divergent results, helping to keep the final mix of images fresh.
Depth of Field (DoF) is one of those elementary factors in photography which seem to mystify most (new) photographers. A question that I’m often asked is, “How do you know how much depth of field you need?” Now anyone who has delved into the topic and has done some research knows that you soon stagger back .. your head spinning trying to tie together all the concepts: circle of confusion, focal length, subject distance, size of enlargement, format size, hyperfocal distance, and so on.
But a working approach might just be simpler than that …
