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October 12, 2011
example: direct off-camera flash vs softbox (model: Ulorin Vex)
Ulorin Vex posing for us during part of the on-location session of the flash photography workshops which I presented in San Francisco earlier this year. Ulorin Vex is of course absolutely stunning, as always. While I often direct models how they should pose, this one is all her doing . Not even I can improve on that.
The image here at the top was shot with an off-camera softbox – my usual preferred Lastolite Ezybox softbox. The direction of the light here should immediately reveal the approximate position where the light was positioned. Just as comparison, we removed the two baffles of the Lastolite, to see how direct off-camera flash would compare. We kept the softbox hull in place, so it did help contain the spread of light a bit. As you’d expect, the results look more dramatic.
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December 17, 2010
photography questions & answers
Continuing with the regular theme where I look at search engine queries that point to this site, and answer a selection of 10 questions more directly…
01) how do I take an exposure reading with my camera?
Taking an exposure reading with your camera is at one level as simple as pointing your camera at the scene, and zero-ing the needle, by using the shutter speed & aperture & ISO controls. But, it also gets more complex and interesting than that. The crucial factor to remember is that your camera’s meter reads the light reflected from the scene you are pointing it at.
Looking at the image at the top – my favorite model, Anelisa, again – you will see she is wearing a white top, and she is placed against a dark background. With the composition as above, the chanced are great that most modern cameras with evaluative metering / matrix metering, will get to an exposure reading that is pretty close. The white areas and darker areas will most likely balance each other out.
But the moment that you change the composition by including a lot more white or a lot more of the dark areas, then the exposure your camera sets, will be off. You need to control your exposure settings …
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December 6, 2010
using multiple speedlights with high-speed flash sync
This photo of Angelique, our model, was taken at 1/8000 @ f2 @ 100 ISO. Yes, an eight-thousand-th of a second. I wanted to use the unique look that an ultra-wide lens gives at wide apertures. (Click on the photo for a larger image). However, the shallow depth-of-field necessitated a very high shutter speed. So we were working in high-speed flash sync (HSS) territory here.
I also wanted to under-expose the city-scape and then use flash to highlight the model against the environment. So the lighting had to enhance the look of the wide-aperture wide-angle lens. The lens was the beautiful Canon 24mm f1.4 II (B&H). The camera that I used is the classic Canon 5D.
With high-speed flash sync, there is a dramatic loss in effective power, as shown in this previous article. To overcome this, you need to work very close to your subject, or gang up a number of speedlights as a group.
My friend Yishai, of HD PhotoVideo, had shown me his permanent set-up which he uses whenever he has the need of high-speed flash. His setup consists of four Canon 580 EX ii speedlights (B&H), held together via a Lightware Foursquare Block. To free himself up from line-of-sight restrictions, and give reliable control of these speedlights, Yishai had connected each speedlight to a RadioPopper PX unit. (They worked with perfect reliability during this shoot.) To have the speedlights recycle fast enough, they are powered by two Quantum 2×2 batteries (B&H). By ganging up four speedlights like this, we can start overcoming the loss of flash power when going into HSS.
To show me how these work on an actual shoot, we arranged to meet up with Angelique (on this icy cold day) on this pier in Brooklyn, for a photo session.
Here is what this set up looks like. …
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November 4, 2010
flash photography essentials
An email I received recently from someone explained how she is struggling with flash. The basic building blocks of photography are all there and understood, but it somehow doesn’t gel when she uses flash. She explains how she understands exposure metering, but “the minute I attach my flash, nothing makes sense.” Having read my book and scoured this blog, she admits that at the point where she uses her flash and needs to set aperture and shutter speed, she is completely lost.
I’m sure this is something many many photographers struggle with – just feeling baffled by where to start. So while this stuff at some level is easy once you understand it, flash photography also seems to be one of those subjects where you have to immediately grasp a whole bunch of things for it all to fall into place the first time.
So I’ve been mulling this over in my mind for a few weeks now. I thought of how to break this down in a different manner that would help with that “aha!” moment shining through. I have written a few other articles on how to balance flash with available light, which are all linked in this off camera flash photography page. But it might be that I need to find another approach in my explanation of balancing flash with ambient light. Break things down in a different way. And in breaking things down, we can see where we get stuck. And break that down again. Finally we might get an “oh!?” moment of clarity. And for other regular readers, this might just be a useful reinforcement of the concepts.
Now, at the very start of this,we have to realize there are two exposures taking place – flash and ambient light. This is the key. Then we have figure out how we’re going to combine them. The ‘how’ then includes exposure metering, but also includes direction of light. For this article, we’re just going to look at balancing flash with ambient light. We’re going to use a few simple portraits of our model, Camille, as illustration here for an understanding of how to add flash to ambient light. We’re purposely going to keep it simple to have things fall into place first.
Let’s see where this leads to …
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August 2, 2010
high-speed flash sync / auto FP .. vs .. normal flash
There have been a number of questions about high-speed flash sync (HSS), and how it affects the output from your flash. There were also some questions asked about high-speed flash sync with this recent post where we tried to reverse-engineer a photo.
I decided to do a series of comparison photos, so we can actually see what happens before, at and beyond maximum flash sync speed. And we can also see what happens with high-speed flash sync. To do this, I set up very simple portrait lighting using a single speedlight and a large umbrella. A simple white paper-roll backdrop, and our model, Rachel. Here is the setup in my dining room …
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December 28, 2009
Flash photography is one of those subjects that seem daunting from ‘the outside’. It might seem like you’re chipping away at something so big that it might even appear incomprehensible.
I actually do believe that flash photography is one of those subjects where you have to grasp a number of things simultaneously, before anything makes real sense.
So here is my list of Top 20 Flash Photography Tips.
This page has just been added to the main set of pages on flash photography techniques. My intention is that it might serve as a solid starting point in understanding flash photography, with links leading to various other pages within the site. Hopefully it all converges to the same point – some aha! moments where everything seem a lot clearer. And hopefully that page will help some in making flash photography more accessible a subject than it might appear.
As always, your feedback and questions on that page is welcome.
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