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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 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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December 1, 2010
wedding portraits with multiple light sources
edited on Dec 08, 2010 :
contest winner has been announced, with feedback from Josh about this photograph
When we’ve previously featured photographs that we tried to reverse engineer, there was a great response by readers of the Tangents blog. Similarly, many participated in the recent Photoshop contest. So I’ve decided that we should combine the two. Maybe even make it a regular event.
The contest then is to reverse engineer this photograph in terms of the lighting.
The winner gets a $50 B&H gift card!
Again, the photograph to be analyzed was shot by my friend Josh Lynn. It was taken during the romantic portrait session during a recent wedding. The setup featured 5 light sources, and Josh was kind enough to give us a head-start with this diagram of how the lights were placed:
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November 15, 2010
portrait using a gridded softbox
It’s been about a year since I last took a more formal portrait of my daughter Janine. Last year it was her with the steam-punk goggles, when I used a beauty dish (with a sock) as lighting. During a restaurant dinner last night I noticed Janine had ‘LOVE’ scribbled on both her forearms with a felt marker. I asked her about it, and she explained the idea behind ‘To Write Love On Her Arms‘. So I decided to include this tonight in the portrait of her.
Lighting her and the words on her arms was a slight challenge. I wanted a moody portrait, instead of just flooding it with even light from something like bounced flash …
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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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July 14, 2010
For this part of a photo session with Johannie, we worked in an alley. The light was very uneven, with some swathes of sunlight falling directly on her. (See the image below for the photo without flash.) To get rid of this uneven sunlight falling on her, we have to add at least as much light on her as the brightest areas lit by sunlight. In the example above, our exposure is set to 1/250 @ f13 @ 200 ISO and we can see from the bright patch of light on her shoulder, that we’re at the edge of acceptable exposure. Any wider on our aperture, or higher on our ISO or slower on our shutter speed, and we’ll start to lose detail in the sunlit areas.
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June 10, 2010
To keep the sprawl of articles on the topic of off-camera flash together that exists on this site, I’ve created an additional page to the main flash photography pages, Simply titled, off-camera flash, it lists all the relevant articles. A snippet from the actual article will help it from being more easy for the eye to scan and find something relevant and of interest. I will keep adding future articles posted to the blog, and keep it as a handy resource.
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April 28, 2010
flash photography – background exposure and flash
When I saw this dramatic sky with the approaching storm during our recent shoot at Coney Island, I knew I wanted to photograph our model against it. By the time I actually started taking photos, the raindrops were already spattering around us. So there was little time to work.
I knew I wanted a brooding sky. Now, depending on how I chose my exposure, I could’ve had a much the sky appear much brighter, or just a little bit brighter than shown here. There’s a whole range of possibilities in how I could’ve exposed for my background, and we can choose a wide range of settings. In this sense there really isn’t any “incorrect exposure” for this particular background. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to choose our settings such that we’d over-expose our model.
This is idea holds true while we consider the sky as our main background. The street areas, and the amusement park areas are indeed under-exposed. They do appear too dark if I had chosen that as my specific background. But the sky as such, isn’t under-exposed. This might seem a semantic difference, but it is an important distinction to make, in that quite often there is no specific under- or over-exposure, but just a way that YOU decide to expose for certain tones. I simple chose to expose for the sky as darker tones. And I could’ve placed them “anywhere”, even as near-black.
Here is the test shot without flash …
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April 8, 2010
balancing flash with available light / ambient exposure
Since many of the questions I get on the Tangents blog relate to balancing flash with available light, I want to pull the replies together into a single article. A reference point again, instead of the replies scattered throughout this website.
The questions most often revolve around:
- exposure metering for available light ,
- exposure metering for TTL flash and ambient light,
- whether to use manual flash or TTL flash,
- flash exposure compensation (FEC),
- choice of aperture,
- maximum flash sync speed,
- metering for off-camera manual flash and ambient light
- choosing our settings to balance manual flash and ambient light,
- whether to drag the shutter, or not.
The answer to the questions about how to balance flash and ambient light, is often along the lines of “it depends”. It really depends on:
- the scenario you have, and
- what you want to achieve.
Now that all sounds quite vague. Being told that you can pretty much “do what you want”, doesn’t help if you don’t even quite know where to start. Most of the answers are in the linked articles there, and on this page on my Top 20 Flash Photography Tips.
But, let’s look at one specific image, and analyze what our options are, and see if we can make sense of it all …
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Filed under: exposure metering, flash photography, lighting, photo shoot, technique — Tags: exposure metering, flash photography, flash photography technique, flash photography techniques, flash photography tips, off-camera lighting for portraits, photography workshop — Neil vN @ 5:38 am
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