Light from a Beauty Dish has a distinctive look - an interesting combination of soft light with a pronounced fall-off to the edges. With a softbox there is a lot of scattering of the light, making it exactly that soft light source that it is named after. A softbox is therefore quite forgiving of how you position the light in relation to your subject. The beauty dish in comparison, used as a single light source, will give light that can be both dramatic and pleasing. (Not nearly as hard as video light or direct unmodified Read more inside...
shooting in bright sunlight with off-camera fill-flash
This adorable kid looked at the camera briefly because I was singing to him. Kids are devious little creatures. They know when you're calling them and will purposely ignore you. So you have to be crafty too in getting their attention. Of course, you have to be ready for the moment ... and shoot a lot. Sometimes that Decisive Moment is to be found in the edit.
The photo session was from 12 noon to 1pm. So the sun was high overhead. We're often told that the sun directly overhead isn't the best time to take photographs. While Read more inside...
Positioning your subject - direction of light & choice of background
Taking cover from the rain under an awning during a photography workshop in New York, we ended up in this spot against a wall that was painted black. However, looking along the wall at an angle, the black paint of the wall reflected the light from behind. This completely changed the character of the background. Since the available light was low level, and not flattering, we added some light from an off-camera flash in a softbox.
Shooting nearly completely in line with the flash, the light on Catherine was Read more inside...
off camera flash for portraits of the bridal couple
My friend, Josh Lynn, just posted this spectacular wedding photograph. It does look like he used flash there, so I thought this would make a another good example to see if we can 'reverse engineer' a photograph in terms of his settings and setup.
I first had a guess at how he set this up; and then had a look at the EXIF data, and this revealed the true story. See if you can decipher this image yourself, without scrolling down at first ... Read more inside...
Photography composition - Look at your background!
The impact in this photo of our model, Jessica, relies equally on her looks and pose, the lighting, and the background. The background was very specifically chosen by how *I* positioned myself in relation to my subject. The background was out of focus neon lights in Times Square. I composed the photo very tightly with a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. By compressing the perspective with that tight focal length, I can select exactly what I want to include in the image. And that's the key here to the composition - deciding what to Read more inside...
With 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 Read more inside...
I had the opportunity to meet up with a fellow South African photographer, Jaco Fourie, who was visiting New York for a few days. I knew Jaco's work from some of the forums that he posts on, and his work with flash was invariably quite impressive .. so I looked on this as a great opportunity to see another photographer work and learn from him.
I arranged for two models, and we met up in Manhattan for these photo sessions. Jaco specifically wanted scenic views of Manhattan, and incorporate the model as part of the urban Read more inside...
