Make Light Real

Neil November 24th, 2008

Environment is one of your greatest tools as a photographer….

Without flash, as above – or with flash as below….if you’re mind is on the right frequency, you should be tuned into how to use that environment to your compositional advantage.

Flash – or added light – has the opportunity to transform an average shady building – into a night time scene where a fairy is running between the trees….

This is not a complicated setup – the flash is about 10 meters away from the bricks, elevated on stand into the tree leaves. The Nikon sb-something-or-other shoe flash is popping at 1/4 power, I’ve lowered my camera ISO to darken the ambient as much as possible within the shutter range for flash 1/250th of a second.  

Exposure Explained:

• Ambient exposure is 1/250th a second @ f2.8 - ISO 200
• Flash altered reality is 11/250th a second @f4 – ISO 100

By dropping my ISO and increasing my aperture, I darkened the overall exposure of the scene by 2 stops.  That is enough to allow the light to make it’s mark – however strong you make the power settings on your flash unit will determine the contrast in the scene.

When you work with your flash off of your camera – the exposure values don’t change as you move closer to the subject or farther away.  Once you’ve freed yourself – take every advantage to work the envionment fully.

Listen to your shadows!

The shadows set the mood of your image.

Aiming your flash unit through the tree leaves gives you interesting and naturalized shadow shapes in your image.  So even though you are using an unnatural light source you have given it natural elements that help with the design and composition of your photo.  Draw your inspiration from these natural elements and build yourself a photo that exceed expectations!

As you’re listening to your shadows and you want to add that vintage golden distressed look buy and download the Golden Touch Texture Set from the create cart:

How well you listen and blend the natural elements and capture their essence defines your success:

• Comments(0)
• Exposure , Hear the Shadows , Inspiration , Photography Lighting

Neil November 16th, 2008

Soft lighting – it’s not an easy ideal to achieve

Head to toe – full sized window – incandescent lamp – all included in the frame!

Is this a lighting problem that would make your head spin, or cringe away and avoid another approach because you feel you don’t have the gear? Read on, you may be stopping before you start!

• Comments(4)
• Exposure , Hear the Shadows , How To: , Motivation , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting , Tutorials

Neil November 12th, 2008

his post is in the Thinking Big series combined with a couple other techniques:

• Thinking Big: outside the music hall
• Lighting a HUGE space – for anything that may happen
• + Light Control: turn the sky from white to blue
• + Balancing the Sun with flash – Crosslighting

Equals how to cross light a mountain!

One of the repetitive questions I get from people are – why such a big flash – and why take it all over with you?

Quite frankly – this is EXACTLY why!

In my lighting case that I loaded onto the plane in Rochester New York was:

• 1 Alien Bee 800 Monoblock flash unit
• 1 Paul C. Buff Vagabond portable power unit and power cord
• 1 Black Impact Air Cusioned light stand height 230cm (model #SLS-LS8A)
• 1 Pocketwizard reciever
• Paul C Buff 11 inch parabolic reflector

Here’s one of the resulting peak moment shots that I try to reach for in my wedding photojournalism. The lighting case was loaded in the helicopter’s coffin gear carrier for the trip up the mountain and across the island. But a large mono-light wasn’t all I had in my arsenal…

Of course I want to cover the whole event with variety as well as style so get past the jump and let’s talk details…

• Comments(14)
• Creativity , Exposure , Gear , How To: , Motivation , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting , Tutorials

Neil September 28th, 2008

Before flash:
 

After Flash:

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• Exposure , Hear the Shadows , Inspiration , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting , Photoshop Retouching , Real-light Overlays , learning

Neil September 27th, 2008

Free Lightroom Brush Presets by Seim; Brush Preset collection

Did you know that in Lightroom2 You can use a brush to make precise corrections, and even have brush presets ready to go to make those corrections easy.

Well I knew about LR  brushes, but I had not given enough attention to them until Matt Kloskowski posted up some darken brushes, and got my mind in gear on a great workflow asset.

Here’s a collection of brush presets I made for… Burn, Dodge, Color Boost, Color Drain, Skin Soft, and Detail Boost. Remember that these don’t work the same as my Develop presets. These are for “Brush” settings. If you need to learn how to install them take a look at my Installing Lightroom Brush Presets article. The download is above. Just download unzip and follow the directions.

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• Action download , Exposure , Free stuff , Lightroom , Workflow

Neil September 21st, 2008

Expounding on last weeks ‘big space’ tutorial…

When I speak on achieving higher creativity, I talk about light being the entryway for more possibility.

Above is one of my shots lit with an Alien Bee 800 with 11 inch reflector with a Roscoe 3442 gel for 1/2 CTO conversion. Below is a shot within seconds of the above, without the off camera lighting.

I shot that basic image with a couple different focal lengths:

I hope that these shots inspire you to look at the big things around you and consider how your creativity would lead you to interpret them with lighting. However, don’t just assume that your off camera light must light the whole building, I prefer to think of lighting a scene:

Since my strobe lighting my photographs is 40 meters away, I don’t have difficulty choosing an exposure when my subjects move because the whole scene gets even light.

So when I have my exposure, I begin to explore the space photographically just as I would with natural light. Sometimes I look to my LCD for review, but otherwise I just work off the concept of the light that I felt and saw as I was setting up and testing. If you’ve never seen any available light photographs from me, take a look at this Bahamas Destination beach wedding photographer’s dramatic, atmospheric, cloud, sunset, portrait slideshow.

For an exercise, setup your light at dusk and get far enough away that your exposure is consistant. Get comfortable and explore the light, hear the shadows with me.

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• Exposure , Hear the Shadows , Inspiration , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting , Self Assignment

Neil September 11th, 2008

Front and Back fashion bridal portrait

Lighting is simply about contrast.

Contrast defines shapes.

Clearly seen either one will help you make a good picture.

If you’re a beginner, don’t be tricked by f-stops or ratios; remember to see what you’re interested in – and then get enough light on it to make a picture.  Don’t loose your muse, before you start.  Gaining complex lighting does not help you  gain a better picture.

Here I used an Alien Bee 800 set to minimum power with 30 degree grid spot on the standard 7 inch reflector. Roughly 6 feet from the model. You can see the falloff starting at about the hips.

Canon 1d – 50mm lens – f2.8

• Comments(2)
• Exposure , Hear the Shadows , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting

Neil June 27th, 2008

Continuing my explanations from the gear I use - today again the small softbox:

So I was out on an engagement shoot and had done all the normal stuff and wanted a little something extra…

But the simple daylight angle was not very flattering and the busy environment of the playground rope piece made for a very messy image – cool – but a little too messy – what could I do quickly to improve the impact of my couple in the space…

Here I am climbing around searching for the right perspective….

Read on to see the final shot and read about my camera settings making it….

• Comments(5)
• Exposure , Hear the Shadows , Photographic Flash , Photography Lighting , Shoe Flash Technique , learning

Neil May 26th, 2008

If you can swallow this yucky corporate video there’s probably a nugget there for you.

I use the extra small softbox, as you can see in my bag, but I always use it hand held because the principle:

the larger your light source, the softer your light

Only applies if you are computing your exposure solely on the quantity of light that is coming from that source.

Your light source is relative to the subject.

A 18″ softbox is a small light source compare to a 70 inch man – so what is it good for?

Working close

I often use the ST-E2 transmitter and keep the flash on TTL allowing me to control the contrast using Exposure compensation on the camera. In this way, you can see how I’ve blended the daylight balance in the room – the tunsten source in the background – and finally the softbox providing the ‘key’ or main illumination shaping the subject.

There aren’t any shadows though, because my baseline exposure is the light in the room. I’ve used the soft box to create a shaping highlight. So there’s a bright shaped area, and a darker flatter area.

In this shot an assistant was holding the light (as I can only shoot hand held – light to my left). Here again you can see how I have blended the ambient and bumped it up with the softbox. Using your light to see shapes is really the psychological core of ‘making light real’. Light gives you that power to sculpt and form.

To achieve this exposure with your camera in TTL auto flash as well as Aperture, Shutter Speed, or Program exposure mode.  Adjust your main exposure compensation value to -1EV.  That’s it – the flash exposure will correct for everything else – easy eh?

Upcoming later, I have a video clip titled the 3 minute portrait, that will show how I’m using the mini softbox.  So the question of size must come up at some point….and you have to know the right answer when you’ve found the right question.

Is the 18 inch softbox big enough?

NO – so (moments later) I switched to using the ceiling as my soft-box.

Size is relative to proximity (distance from the subject) and you want to always have a softbox as big as or larger than your subject.

• Comments(3)
• Exposure , Gear , Photographic Flash , Shoe Flash Technique , Tutorials