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:

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!

We’re not talking about that faux, broad light look created by softboxes, that often leaves deep shadows. We’re talking about REALLY soft light.

How do you get it in a hurry, with minimal gear?

Think outside your gear.

Respond to your environment.

Realize the potential of all the elements you have been given.

And then you’re free to relate to your subject for the most engaging expression.

Here’s how to simplify your lighting quest by understanding the MOTIVATION – of the light in an environment.  The lighting from the picture window is northlight – extremely soft.  So to match that, you need a very large light source.  The room.

What is the ‘working‘ light source?  We’ll call it the ‘hot zone’ and it’s anywhere light directly from your strobes open, naked, bare bulbed tube hit’s a wall.  The strobe is no-longer the light source – transfer your thinking away from that.  The light then bounces from the wall – onto your subject.  What this allows you is to control the ratios of light on your subject.  The ratio controls the shaping of your subject.

What’s wrong with this image?

Canon 1ds 135mm lens – F/4.0 – ISO 320 – 1/250 second

Listen to the shadows!

The motivation is wrong – if there’s a picture window behind the subject, the eye nearest the window should not have a shadow on it! The MOTIVATION of the light is not right!

in the image above I’ve thought in terms of ‘fill light’ and put my strobe to the subject’s front (in diagram above it would be the bottom wall of the room) to generically fill the window light.

In the correct pattern as shown in our lead image (illustrated here again to the right) – rolls the light around the subject from the side offering a nice open and soft shadow toward the couch’s front and to the left of the subject.

Do you see the difference?

This is the difference between photographic lighting – and motivated and inspired lighting.  A fine distinction, but one that once pointed out – your realize your eye was giving you some unnatural feedback about. The unnatural feedback is an unconscious barrier to acceptance and understanding of your image by the viewer – remove it and you give them a better gateway to experience.

Trust the instincts your natural eye leads with as it has been trained by years of interpretation of it’s natural surroundings.

Changing the position of the light in the room, changes the Hot Zones

The result is a change in the amount of light on each wall – the amount is the ratio of light that will illuminate your subject.  So you can change the ratio and shaping of your subject by moving your light through the room.

Shadowless shaping

The bare bulb technique is faster to learn than a softbox.

Produces more natural than owning a custom studio.

Do you see any shadows you can learn from? Not really, but the subject is still nicely contoured by a very gentle cheek and eye shading.

The catch is that you’ll need a bare bulb so your average shoe flash won’t do it – you’ll need a Quantum Q Flash, Sunpak 120J, Alien Bee, Monoblock, or ProPhoto head without reflector.

Any of the classic lighting styles can be softly mimicked with very little effort in the same room by moving the position of the single bare bulb:

• Short Lighting
• Loop Lighting
• Broad Light pattern
• Closed Loop Lighting
• Rembrandt light portraits
• Side lighting
• Butterfly – with or without lens flair
• Dietrich – Paramount Portrait lighting
• Backlight portait with hard light or soft
• Wraparound lighting
• Crossover lighting
• Profile lighitng
• Dramatic Overexposure

If you’re careful when you let a little direct from the bulb light spill onto your subject the list doubles.

I will cover these styles in future posts.

After Flash:


Softer Balance:

I’m using my usual Alien Bee 800 with 11 inch silver reflector on a vagabond power pack unit.

What do I mean softer balance?  Can you see it?

The effect of changing your exposure to be able to capture the sky is a matter of balancing your strobe output with the brightness of the sky.  Here in these New York afternoon portraits I wanted to get the light streaming through the clouds as well as the antique aircraft while managing to highlight the bride and groom.  Checking my exposure for sky values led me to decrease my ISO to 100, increase my shutter speed to 1/250th of a second which is limited by flash sync speed, and then choose an aperture that under exposes the sky by 1-2 stops.  The final variable – to my thinking the only variable (as the other features of the image are dictated by my goals) is how much output should I set the flash to.

Do you see how I isolated my variables and got down to the core decision?

Not sure if I wrote that clearly, but that is the essence of ‘Hear the Shadows’……

Regarding Gear, the reason I carry such high powered strobes is to be able to make decisions without limitation by my flash output.  

Getting down to post production

Blue Skies – Lightroom Preset

I used my Blue Skies Lightroom preset and then moved into photoshop’s L*A*B* colorspace

I have a few posts coming up describing how to get the most out of your situation even if you really want to shoot directly into the sun. Here’s a good example with a vintage style applied with the ONE WORKFLOW actionset. I was able to quickly modify my overall contrast type with a single adjustment layer to lower the contrast and flatten the highlights. In the same layer, just a quick shortcut away, I tinted the global yellow (warmth) saturated the green, and tweaked the red, and darkened the blue. L*A*B* color mode is ingenious that way. A texture from the ‘Dark Descent’ texture package helped dapple and roughen the tonalities in an organic and random way.

So there you see how I use all the facets of photography, lighting, and photoshop to create a memorable set of portraits. Take a loot at their thank-you card design:

I decided to feature a new category ‘to what lengths’ and I suppose this one should get featured in ‘mind like water as well’ that would just be a pun.

It’s fun to see what lengths other shooters go to, and I hope it inspires you to think outside the box, beyond what you considered normal or worthwhile and take a step to new creativity!

That’s pretty funny!

If you’d like others to see what length you’ve gone to… post a link the the comments, on my facebook wall, or my flickr stream.

Read more to think outside the box in lighting large spaces for maximum creative impact…

This wedding is taking place in Founder’s Hall at the Milton Hershey School, which is providing the extraordinary ceremony entrance for Elizabeth.  The lighting I created is what’s allowing me to take such a dramatic, regal, and poignant capture at the moment her husband Scott looks up to see her for the first time!  I work as a wedding photojournalist, but I want to go beyond my client’s experiences to create pieces of art that fully describe those important moments in their lives with the frozen time power of the camera.  Notice the details in this image which was shot with my Canon 1Ds MarkII with a 50mm lens – so there’s no wide angle distortion of the height here.  You can see the individual expressions of the bridesmaids, you can see the guest holding out their point and shoot camera to capture the bride; but only my shot captures the whole space with a pleasing illumination helping to define all these elements.

Are you asking if this is natural light?

It is in-fact strobe.  Not something a little strobist could produce, but stadium sized strobe lighting. Here’s what the scene looks like without strobe:

Here is just a split second later (litterally two frames) where I had depleted the charge of the flash units by shooting continuous frames.  Ok, ok, that’s not totally fair cause I didn’t white balance it….let me give you a white balanced view just to be absolutely fair – I’ll even size it the same.

My raw file tells me I shot at 1/200th of a second @ f/2.8 with an iso of 500.

In my highlighted image you can see leftward leaning shadows from the marble pillars, but wouldn’t you rather have than then the backlit shot?

Make Light Real – is a process that can guide you to realizing your creative vision, whether it be in a enormous vault of a room like founder’s hall, or in a tiny sitting room.  Let’s talk about how the light is real, after we see a few more of the impossible without it pictures:

With strobe above ^ without strobe below V

The slight amount of direct light from the strobe hitting the side of the bride’s face cast’s a weak sharp shadow, and overall helps to sharpen the image.  Sharpening in the image isn’t just something you do in post production.  Here are a couple of my highlight images from the wedding:

I added a little atmospheric lighting affect with photoshop.

Here’s an emotional look at the bride from between the groomsmen’s shoulders and some darkening from my veritas vignette overlays.  All the contrast and wonderful shaping of the face is a result of my lighting setup, and balance of the strobe with the ambient.

Let me give you one more comparison that uses an isle shot to give you a look at how my lighting approach allows me to shoot in otherwise extremely difficult positions.

The bride received this shot in B+W and here it is.  Because I am using lighting off axis to my camera, I am able to shoot through the guests to reach my focal plane to the ring bearer and flower girl telling the full story of them coming down the isle.  Without the strobe illumination, I would be getting an overpowering flare from the outside light coming through the glass doors.

Shooting faster than my flashes can recycle I am proud to show you what it would look like without flash illumination.  You can certainly lighten it, but without the light getting into the eyes, and shaping the face and body, you’re just lightening a soft and flat photo.

Here now a couple more steps down the isle, you can see the flash illumination from the side, and the overall ambient is brought up to the shutter speed and low ISO of the camera settings.  If you were limited to using an on-camera flash, you would have two white heads in the foreground and two large shadows on the children.  If you tried to bounce, you’d be thinking – where’d that light go? – cause this is the size of the room!

I couldn’t find the stated height of the dome, but it stands about 4 stories tall.

So we’re talking about lighting a working space two stories tall, and probably 40-45 meters wide.  We know that the bride is coming out the doors on the second story to overlook the ceremony before descending to walk the isle – a very dramatic choice and one we want to help illustrate in our pictures.  Here’s a quick look at the finished setup of my lights and then I’ll talk about how I got to that setup.

Yep, three monolights!  Two Alien Bee 800Watt units, One Photogenic 400Watt monolight.  The alien bee units have the 11inch dish reflector on them, the Photogenic has the standard 7inch reflector.  Each unit is at 1/4 power.  We’ll refer to them from right to left AB1, AB2, and PG3.  Let me give you a 4 shot walkthrough of the whole space so you can how the light is filling the space.  

Starting from the right with the lights in the frame

Here you can see where the focus of my light is collecting on the domed ceiling.

Creative balance is the path to Making Light Real

That is why we study the Tao

So back to the lights PG3 was the ’sparkle’ light – it was set to point directly at my subjects, albiet at a lower power, but that small amount of direct, hard-light provides a giant increase in perceived sharpness.  If you would like to understand the effect find yourself some deep shade and set your exposure to be accurate, then add just a light touch of hard light source (like a small shoe flash) at -2 or -1 to the exposure.  It’s very important that the amount of light you add doesn’t change the exposure.  Notice it in small details,the way hair or skin texture is rendered.

Deeper perception leads to greater creation.

Ok, so the challenge was to use the Alien Bees to give me a very soft(in quality of the light) boost in my ambient light quantity.  To do that I must transfer the source of the lighting from a small one at the strobe head to a large one – like a three story dome, if I only had a perfect dome the size of the room.  Oh wait – I do.  Yea so pushing the light into the far side of the room to provide a balanced exposure was the goal.  The Alien Bee 11 inch reflector is the perfect tool for the job because it is highly efficient, no light power is lost, and it throws the light out in a gentle cone so that no direct light falls on the ceremony location because that would completely throw off the balance and quality of the light.  AB1 is covering the walls and ceiling to the back of the room, opposite the balcony and ceremony.  AB2 is throwing it’s light up and over to the dome top and left side of the balcony.  The Alien Bees are putting out roughly 16x more light than the Photogenic to fill the entire auditorium with an extremely gentle light.  Hopefully that illustrates the power necessary to reach certain creative goals, and the freedom that the power gives you in your working process.

Why three, couldn’t just one light do it?

Yes, but without the same control over the balance – I’ll be covering how to balance a bare bulb flash in several tutorials over the next couple weeks.  Secondly, one strobe unit would almost certainly need to be at full power output, which exceeds the recycle time needed after each shot.  I wish to be able to shoot continuous bursts of 3-5 shots and so I adjust my setups to only use 1/4 or less of the flash output giving me that 4 shot burst.

Leave any more questions you have in the comments and I’ll answer them.

If you like this training article, consider purchasing the Video Tutorial on the color blue and continue improving your photographic perception and craft.

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….

This was shot at ISO 100, F8 and 1/250th of a second with a 15mm fisheye lens.

The small soft box in a large environment creates a pool of light.  With such a wide angle lens I was able to obtain a vignetted feel highlighting the engagement ring and the couple with soft directional light in the midday sun.  To darken the background I chose a low ISO and a fast shutter speed which has the effect of lowering the contrast of the ambient light.  I increased the output from the TTL flash head to +1 EV for the flash output, transforming the flash light from fill to the main exposure source.  A quick tweak in photoshop could dramatically increase the contrast without blocking the shadow tones if I thought the client would like a more dramatic look – so I’ve created a very flexible capture.  As I listen to the shadows, I note that there is a nice Rembrandt caress across both their faces.

See why Neil VanNeikerk chooses to block the light coming out of his speed light, and what advantages that gives him in achieving soft light.

The lighting principle he utilizes is:
the larger your light source, the softer your light.