As I said, the sky was just downright ugly with no color in it at all, and worse, it only looked like it was going to get worse. My goal of teaching how to balance flash and bright sunlight was certainly not working out so I decided to show how to make a blue sky of of the drab sky we were looking at.

To start off, I switched the camera’s white balance from Auto to Tungsten. What this will do is to add a blue color cast to the clouds. Here is how the sky looked in both Auto and Tungsten White Balance.

Auto White Balance

Tungsten White Balance

Now that we have some color in the sky, its now time to shoot our model. If we just used a flash, the Tungsten white balance setting would make our subject look more like a Smurf than a human. In order to compensate for the much cooler color temperature we have to reverse that by making the light from the flash much warmer. To accomplish this, I used the ExpoImaging Rogue Gel Kit with the 1/2 CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel.

Using the gelled flash to light our subject, we get the natural looking lighting on the subject while retaining the blue in the sky.

You can use this same technique with different gels to create more dramatic skies by using the opposite of this effect with a nice sunset. Using a cool (blue) gel and setting the color temperature to a higher temperature will create extremely vivid colors. No lighting kit is complete without at least a few color correction gels.

We set up the first lightstand with an umbrella, and the wind almost blew my gear and girl away. Debra asked, “Bare flash?”. I replied, “Yes, I think that would be best.” So we set up 3 light stands, each with a bare BB560 flash and Blackbelt receiver. We moved the lights around as needed, sometimes lighting Brian in the car with 1 or 2 lights (plus the sun of course). In a few images we had 1 or 2 lights on Brian, while at the same time having 1 or 2 lights on the car, just to open up the details that would otherwise be black shadows from the low sun.

I shot these images on a Canon 5dmk2, mostly with a 70-200 lens, and a few wide angle shots were done with a 17-40 lens. Lighting conditions being constant, the shots were taken at ISO 50 or 100, from f5.6 to f8, at a 1/200 shutter speed (the maximum sync speed for the BB560). Flash output was set to 1/2 power and sometimes bumped up to full power as needed. I have been using the BB560′s for sometime now and this was one of those shoots where the reliability and power output was really put to the test. They worked flawlessly.

Photos were edited in Adobe Lightroom 4, the black and white images were done with Nik Silver Eex Pro 2, and Nik Color Efex Pro 3 Tonal Contrast preset was used on some of the color images.

If you would like to see more of this collection shot with Blackbelt Lighting Products, you can visit my blog post here.

Thank you Kerry for letting me share this collection with your Dojo friends.

I’ve talked about basic and advanced lighting techniques commonly used for virtually any studio photo shoot, but those lighting setups require more than a single light, and for a beginning photographer, especially one who has a limited amount of studio space and a small budget, retaining multiple lights can be a problem. There is a way to get around using multiple lights though, and that is low key lighting.

Low key lighting is a type of portrait lighting that creates a very dramatic light setup, as well as creates some intense classic looking photos. Low key lighting lends it’s self strongly to a darker side of glamor and artistic photography. This type of lighting can cast a strong exposure on the subject, creating harsh contrast between the light and shadows of your subject, and leaves a majority of the background darkened. There are a few ways to set up a low key lighting setup, but the common factor in almost all low key setups is that they are predominately lit by only a single light.

45 or 90 Degree Angle

Image by Andy Leddy

This setup is the simplest by far, but still creates powerful, elegant images. Place your key light at either a 45 or 90 degree angle from the subject, on either the left or right side of your camera. That’s the entire setup, one light, in one of four locations. While it is a simple setup, the effects of the setup can very greatly. At a 45 degree angle, exposing the front of your subject, you will create a beautiful front exposure, with harsh contrasted shadows. At a 90 degree angle, if you expose your subject from the front you can create an intense split light where the subjects back will virtually vanish into the background, but if you expose the subject from the back you will create the exact opposite effect.

45 or 90 Degree with a Reflector

Image by Cillian Storm

This setup is the exact same as the previous, with the inclusion of a new piece of equipment, a reflector. The reflector is placed on the opposite side of your subject, and directly in front of your light. The light that wraps around the subject, or misses them entirely, is diffused and reflected on the back of the subject, creating a softer exposure. In this way the reflector acts as a fill light. Images shot in this way will not be as dark and contrasted as the previous manner, but will still maintain a much darker contrast ratio.

From Behind

Image by spunkinator

This type of lighting is commonly used to create a much more brooding, or sinister look, by creating an intense silhouette of the subject, only exposing a small area outlining the subject. The best way to achieve this look is with the help of two strong lights, but it can be done with as little as one. Place both lights behind the subject at 45 degree angles on opposite sides. An addition trick to really enhance images shot like this is to actually include the lights in the image. This will create a lens flare look behind the subject, and really enhances the visage of a foreboding or sinister subject.

Kyle Miller has been a professional wedding and portrait photographer for several years. He shares his knowledge on his blog Photography Tips where you can also download his eBook 7 Essential Photography Tips for free.

Even though I have talked about this setup several times, recent events have prompted me to bring it up again and for good reason. As I am writing this, I am on a cruise ship sailing towards St. Maarten. One thing about cruise ships is that they make a good chunk of money selling photos. They take photos of you getting other ship, arriving at ports, at dinner, and they have multiple static setups with different backgrounds. When you are needing to pound out hundreds of portraits per day you can’t be spending a lot of time messing with your lighting. So what lighting setup do they use for quick, simple, and consistent lighting? The standard three light portrait setup of course.

Let’s dissect their secret recipe and see how they are using the three light setup so effectively.

To the camera right is a 32″ softbox as the key light. On the camera left is a 42″ umbrella as a fill light, and then high right off the background stands is a third light with a honeycomb grid as a hair light. Why does this setup work so well that they use it exclusively at every one of their stations? The answer is simple, its because it works. The softbox provides some nice directional lighting while the umbrella softens the shadows. The high gridded light adds a splash of hairlight which looks natural for both indoor and outdoor scenes.

While the cruise ship is using 500 watt second monolights, a Westcott Apollo, and a Westcott umbrella, you can put together the same setup for much less. Let’s break down all of the pieces and see what it would cost to replicate this tried and true lighting setup.

(3) Blackbelt Lighting BB560 speedlites @ $95 each
(1) Blackbelt Lighting. Stealth 32″ Softbox @ $79
(1) Blackbelt Lighting 10′ x 12′ backdrop stand @ $85
(1) Blackbelt Lighting Ninja Speedlite Triggers @ $65
(1) Blackbelt Lighting swivel mount @ $15
(1) Shoot through umbrella @ $10
(1) Blackbelt Lighting Samurai Light stand kit @ $65
(1) Bogen Superclamp
(1) Expoimaging Rouge Grid
Printed backgrounds from Backdrop Outlet

All in you are going to be between $700 – $900 depending on the background you get. While this may sound like a lot of money, you would easily spend over $2,500 for big name products. The beauty of a setup like this is that it is a very versatile lighting kit that makes for a great starting point for building upon as your skill increases.

One of my favorite features of speedlites is High Speed Sync. This feature allows you to work with speedlites way past your camera’s normal sync speed (1/160 – 1/250 depending on camera). By shooting at very fast shutter speeds you can dramatically cut ambient light and can shoot what looks like night-time shots at high noon. Sounds incredible huh? Guess what, using it is as simple as pressing a single button.

1. Light travels in constant directions

Have you even shot pool? If so, you have had an extremely practical lesson in how lighting works. If you aim a light straight, it goes straight, if you aim it into a wall, it bounces off in the opposite direction at the same angle. Before the comments fill up talking about diffusion, refraction, etc, the goal of this is to make the concept easy to understand here.

By understanding this basic concept you can control the angle that light is hitting your subject. This can be used to create soft or harder lighting, change the mood of an image, and create different lighting styles. Again, there is more to this with sub-topics on light spread and reflectivity but the number of variables involved are almost infinite. For the sake of keeping it understandable, you need to keep the concept simple. Light does not follow general guidelines, nor does it follow suggestions, it absolutely follows the laws of physics. Getting a handle of how light functions will give you many, many more options.

2. The Inverse Square Law

“The inverse-square law is a law stating that a specified physical quantity or strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity.” – Wikipedia

Pretty heady stuff huh? Let’s break this down so it is as simple as possible to understand, if you double the distance between the light source and the subject, you need four times the amount of light. Ok, simple if you are always doubling the distance, but what if you want to do it fairly quickly? If we need to calculate the light falloff we can take the distance, multiply it by itself, and take the inverse of that number. So if we take a distance of 2 feet, multiply it by itself, we get 4, and take the inverse which would be 1/4.

Putting it Together

Keep in mind that these two things work together in that when you bounce light off something you are adding to the distance between the light source and the subject, therefore you need more light. If the angle causes you to double the distance, you need four times as much light. Often the easiest way to increase or decrease the power of the light source is simply to move it towards or away from the subject.

If you are trying to learn how to shoot with manual flash, understanding these core principles will put you well on your way.

The two most common issues are not being able to get the background color bright enough or the background color gets too washed out. Let’s get right into it and see how we can improve our technique and use colored gels for our backgrounds more effectively.

The Setup

The setup is very important to make sure everything goes smooth. First off, I prefer using a black seamless paper for the background. Black paper will result in more vibrant colors where a white background will make the colors look duller.

Secondly, you need to make sure that your lights that are lighting your subject are not hitting the background which will cause the colors to wash out as well. The two ways to do this is to use more side-lighting and to increase the distance between the subject and the background. The other advantage of increasing the distance between the subject and the background is that you will be less likely to get color spill on your subject from the background light.

Getting The Exposure

Probably the biggest mistake people make when learning to use gels is to get the lighting for the subject all setup and then try to dial in the background. If you do this in the opposite direction you will get where you want much faster. The following are the three images I took in order to get my light dialed in.

Initial Background Shot

In the initial background shot you can see that I had no light turned on the subject. The background wasn’t quite bright enough so I needed to power up the background flash another stop.

Subject Lighting Test

in the first lighting test with the subject light, the background is nice and bright from turning the power up, but the subject is still underexposed by about a stop so the main flash needed to be powered up more.

Final Shot

In the final shot we have enough light on the subject which is coming from about a 45 degree angle to camera-right and using a Large Rouge Flashbender to flag the light from hitting the background giving me exactly what I needed to get the shot.

The final settings are as follows:

Main Flash: 1/8 Power
Background Flash: 1/8 Power
ISO: 200
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter: 1/250th

Be sure and experiment with gels and see what you can come up with and be sure and share your images with us.

To really understand the difference, we need to look at how the light comes out from both types of devices so we can decided when best to use which modifier.

Side by Side Comparison

It shouldn’t take too much effort to understand how an umbrella should throw light out. The spherical shape sends light in all directions. This is great for providing a large soft light source that is easy to control and manage and provides a lot of latitude in how it is positioned.

A softbox controls light a lot more keeping it from spreading out so much. Because the beam of light is a lot narrower, the light fall off is much faster so positioning is more important.

Test Setup

For our test setup we used Supermodel Venus Garrison as our model and setup an umbrella and softbox in the same positions. Below are shots of the actual setups.

Umbrella Setup

Softbox Setup

The umbrella is a standard 32″ shoot-thru umbrella while the softbox is a 24″ x 24″ Ez Softbox from Blackbelt Lighting (my own lighting products company). In both cases, a YN560 speedlite was used on 1/32 power. The camera settings were ISO 200, 1/160th second shutter, and f/5.6.

The Results

Looking at the results you should be able to easily see the difference. With the larger apparent size of the umbrella, the light wraps around the face more and creates a softer transition between the highlights and shadows. The softbox provides much more directional light with a faster fall-off. Also notice that the background is darker with the softbox because much less light is hitting it from the softbox.

Umbrella

Softbox

Choosing the right modifier

Umbrellas are great for beginners since they are easier to use because of their forgiving nature. As you progress and want to create more dramatic images, being able to have more control over your light will become more and more important. Moving up into softboxes will help you to be able to create the look you want.

While the difference in these two images may seem subtle at first, the differences actually fairly dramatic. The umbrella image has some light on the shadow side while the softbox image goes almost completely dark at some points. Softer, light such as the umbrella shot usually make women look better while men are often shot in harsher, more dramatic light. If you are just getting started, I usually recommend starting with umbrellas and moving to softboxes as you want to create more dramatic and edgy images.

Before I just jump in and explain what he was doing wrong, let’s break down the situation and explain why this shouldn’t have been a problem.

The room wasn’t very bright and you needed to shoot at around f/5.6 to keep multiple people in focus. Using this aperture and a reasonable shutter speed of 1/60th required an ISO setting (without flash) of 6,400. A Canon 580 ex II zoomed to 105mm at full power easily has a working distance of 150 feet so I was able to get good exposure at a much lower ISO at only 1/4 power. I didn’t even bother to use manual flash settings as eTTL was doing just fine.

Given the ability of the equipment, why was it that the other guy was having problems even though he actually had a better camera? Well, the other guy had something I didn’t, he had a Sto-fen diffuser on his flash. But wait, isn’t a Sto-fen supposed to improve your flash? Why was this killing the shot?

Let’s break this down. At full power he should have had 150 feet of flash range. Just having the Sto-fen on the flash will cut the total light output by two stops (Understanding Light Stops), add to that the diffusion that is throwing the light in every possible direction and you are probably losing 60-70% of your forward facing light. If we start with a practical 150’ working range and cut our light by two stops, we cut our working distance down to 37.5’ which would still be in range of having a good exposure. Now let’s be really conservative here since I don’t have a Sto-fen here to test and say that its really only wasting 30% of the light and 70% is still going forward, 70% of 37.5’ is 26..25’ which is too short of a working distance to light a subject 40 feet away. All he had to do was remove the Sto-fen diffuser from his flash and he would have got instant great results.

I am not telling this story to mock him for using a Sto-fen, but you have to understand what different modifiers will do to your light and how it will affect your working distance. The following day I saw people at the final graduation event sitting in bleachers close to 350’ away from the subjects and having their flash turned on. Not on the best of days with the wind behind you and finding a four leaf clover will your flash give you an exposure at 350 feet…this is physics, it just aint gonna happen.

This is why you need to learn how your equipment works, try your different modifiers, figure out what the longest working distance you have is and even write it on the device. If you decide a Sto-fen device is best used at 20 feet or less, write a “20-“ on it so there is no second guessing when you really need something to work.

Again, I am not knocking the Sto-fen diffuser here, I am simply saying that there is a time and a place for almost any modifier and knowing that some devices will give you a shorter working distance is absolutely critical to making sure you are setup properly.

Any time you get a new light modifier you need to really practice with it and figure out its strengths and weaknesses, and they ALL have weaknesses. Some are better for individuals, some are better for groups, some are better for soft lighting, some are better for dramatic lighting. The point is, they are all different and don’t assume that you can take one specific modifier, put it on your flash, and never have to worry about it again..

The Image

The shot is an evening shot taken after sunset so there is no visible sun and almost no ambient light. The subject is a girl so she needed to be lit properly which meant artificial light. I also wanted the water to be sharp and not have any motion blur in it.

Making The Image

The light from the sun was almost non-existent so any normal exposure that would freeze the water in mid-air would have resulted in a pitch black background. In order to get any color at all out of the background the shutter speed needed to be 1/15th of a second, now that is one slow shutter! But with that slow of a shutter, why isn’t the water all blurry (not to mention the subject since I shot it hand-held, not with a tripod)? Since there was almost no ambient light, what freezes the subject and the water is not the shutter but the flash. The speed of the flash is about 1/20,000th of a second so it is this short burst of light that, in effect, acts like a fast shutter speed. The flash was a Canon 580 EX II with a 14″ Lumodi Beauty Dish mounted on it about 3′ away from the subject.

The aperture was set at f/8 to provide a wide field of view for all the water as well as the subject and the ISO was at 200 so keep digital noise to a minimum. The flash was fired using a PocketWizard MiniTT1 Transmitter with AC3 ZoneController mounted on a Canon 50D and a PocketWizard FlexTT5 Transceiver on the flash. This combination allowed me to take a few shots and adjust the flash power right from the camera while an assistant held the flash into position.

ISO 200 - f/8 - 1/15th - Handheld

While you may not think you can get a sharp image with a long shutter speed, if flash is the only light source then you can use a very long shutter speed and the light from the flash will be so brief that it will effectively freeze the objects in the frame. This is the same technique for freezing bullets in mid-air and other fast moving objects.

What you will need

To start off with, you should get a set of gels. The set I recommend is the Strobist Gell Collection since it contains a large number of gels of different colors that are pre-cut to fit most speedlites. Second, you will need some way to attach the gels to your speedlite. I generally use the Lumiquest Gel Holder or just some basic gaffers tape.

Once you have the gel attached to your flash, you are ready to get going.

The Lighting Setup

This is where people often get hung up because a poor setup can cause light to spill on to the subject or the main lights can wash out the color effect. Ideally you want 3 feet or more between the background and the subject to prevent spill and you want the main lights to be angled enough to not spill onto the background to wash it out. Later on we will look at some actual setups to show how they are done.

In the first image, we saw just a plain black background which was done with black seamless paper and the lighting was coming from an side angle to prevent hitting the background. In this image we have a single speedlite one 1/2 power with a purple gel shooting up from behind the subject. This is a very simple yet effective setup since it used a single light source. To help the light spread out, the flash zoom was set to 24mm to make it as wide as possible (without a modifier).

If the flash isn’t set high enough you won’t get much of an effect. If it is set too high, the color will wash out and you will get white.

If you want to take it a step further add a second light with the same or a different color. In this case I changed the purple to a red and added a second flash with a blue gel. Take notice that where the colors overlap they actually mix and become purple. If you are trying to use two different colors, you will need to keep this mixing effect in mind and might have to take steps to flag the two flashes to keep the colors from mixing.

Another thing to try is to use multiple gels on a single flash by covering half of the flash with one color and the other half with a different color. For a recent benefit shoot I tried this with pretty decent results.

Again you can see the distinct blue and red colors but a purple where the colors mixed. I am going to continue to play with this technique and see what I can get with possibly using a vertical card in between the two gels to try to keep the colors separated more.

Even though the colors mixed more than I would have liked, the overall effect was very nice although I later wished I had used a white or black background as the gray seamless was a little too drab where the color wasn’t hitting it.

The following is an image from the shoot showing how the images turned out.

What I really wanted to achieve was a red, white, and blue effect so back in the studio I start experimenting to see what I could come up with. What I finally came up with was a three light setup with bare flashes with the gels on the bottom and an non-gelled flash higher up to provide a white splash. If I used just a bare flash for the white, the spot was too big and washed out the other colors so I added a Rouge 3-In-1 Grid to keep the light contained.

The first test was alright but the white spot was too small.

To solve this, I took the small grid out of the Rouge Grid so I would get a little larger of a spot and got the resulting image.

There I had it, a red, white, and blue background effect. The next image is a shot of the actual lighting setup so you can see how it was all put together.

Hopefully this will inspire you to get creative with using gels for different background effects. It just takes a little patience and practice to get it all dialed in right, but once you do, the possibilities are endless.

At a recent event I only had a few minutes to get whatever I was going to do setup and tested and I didn’t have anyone available to stand in for the speaker to test the lighting. While I would usually throw up a couple of YN560’s and some wireless flash triggers, the problem was I didn’t have either the time or a subject to help dial in the lighting. Sure I could have used a light meter but I also didn’t really know how things might change as the spotlights came on and I wanted to make sure things were going to work right.

For me, this would normally be a simple case of using the PocketWizard ControlTL system with the Zone Controller so I could change my lighting on the fly from wherever in the room I ended up. The reason I didn’t go with my regular Blackbelt Lighting triggers was simply a convenience factor so I could change the flash output remotely.

The second concern I had was where to put the lights to get good lighting on the speakers without blocking the view from the tables. While I had a good position and angle, using an umbrella would get in the way of some people’s view while also flashing the audience at the same time.

The solution had to have the following qualities:

• Small enough not to block the view from the side
• Big enough to provide a good light source
• Can’t be obnoxious to the audience
• Had to be able to adjust the power output remotely

While this isn’t a huge list of requirements, it does represent a unique challenge. How to you get something big enough to give a good light source but not be really visible from the audience? My solution was actually quite simple and required very little in additional equipment over two Canon 580 flashes.

The Lighting Setup

Let’s start with the actual lighting setup. The main light is a Canon 580 EX speedlite on a lightstand to camera right. The fill light is a Canon 580 EX II mounted on-camera. The 580 EX main light was switched to Slave mode on wireless group B with the body of the flash aimed back towards the audience.

The 580 EX II on the camera was in Master mode on Group A. With this setup, especially because the remote flash was in front of the Master light and aimed back to the on-camera flash’s position, this setup should work quite well without the need for a radio transmitter system.

While I would normally use the PocketWizard ControlTL system for this setup, except that the battery in the MiniTTL transmitter was dead, and since it is not a common battery, I had no means to replace it before the shoot. (The battery sells for about $12 at Radio Shack or $3.99 at Batteries Plus).

The Modifier

The choice of modifier here is what really pulled everything together. I used a Rogue Large FlashBender. The large size provides a nice size light source so the shadows wouldn’t be too harsh. The FlashBender also allowed me to fold down one side so that when the flash went off the audience didn’t really see it, so the flash going off wasn’t annoying to the audience.

Since the FlashBender is much smaller than an umbrella, it was basically hid behind the existing balloons so it wasn’t blocking the view from the audience on that side of the room.

The Results

Using only the eTTL Wireless System built into the Canon 580 EX/580 EX II flashes I had the ability to adjust lighting ratios between the main light and the fill light.

The FlashBender rounded out the solution by being “big enough†without being too big that it would block the view. The ability to fold the one side down to flag the flash from the audience kept the flash from bothering the audience.

In the end, we ended up with what looked like nice window light even though there were no windows in the room at all.

The flash ratio was generally 1:4 (B group 4x brighter than fill) and with the A being a bare flash firing right at the subject and the B light firing up through a modifier, this create a fairly nice directional light.

If I had to do anything differently, I would have brought in a larger lightstand so I could have got the flash higher to add a little down-angle to the shadows.

With all of the gear I have, this shoot really boiled down to the camera, two 580 EX/EX II flashes, a light stand, a swivel mount, and a simple light modifier. The end results look quite nice, certainly much nicer than just using an on-camera flash and blasting flat light on everyone.

My good friend Chris Diset comes over yesterday and tells me that his significant other Debra has come up with a solution.

Fortunately we all had some of the small Think Tank Photo Pixel Pocket Rockets (for 6 CF cards) laying around that Think Tank Photo had given away in a recent promotion.  The trick here was to cut the separator out of each pocket, this way the gels would be able to fit into the pocket perfectly. This is not the easiest thing in the world to do, you need to be careful as the material in the back of the pockets will tear easily.

Since I use a Large Pixel Pocket Rocket for my CF cards, and its a different color than the small one, this wouldn’t be confusing during the heat of a shoot.

The result is better than I expected as the gels fit absolutely perfect into the pockets. The next decision was how to organize them, and while you may do it differently I figured I would explain how I decided to do it.

The top pocket holds my main color correction gels, this includes the CTO’s (Color Temperature Orange) or the green’s for correcting in fluorescent lighting. This middle pocket holds the color effects gels which is all of the rest of the colored gels. The bottom pocket holds all of the Neutral Density gels. This layout makes it very simple to find the gel you are looking for, and if you happen to drop it in the wind, the gels are not going to go flying everywhere.  This is such a perfect solution for storing gels that I am actually going to encourage Think Tank Photo to offer a version of this pouch like this.

So thanks to Chris and Debra for this awesome quick tip. If you have your own quick tip that you would like to share, please post in the comments section.

With even just a single light you can create really nice portraits. All of the examples here were created with just a single light with the only change being the position of the subject’s face in relation to the light.

For some people, the shadows may be too harsh in which case adding a reflector to bounce some light back into the shadows will help brighten up the shadow side of the face.

With the light shooting through an umbrella and the umbrella positioned just above the subject’s head and angled down to point right at her eye, we get some nice directional lighting which is quite flattering.

In the second we turned the subject’s body away from the light and had her look almost directly into the light.  This gave us a little more light wrapping around her face while still giving a little directional light.

Because of the size of the light source and the closeness of it to the subject we still get plenty of light on her body while the directional light brings out the detail in the dress.

Because the light is higher than the subject’s head, we also get the advantage of lighting up the hair nicely.

In the next example, we look at the same scene with and without the use of a reflector.

Without Reflector

Gold Reflector to Camera Left

As you can see, even if you are on a budget and can’t afford a multiple light setup yet, you can still create great images with just a single flash and a adding a reflector greatly increases your versatility.

Start off with a simple setup and learn to use it to it’s full advantage before trying to complicate things with multiple light sources. You also don’t need a big studio either, all of these shots were shot in the exact same location which was no more than ten feet wide and deep.

To wrap this up, here are a couple more shots that were also done with just a single light.

There were five speedlites used on this setup with a mix of 580 EX, 580 EX II, and YN560′s all fired with Pocketwizard FlexTT5′s. To get the signs on the top light with minimal spill, they left and center one were fitted with Harbor Digital Quick Spots and the one on the right was fitted with a large Rouge Flashbender if a half roll to act as part snoot but also to spill some light on the side of the building. Two more speedlights were on the ground pointed inwards to light the area under roof area.

Lighting Setup

While we tried to use a longer exposure to try to pull in the stars, the problem was that too much shutter and we were getting light contamination from nearby street lights. All of the flashes were set to 1/4 power and the three pointing at the signs were also zoomed to 105mm while the ground lights were zoomed to 24mm.

24mm - ISO 400 â€

For more information about this image and to see the rest of the Photo Project 24 images, please visit http://photoproject24.com

This is one of those times when things just didn’t work right immediately. We tried to get some star trails…didn’t look good. We tried to light paint the hill behind us, didn’t work. We tried to get headlight trails from the road, but it was so dark you couldn’t see the road. So…time to light the bushes around us. We tried front lighting, side lighting, gels, and nothing was coming together. We then came up with the idea to backlight it and see what we would get.

We mounted a speedlite on a lightstand about 30 feet away with a PocketWizard TT5 and set it on about 1/4 power.   The shutter was at 1/40th but since it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, the shutter speed was meaning less. The backlighting came through the shrubs nicely and reflected off the snow which then light the underside and even the front of the bushes somewhat. We both looked at the image and thought it was finally a pretty cool shot and off we went to the next location.

24mm - ISO 400 â€

Lighting Setup

To read more about this and other images from the Photo Project 24 adventure, please visit http://photoproject24.com

The Lighting Setup

With almost no ambient light left and just a little rim of light in the background, we would need a long shutter speed to bring some light back to the sky. We also wanted to try to lose focus on the trees behind the wagon so we set on an aperture of f/4 and at ISO 500 we would need a 1 second exposure.  We could have used a lower ISO and longer shutter but there were still enough cars whizzing by that any longer than a second and we would likely end up with headlights streaking by.

With the camera setup for the sky, we now needed to light the wagon. This was done with two speedlites fired with PocketWizard FlexTT5′s and the Mini TT1 on the camera. We put both lights in manual mode at 1/4 power with no modifiers on them.

Lighting Diagram

32mm - ISO 500 - 1 sec - f/4

Fairly simple setup, a few practice shots, and we got the image we were looking for and headed down the road to the next location.

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The Accidental Ghost Town - 1/250th - f/5.6 - ISO 50 - 24mm

During this article we will start with an on-camera flash and build up to a three-light setup.

On-Camera Flash

This first shot here is what I would expect from a simple on-camera lighting setup. We get a nice even lighting, plenty of detail, but the floor and background are easily visible. These example images are not cropped or adjusted and yes, with some fair amount of Photoshop work, this could be turned into a decent image. The goal though is to minimize post-production and get the effect that we want in-camera. This shot was taken with a Large Rouge Flashbender on top of the flash to provide a larger, diffused lighting source.

In this second image the only change was that the Rouge Flashbender was removed and the light was bounced off the white ceiling. This did a great job at killing the floor and background lighting while maintaining some specular highlights. Because of the overhead lighting we lost the tail rotor completely, detail in the fuselage, and detail in the lower part of the canopy. The flash was set at 1/8th power.

On the plus side we also lost some harsh specular highlights in in the canopy that we didn’t want. At this point I thought we had a good baseline to start adding in some additional lights.

Light Number 2

The second light to be added was for the rear of the helicopter. This was another YN560 fitted with a Harbor Digital Designs 1/8†Quickspot to keep the light from spreading onto the table or background. This really kicked up the light on the back of the helicopter and added some nice detail lighting to the tail boom and rear assembly.  The flash was set to 1/32 power, any more and it would have overpowered the subject .

At this point I felt we were really getting close but I didn’t like the lack of detail on the bottom of the canopy and you couldn’t really read the text on the canopy either.

Light Number 3

The third light was added just left of the camera and fitted with a Harbor Digital Designs 1/4†Quickspot so I could get just a little more spread without much light contamination. The flash was also a YN560 and was set to 1/128th power. This provided a nice little kicker light on the front of the canopy and light the bottom section of the canopy nicely to really make the letters pop.

This is the part where I start to get all OCD about the lighting and although I was actually right were I wanted I get compelled to keep tweaking and tweaking but I fought the urge this time because the point isn’t always about getting the shot perfect in-camera, it really should be about minimizing your work overall.

The Final Image

As I said, I actually stopped with the last image because while I could have spent another 20 minutes tweaking the lights to get exactly what I wanted, I also could spend 2 minutes in Lightroom and get the same result. Taking the last image into Lightroom 3.3, some Clarity was added, a little Vibrance, a post-crop Vignette, and then the Local Adjust Brush set to -30 Exposure was quickly drawn to minimize the line you could see between the table and the background.

Setup

All of the images shown in the article were shot with the following settings:

• ISO 800
• 1/60th Shutter Speed
• F/8 Aperture

Summary

Lighting is not magic and it really isn’t that hard either once you start practicing different techniques and lighting setups. If it seems frustrating at first just remember to stick to the basics. Build up from one light source at a time in order to see the effects of each light as you go to make sure you know what light is doing what.

While I do try to get as close as possible to the final image in-camera there is also a point of diminishing returns when it comes to how perfect you can get something. If this wasn’t true we would have no use for tools like Lightroom or Photoshop. Sometimes it is best to spend a few moments in post-production versus spending many more in studio.

Equipment Used

The only lighting used was a Blackbelt Stage 1 Lighting kit which contains a YN560 Speedlite, a set of wireless flash triggers, a lightstand, swivel mount, umbrella, and a reflector.

What you will see in the video is the effect of just using the one light, then we bring in a reflector to cut down on the contrast and make the shadows softer for a better final image.

Equipment Used

Blackbelt Phase 1 Lighting Kit
Canon 50D

Check out the video for more information about the setup.

Equipment Used

Westcott Magic Slipper Kit
Blackbelt Phase 1 Lighting Kit
Blackbelt YN560 Flash

Why Manual?

One question that a lot of people have at this point is why would you want to use manual flash when you have eTTL mode available and the camera will try and determine the lighting? There are actually a number of reasons why that isn’t always the right answer:

• Using studio strobes
• Using wireless flash triggers that don’t support eTTL
• Using manual speedlites that don’t support eTTL
• Conditions when eTTL is not giving you what you want

Usually eTTL will try to give you a pretty balanced lighting so it does not always give you what you are trying to achieve. By understanding how to use manual flash you can create dynamic lighting that may otherwise not be possible.

Fear Not The Flash

So why are people intimidated by manual flash? Mostly because they think its complicated and they don’t know where to start. So let’s break it down into some basics. First off, If we look at the range of a flash there is really only eight stops between full power and the lowest setting of 1/128th power. While better strobes like the Canon, Nike, and YN560 also have incremental settings in between each stop, let’s just look at the primary settings to get started.  So long as the flash has enough light output, the proper setting is going to fall somewhere along this scale.

Keeping this in mind if you start with a mid-range setting such as 1/16 or 1/8 power the worst you can be is already halfway to the best setting. Take a test shot and then adjust the power up or down accordingly. With just a small amount of practice you should be able to get your lighting dialed in within a two to three shots.

Keeping it SAAF

SAAF is a little acronym that you should learn as well, this stands for Shutter/Ambient – Aperture/Flash. What this helps you to remember is that shutter speed will control the ambient light and aperture will control light from the flash. If you need more ambient light, slow down the shutter speed. If you need more light from your flash, use a larger aperture (smaller f-stop number). Being able to use your aperture to control the light from the flash also allows you the ability to fine-tune the light to get exactly what you want.

Putting It Together

Hopefully this has helped demystify manual flash lighting. If you have a Canon or Nikon speedlite, I highly encourage you to put it in manual mode to learn how to use manually rather than relying on the automatic modes. I have put together a little video to help go over the concepts I have talked about here.

Stop the Madness
So…what is a stop exactly? Simply put, if you take a given amount of light and double it, you are moving up one stop, if you cut the amount of light in half then you have gone down a stop. So a stop isn’t a specific amount of light, instead it is a measure of difference between the amount of light. To be completely technical about it, the term “one f-stop” refers to a factor of √2 (approx. 1.41) change in f-number, which in turn corresponds to a factor of 2 change in light intensity. So how can we visualize this easily? If we have a single light bulb as a base light source, then two light bulbs would increase the light by 1 stop. Going to 4 light bulbs doubles the output again giving us 2 stops, to get to 3 stops we then need 8 light bulbs, etc.

So let’s take the sentence in the introduction, if we wanted to expose one side of the face 1 stop under the other side of the face, what we are saying is we want half the amount of light on the shadow side that we have on the lit side. Pretty simple concept huh?

For the most part, we are actually going to be doing a lot of guesswork unless we have good light meters and can measure each piece of the scene. Using our DSLRs we can zoom into each area of the scene and look at the exposure meter in the camera for a pretty good meter reading as well.

How aperture and shutter affect light
Ok, so now we have a basic understand of what a stop is, now we need to see how to control this using the two basic controls, shutter speed and aperture. To illustrate the effect of aperture, we have created this chart that shows the amount of light that is gathered at typical aperture settings. While each camera/lens may have slightly different available aperture numbers, they are typically in multiples of 1.4 (as described in the previous section). As you increase the f-stop number to the next 1.4 increment, you halve the amount of light.

The effect of shutter speed is the same concept. Every time you double the shutter speed, you decrease the amount of light in half. If you cut the shutter speed in half, you double the amount of light.

Again, you can see this represented by a similar chart.

Where this gets interesting in combining aperture and shutter speed, you can get the same exposure with different combinations of aperture and shutter speed. For example, a shot taken at 1/500 at f/2.8 and a shot taken at 1/60 at f/8 will have the same equivalent amount of brightness, what will change is the depth of field.

Let’s take a look at one of our favorite studio lights, the Westscott TD5 Spidelite. The light head has 5 bulds in it, you can control the center bulb, and two sets of two bulbs. To show how this affects stops we can use the different combinations to control how many stops of light we have:

If we only turn on the center bulb and use that as our base reference point, we can then use the different variations to come up with the following amounts of light changes:

How can we use this information?

If you have a light meter than putting this information to use is just a matter of measure-adjust-repeat until you get the desired light readings you want. With a modern DSLR, we can do this with the camera’s light meter with fairly good results.

Let’s say we want to use a two-light setup to light a subject’s face and we want one side 1 stop darker than the lit side. To begin with we zoom into the lit side of the face (or use the Photovision Digital Calibration target aimed at the light source , the small size works best for this) and adjust the lights until you get a good exposure reading. This is the time to make the camera adjustments to center the exposure in your camera’s meter.

Good Exposure Reading

The next step is to meter the shadow side of the face, using the same technique of zooming into the subject or a target to get a meter reading. This time however we want to underexpose by one stop.

-1 Stop Under Exposed

At this point we now have the camera setup for the right exposure on the lit side of the face and we checked to make sure the shadow side was one stop underexposed, we are now good to take our shots and be confident that the lighting will turn out good.

Summary
Hopefully this has helped to explain the concept of stops as it pertains to the relative amount of light and how we can use the tools we have available to make sure we have good lighting and exposures. To discuss this with others, please join us in our Camera Dojo Flickr Users Group.

In order first sample shot we have a couple standing against a wall with light coming in from the right of the camera creating a fairly simple broad lighting effect. The problem here was that the shot was taken at 4:30pm in May so we still had a good two hours before the sun would go down and give us ideal lighting. Secondly, the two walls we had available faced either due west directly into the sun or faced east and was completely in the shade. I ruled out the first option and went for the easier shot by placing the couple in the shade. With no additional light coming in we just didn’t have an interesting shot and because we were under a bridge, there wasn’t a good angle to use a reflector to bounce any light into the area.

In order to create the directional lighting, a Canon 580 EX II speedlite was fitted with a Lumodi 14†beauty dish and a PocketWizard FlexTT5 transceiver. The camera was a Canon EOS 50D with a PocketWizard MiniTT1 transmitter. My assistant positioned the light at about a 45 degree angle to the couple’s left and about two feet above their heads. This provided a nice directional quality to the light by simulating a late afternoon sun position but with the ability to completely control the light output. The beauty dish provided for a softer transition from the highlights to the shadows versus the sun would have been much harsher shadows due to is smaller apparent size.

The following diagram illustrates this lighting setup.

ISO 200 Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 IF EX DG HSM @ 63mm f/5.6 1/200 sec Flash: eTTL

In our second example we wanted to create more of a rim or Rembrandt style lighting on the subject. In this case the shot was taken at 7:15pm and the sun was far too low on the horizon to provide and real light other than a little bit of ambient. Using basically the same exact setup as before, a Canon 580 EX II speedlite was fitted with a Lumodi 14†beauty dish and a PocketWizard FlexTT5 transceiver. The camera was a Canon EOS 50D with a PocketWizard MiniTT1 transmitter, this time the setup was stationary on a lightstand and positioned just to the left and above the subject and is just barely out of the frame in this shot.

ISO 400 Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 IF EX DG HSM @ 70mm f/5.6 1/160 sec Flash: eTTL

Had this shot been taken about 30 minutes earlier the sun would have created basically this identical light pattern although we might have had to use a touch of fill light to keep the shadows from being too harsh. Shooting later in the evening, we can create the effect that we wanted the sun to have created had it not been too late in the day.

As we continue to look at more lighting setups we will add additional light sources, reflectors,  different diffusers, and other tricks to get the light to look as natural as possible but still trying to maintain as much control over the light as possible.

Equipment Used:

How does eTTL Work?

In order to really understand how to make our speedlites do what we want, we first need to understand what our speedlites are actually doing, then we can use that knowledge to use their automatic modes to our advantage.

The Pre-Flash

You may not even notice it, but when you press the shutter, your speedlite will actually flash twice. The first flash is at 1/32 power and the second flash is at the setting the camera determines the flash should be at. You can see this by setting your camera to a very slow shutter speed and having the flash set to second curtain sync (more on this in just a moment). What is happening here is that the speedlite is throwing out a low power flash that the camera is evaluating to determine the exposure. Based on the reflected light from the pre-flash, the camera sets the power output of the speedlite to an appropriate level and then fires the main light burst. The speedlite itself is not using any intelligence here, it is simply firing a low power burst and being told by the camera what to do next.

Explanation of Second Curtain
Your shutter actually operates by sliding one panel (curtain) up to expose the sensor and the a second curtain slides up to cover the sensor and stop the exposure. If your flash is set to second curtain then the flash will go off just before the second curtain closes. With a long exposure, you will see the pre-flash, the first shutter will open, then at the end of the shutter time the main flash will go off before the second curtain closes.

The Problems with eTTL

The two main issues with eTTL is that it relies on the camera being able to see the reflection of the pre-flash to set the exposure and that the system does not compensate for ambient light. Since the pre-flash is used to set an exposure, this requires that the pre-flash is hitting the subject in a way that the camera can evaluate (the e in eTTL) the scene and change the flash output. What happens if you are trying to backlight a subject? Or if you are really feathering the light across the subject, these are two very simple situations that will completely bork up eTTL since the light isn’t completely hitting the subject in a way that the camera can see it. These will usually result in the camera telling the flash to fire a full power burst since it didn’t get enough light off the pre-flash.

The second problem is that eTTL is only metering for the light on the subject and is not dealing with any ambient lighting. If you are in a fairly dark room and are not using manual or shutter priority modes, you can often end up with just the subject lit and the room being pitch black. Again, this is the flash/camera trying to guess that you simply want to light the subject and will ignore the ambient light in the room.

eTTL Not Taking Ambient Light Into Account
ISO 200 – f/7.1 – 1/50th

Telling eTTL What We Want It To Do

The good news is that we actually do have some control over what we want our speedlite to do when in eTTL mode. When we are in eTTL mode, we have one control over the flash power and one control for the ambient light, this will actually change when we learn about using speedlites in manual mode.

If we want to be able to adjust for ambient light, the only control we have is the shutter speed. Since the camera and speedlite will always be trying to make a good exposure, our aperture setting will have no effect since if we close down the aperture to let in less light, the camera will simply tell the speedlite to fire at a higher power. To adjust for ambient light, we either need to use a slower shutter speed to let in more ambient light, or speed it up to let in less.

The following images demonstrate this concept:

ISO 200 f/5.0 1/400th	ISO 200 f/5.0 1/50th
ISO 200 f/5.0 1/13th	ISO 200 f/5.0 1/6th

As you can see from these examples, the main exposure on the can is always the same, only the ambient light is different. In the very slow shutter images the ambient begins to burn into the subject since the speed is slow enough to alter the main subject exposure.

Let’s look at two real world examples of this.

Dark Room Situation

In the following image, the room was quite dark (as seen in the image earlier. However, the ceiling was quite beautiful. To the human eye, the room was most certainly not as bright as it appears in this image, to get this effect, a slow 1/4 second shutter speed was used to let the ambient room light burn onto the sensor. I wasn’t too concerned about the slow speed with the model since the flash would have the effect of freezing the model in place. The eTTL metering provided a good exposure on the model, while the slow shutter speed allowed me to capture the room light.

Slow shutter speed to capture ambient light
ISO 200 – f/5.6 – 1/4th

Bright Daylight Situation

In a bright daylight situation you can run into the opposite problem. If you are trying to capture a subject against a bright blue sky, one of two things tends to happen, either the subject is exposed well and the sky is completely blown out (white) or the sky is a nice blue but the subject is too dark. The simple solution here is to meter for the sky and set your shutter speed fast enough to pick up the color of the sky and then let the eTTL system meter the subject for a good exposure. The easiest way to do this is to point your camera at the sky behind the subject and adjust your shutter speed so your exposure meter is centered, then when you shoot your subject, the eTTL system will properly expose the subject.

Shutter Speed to Capture Blue Sky
ISO 100 – f/5.6 – 1/1250th

When eTTL Isn’t Giving You The Power You Want

Usually I find that eTTL mode will do a pretty good job with the subject exposure, the images so far have been shot completely in eTTL mode with no fine tuning other than adjusting the shutter to adjust for ambient light, but I have not had to adjust the flash output at all.

As mentioned earlier, there are simply times that eTTL’s best guess simply isn’t working. It can be because of light placement, distance of light to subject, or the reflective nature of the subject, these things can play havoc with eTTL and cause undesired results, this is when we need to tell the eTTL system we want it to do something different.

Flash Exposure Compensation (FEV)

Fortunately we have a very simple tool we can use called Flash Exposure Compensation, this simply let’s us dial the flash output up or down to make it put out more or less light. The eTTL system will still be doing the metering, but we can tell it to use that metering and factor in our guidance to achieve the exposure WE are looking for and not what the camera thinks it should be.

When your speedlite is mounted on your camera, you should have very easy access to the FEV setting right on the top of your camera. On Canon cameras you press the button under the icon shown here spinning the large wheel up or down to adjust the flash output. When you need to override what the eTTL metering is doing, simply adjust the FEV as needed. In the following images, all of the camera settings were the same for all three images, only the Flash Exposure Value was changed.

ISO 200 f/5.6 1/200th FEV 0

ISO 200 f/5.6 1/200th FEV -1

ISO 200 f/5.6 1/200th FEV -2

Summary

These few tips are not going to make you a Flash Master all by themselves but it should help you understand what your flash is doing in the eTTL mode and help you to fine tune it to get the results you are trying to achieve. For more information than you could ever possibly want, there are a couple of books available.

• Speedliter’s Handbook: Learning to Craft Light with Canon Speedlites by Syl Arena (pre-order)
• Mastering Canon EOS Flash Photography by NK Guy

Equipment Used

A simplified explanation of how a shutter works

First we need to understand how a shutter works in order to understand why we can’t use high shutter speeds with a studio strobe. Many of you have heard of first and second curtain for front and rear curtain but what exactly does this mean? Many people think that when you press the shutter release button that the shutter flips open and then flips back down.

What actually happens is that there are two components to the shutter, when you press the shutter the first shutter slides up out of the way and exposes the sensor. When the shutter speed time expires, the second shutter (curtain) slides up and covers the sensor. Up to certain speeds (1/160 – 1/250 depending on camera) the entire sensor is exposed. So when a flash goes off, the light is picked up across the entire sensor all at once.

At speeds higher than the standard sync speed, the second curtain is closing before the first curtain is completely out of the way. When you fire a flash at these speeds, the entire sensor is not exposed and you end up with black banding issues.

High speed sync solves this by firing a continuous stream of thousands of small strobe burst essentially creating a constant light source while the opening between the two curtains slides across the face of the sensor.

High speed sync is not available with studio strobes because they cannot communicate with the camera and are not capable of firing small bursts for the same type of effect.

Is there a solution?

Well…in a sense…there is. While we cannot make the flash do something it wasn’t designed to do. However…we may be able to pull a trick on the flash and trick it into firing at a different time in order to push it past the slower sync speed.

PocketWizard’s ControlTL system has a unique feature called HyperSync. What HyperSync does in a nutshell is to fire the strobe before the shutter opens and the sensor is then exposed to the fading trail as the strobe bulb dims thus providing a pseudo-constant light. Since the initial flash occurs before the shutter opens this will definitely cut down on the output power by up to several stops. If your strobe dump very quickly, the fastest shutter speed may be limited while a strobe that dumps slower will have a longer tail allowing a wider range of shutter speeds.

How well does it work?

This is really going to depend on the combination of your camera body and your strobe units. In my testing I used Westcott StrobeLite Plus units with a Canon EOS 50D. Normally, this setup is used either with PC Sync cords or with Cactus V2 Wireless Remotes where the best I can get is a 1/250th shutter speed. As you can see from the first sample set, anything above 1/250th had severe banding problems.

With the MiniTT1 on the Canon 50D and a FlexTT5 connected to the Westcott StrobeLite Plus via a 1/8†mini plug cable, I started a battery of tests. First I had to make sure that 1/250 was still working properly which it was so I bumped the shutter to 1/500 and had no noticeable banding. I bumped it another notch to 1/640, still the same result, up to 1/1000 and still the same. At 1/1250 very noticeable banding appeared on the bottom of the frame but could easily get cropped out, by the time I got to 1/3000 the banding was was starting to get worse quickly although if you took into account it would happen, you can still get a good cropable image. At 1/4000th a bit too much of the image is banded. Still, this is absolutely amazing compared to what I was able to get before. After lots of additional testing and making sure the strobe was set to full power, I was able to squeeze even more out of HyperSync.

As you can see from the second sample set, there was no noticeable banding through 1/1250th. Bottom banding started showing at 1/1600th and 1/2000th but with a little cropping you can get perfectly usable shots. At 1/2500th we started getting vingetting at the top of the frame. This is without changing the aperture or ISO settings, so with a larger aperture and higher ISO I could force my way into higher shutter speeds.

Let’s take a look at some comparison shots.

Sample Set 1 – Camera Connected to Strobelite via PC Sync Cable

1/250th	1/500th	1/1000th	1/2000th

Sample Set 2 – MiniTT1 on Camera, FlexTT5 Connected to Strobelite

1/250th	1/500th	1/800th	1/1250th

1/1600th	1/2000th	1/2500th	1/3200th

1/4000th	1/5000th	1/6400th	1/8000th

Putting it to practical use

Ok, we have seen technically what HyperSync can do for us, but what are some practical examples of why we would want to use this technique? First off, we can use a high shutter speed to kill off ambient light. This allows us to completely alter the lighting on a subject regardless of the current conditions.

Here is a shot of lighting setup we used today at 3pm in the afternoon with the sun coming from very high and slightly to the left of the camera.

We positioned our subject on the seat and even though the sun is to the left, we are going to shoot with such a high shutter speed that the sunlight will be virtually non-existent and the flash to the right will become our key light.

1/3200 Sec f/5.6 ISO 100

By using HyperSync mode at 1/3200 of a second, even though we are using a standard studio strobe, we have no noticeable banding and we have made the side of the face that was in direct sunlight now become the shadowed side.  Using these techniques you have total control over your lighting.

One complaint about studio lights is that you can’t run a fast enough shutter speed to freeze action, again this is where HyperSync can do magic for you. Take the following shot as an example, at the regular sync speed of 1/250th second, the fast moving drum sticks are just moving too fast for the shutter speed.

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/250th Second

Even though we can still get some banding issues with HyperSync, they are very minimal. The following shots are the same image before and after some cropping.

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/8000th Second - Before Crop

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/8000th Second - After Crop

As long as we are shooting with the understanding we will have some banding issues we can compose accordingly and still be able to get highly useful high speed shots.

While not everyone will need this kind of functionality, it is really good to know that it is there and if you are really looking for extra control of your lighting, sticking regular sync speeds just might not cut it for you. With PocketWizard’s HyperSync, your creativity is not limited by your shutter speed.

Equipment Used in this article

Understanding The Shutter

First we need to look at how a typical camera shutter works. In the shutter mechanism are two “doors” or what are called curtains. When you press the shutter, the first curtain drops down out of the way, the sensor is exposed, and then the second curtain drops down to cover the sensor and stop the exposure. In this mode of operation, the flash goes off when the shutter is fully opened to get a good exposure. At slower shutter speeds, when you are trying to get more ambient light cooked onto the sensor, you can control if the flash goes off right when the first curtain is open or right before the second curtain closes. This can allow you to create interesting effects.

Once you get above your camera’s sync speed, usually around 1/250th of a second then the shutter starts to behave differently. At faster speeds the second curtain starts to close before the first curtain has fully opened causing a small gap between the curtains to move across the shutter. If you fire a flash only a portion of the sensor will be exposed during the duration of the flash bulb going off. This will cause banding in your image.

Example of Banding

What is High Speed Sync?

Since a single flash burst will only expose a small portion of the sensor the solution is to have a continuous light output throughout the shutter cycle. Without speedlites this isn’t possible but we do have an interesting work-around. With High Speed Sync (HSS) the speedlite outputs a large number of short bursts while the shutter is in motion, around 50,000 bursts per second, emulating a constant light source. There are two downsides to HSS mode, the first is that you will lose some light output since the speedlite can’t put out full power when trying to spit out tens of thousands of bursts. The second downside is that you cannot freeze action with a longer shutter speed since the light output isn’t a very short burst, however, you can freeze just about anything by speeding that shutter up. This means the best use of high-speed sync is to light a subject that is heavily backlit by another light source such as the sun. Even in the brightest daylight can be taken to almost pitch black with a fast enough shutter speed. The challenge is to get enough light from your speedlight to get a good exposure on your subject.

Normal Flash Mode

Flash Bursting in High Speed Sync Mode

Enabling High Speed Sync

On the Canon speedlites its very simply to enable high speed sync. To get started, simply press the third button until the icon appears at the top of the speedlite’s LCD display. High Speed Sync is available in both eTTL mode and Manual mode. If High Speed Sync is not enabled, the fastest your camera’s shutter will be 1/250th of a second. Once you enable High Speed Sync you can set your shutter speed to any speed that your camera body will support. Most modern DSLRs can go up to 1/8000th second.

Why Do We Need Faster Shutter Speeds Anyway?

If 1/250th is fast enough to freeze most action, why would need to shoot faster than that or why would we need to use flash outdoors in the daylight? To begin with, if we are shooting people against a bright blue sky and we try to expose the scene for our subject, the blue in the sky will get completely washed out and turn white. On the other hand, if you crank the shutter speed fast enough to get the sky to stay nice and blue, the subject will be underexposed. The best way to solve this is to expose for the sky and then use flash to light the subject. While this sounds simple the problem is really bright conditions is that you may need a shutter speed significantly faster than your sync speed, sometimes well over 1/1000th of a second. Let’s take a look at a very typical outdoor, mid-day shooting situation.

In the first sample set the sun was almost directly overhead and subject was sitting in a gazebo so she was covered by shade. While the first shot is “ok” it certainly doesn’t stand out or have any real mood to it. The second image is unusable, and the third image has a real edgy tone to it due to the directional lighting that was done completely by flash since the settings and conditions were identical to the second image where the subject was completely dark.

Scene Exposed for the Subject - Background Blown Out - Lighting Looks Flat 1/1000th sec f/4.0 ISO 400

Scene Exposed for the Background - Subject Underexposed 1/8000th sec f/4.0 ISO 400

Scene Exposed for the Background - Subject Lit By Flash 1/8000th sec f/4.0 ISO 400

In the second example set we set our subject completely unshaded and then started with an exposure metering of the sky and the knocked it down another two stops to knock it down as much as possible. Then, with the flash, we added the light back in with the flash.

The only issue was that the subject was basically looking into the direct sunlight, but we did want to prove the point that you could completely override the sunlight with a fast shutter speed. To take it a step further, we moved the light to the opposite side. Take note that the shadow side of the face was actually facing the sun but by cranking the shutter speed we virtually eliminated the effect the sun had on her face. We also changed the ISO from 400 to 100 to stop the overall lighting down by two stops without affecting the subject.

1/1600th sec f/5.6 ISO 100

As you can see, we ended up with a great short lighted loop light. Could you do this with just natural light and reflectors, well not exactly. You could use a scrim over the model to cut down the sunlight and then bounce sunlight onto the far side of the face with a reflector. However, as you sped up the shutter to kill the background light, you would also be reducing the sunlight so it would be difficult, if not impossible to completely replicate. We can do it easily with flash because a speedlite at close range is going to provide more light than the sunlight and it is because we can create more light that we can do shots like this with flash.

Feel The Need for More Speed(lites)

Now let’s say you need to create a shot that appears to be taken at night, but your only opportunity to get the shot done is at high noon, the sun is blaring down and reflecting back up the ground. 1/100th at f/16 will give us a good exposure but if we need to knock it down significantly, without having enough depth of field to reach into the next county, we can easily find ourselves in a position where we need to be at 1/4000th or even faster to kill off the ambient light. Now usually we can get into the ball park with a single flash, but there is a really good reason why several companies have come out with dual, triple, and even quad speedlite holders. Remember, once we are in high speed sync, we can lose 2-2.5 stops of light, but if we add a second speedlite we double out light output. If one speedlite at full power (not really full because of HSS remember) isn’t quite enough, then two speedlites may be more than enough, as you add a third or fourth speedlite, you can usually run the speedlites are much less than full power which means faster recycle times and longer battery life. Running two speedlites each at 1/2 power is much better than 1 speedlite at full power. So three at 1/3 power each is better still. If you want to get really crazy, try twelve speedlites all connected together.

Summary

Hopefully you have now seen the power of using High Speed Sync to get shots that your normally wouldn’t be able to get. It does take some experimenting to get your settings dialed in for exactly what you are trying to achieve, but once you get the hang of it, it will totally open up your ability to be more creative.

Equipment Used

The Setup

The setup consists of a seamless paper background suspended on a background stand. To the camera right is 45″ Westcott Halo with a Westcott StrobeLite Plus which is very similar to using a shoot-thru umbrella which provides a good key light for but is big enough to provide a soft transition between the shadows and the highlights. To camera left is a 28″ Westcott Apollo softbox with a Westcott Strobelite Plus which is mostly used to light the background to soften any shadows that fall on it but also spills onto the subject slightly to help soften the shadows caused by the key light. The camera I use is a Canon EOS 50D with a Canon 580 EX II flash mounted on it along with a Lumiquest 80/20 diffuser. The key here is that the 580 EX II is set to manual mode and dialed down to 1/32 power. This means the light from the flash is fairly insignificant to the exposure and is really only used to fire the optical slaves on the StrobeLite’s. To me this is preferred to having PC Sync cords and can be more reliable than using cheap radio slaves in some conditions.

Portrait Lighting Diagram

Portrait Lighting Setup

Using the Lighting Setup

Short Lighting

Given a perfect setup, I would use a backlight on the background but there isn’t always enough room to work with when doing these kinds of shoots. By using the Apollo and the Halo in this configuration I am still able to get enough light on the background to give it a type of gradient look that keeps the background from being too boring.

If someone is facing to their right, I get a nice broad lighting effect, if they are looking to their left, I just pull them a little more away from the background so that the light from the Apollo to the right of the camera will provide a short lighting effect.

Having a versatile lighting setup means you can run people through very quickly and still be able to get a variety of looks without ever having to move lights around.

Avoid Issues With Glasses

Avoid Issues with Glasses

By having the lights more off to the side rather than more straight on to the people, we can also minimize issues with glasses.

Lighting is very much basic geometry, the light will bounce off an object at the same angle it hit it. Therefor, is you angle the lights so that light is not going to bounce back to the camera, the lenses in the glasses will show almost no reflection from the light source. The only time this lighting setup presents any issues with glasses is if someone has a tendency to raise their chin up during pictures. A simple suggestion for them to lower their chin should be all that is needed to solve the glasses issue.

Getting Group Shots

Large Group Shot

The biggest problem you will run into in this situation is a large group. This is the only time I will move the lights at all and the key light will be pulled back towards the camera to help reduce shadows on people caused by standing behind or beside someone else that is blocking the light. The bigger issue is getting people to squeeze together enough so that the frame doesn’t exceed the edges of the background. You might have to get creative in placing people to keep the group width narrow enough. I take the 9′ wide rolls since they will (barely) fit into my car. The 12′ rolls would be better for groups but they are harder to transport and are available in less color options.

Summary

The biggest thing when doing a shoot like this is to not over-think it. A simple lighting setup can be very effective. The more complicated you make it, the more problems can arise, the more time it takes to setup and tear down, and the more it costs to acquire in the first place. Keep it simple, position the lights in good spots, get a good meter reading and you will be able to just fire away all night.

Equipment Used

With an accessory flash like a Canon 580 EX II the top piece can rotate around to different angles, this will allow the flash to fire in a different angle than the camera is facing. If you then bounce that light off something like a wall or reflector you can then redirect the light back at your subject to create good directional light. The only thing you have to really watch for is that you are blocking and light directly from the flash to contaminate the scene which can completely diminish the look you are trying to get.

First let’s look at the flash configuration we are going to use. A 580 EX outfitted with Velco and then a Honl Photo Gobo to cover the bottom and right side of the flash head. This blocks direct light from the flash from hitting the subject but still allows some extra light to move up and left which will help add a little fill light. If we used a snoot, we wouldn’t have any extra fill light and the shadows would be much harsher.

The key to this working with such a simple setup is actually having things to bounce the light off of. Without walls and a ceiling that are close enough to effectively use as reflectors we might have to bring in our own reflectors to create the desired effect.

Let’s take another look at the lighting diagram.

The flash is mounted on the camera and is turned towards the wall aimed to hit a midpoint between the camera and the subject. This will illuminate the wall and act like new source of light angled back towards the subject giving us light that appears to come from the right side of the subject. Now let’s look at an example image to see exactly what this looks like.

As you can see, we have effectively created a short light setup by bouncing the light off the wall while also using a small amount of bounce light from surrounding walls and the ceiling to add a small amount of fill light to keep the right side of the subject from being completely black.

The point here is that learning how to use your on-camera flash to behave differently than simply blasting your subject with straight on lighting will open up your ability to create much better images. Experimenting will different distances, angles, and reflector surfaces and soon you will find that you can find useful locations and/or objects to use as your bounce target.

Understanding the problem

In the intro, we stated that the Canon wireless speedlite system has a lot of features and is reasonably flexible in how you can use it. While that is true, there are some serious limitation to the system that Canon has yet to address, and given the installed base, probably isn’t likely to address in the near future.

The primary problem is that the Master light needs to communicate with the slave units and does this via bursts of flash just before the main flash goes off. This “pre-flash†happens so fast that you can’t tell it from the main flash. This works quite well in optimum environments like inside your studio. However, once you get outside and you have issues like the sun interfering with the speedlite’s communication, trying to use modifiers that block communication, or worse, trying to put speedlites in places with no direct line of sight such as outside a door, or around a corner, and the Canon system by itself starts to have issues very quickly.

While there are inexpensive radio triggers available and some of them work very reliably, the problem is that they only allow you to use use speedlites in manual mode only. Now this may be ok for you, and it is for many people, they lack several very key features:

1. The ability to use Canon’s eTTL system for automatic exposure control
2. The ability to remotely adjust the power output of the slave units
3. The ability to use high speed sync

Again, these things may not be of interest to you based on the style of shooting you do, but for many people, these are critical components of getting the lighting they want.

How the ControlTL System Solves the Problem

While I will go into more technical detail in a moment, simply put, the ControlTL system intercepts the signals going to the speedlite and transmits the information over radio frequencies to the remote receivers.

There are two available components as part of the system, the MiniTT1 transmitter and the FlexTT5 transceiver. At a minimum you need one transmitter and one transceiver which would allow you to do off-camera lighting in eTTL mode and allow you to adjust power output by adjusting the flash compensation on your camera body.

Adding additional transceivers and speedlites adds to the flexibility of the system and allows you to build up to using multiple zones, ratio control, and remote setting of manual settings.

Why is eTTL Important?

Is eTTL over-rated or the magic bullet? For the most part, eTTL does a pretty good job the majority of the time. Let’s say we are shooting a scene and we set our camera to ISO 200, f/5.6, and 1/60th of a second shutter speed. The Canon speedlites will do a pre-flash to determine the best flash output for those settings and adjust accordingly. If we then change our camera settings to ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/100 of a second, even though we have effectively adjusted the camera settings by two stops, the eTTL system will determine that it simply needs less flash output to properly light the scene. Of course, with any system that is trying determine how to light something, it isn’t always going to be perfect because the camera simply can’t read your mind to figure out what it is you are trying to do, but generally speaking, eTTL does a pretty good job most of the time and can be a big time saver in getting your lighting dialed in.

ControlTL Modes

The new PocketWizard ControlTL system has several basic operating modes, the following are explanations of the basic setups.

• Basic eTTL Mode
  In the most basic mode you need either a MiniTT1 transmitter or a FlexTT5 transceiver on the camera’s hot shoe shoe and a flash on a FlexTT5. In this basic mode, all speedlites  are grouped together into a single zone.
• Ratio eTTL Mode
  This mode requires Canon 580 EX or EX II be in the hot shoe of the MiniTT1 or FlexTT5 that is in the hot shoe on the camera. Remote flashes can be assigned to zones A, B, or C by selecting the zone switch on the remote FlexTT5 module. The ratio control is managed on the speedlite mounted on the camera. You can also use a Canon STE2 Commander on top of the camera to adjust the lighting ratios.
• Wireless Manual Mode
  “Wireless Manual†system allows setting a remote flash to a desired manual level from the MASTER flash. You must use a 580EX II on the MiniTT1 or FlexTT5 as transmitter. The original 580EX or earlier flashes cannot perform
  this function via ControlTL radios. “Wireless Manual†uses controls similar to ratio mode.

In both of the eTTL modes, the new PocketWizards double the output of the pre-flash boost for determining exposure making it more accurate, usable at longer ranges, and improves functionality when using modifiers such as umbrellas and softboxes.

One feature that I love is being able to use high speed sync. The way high speed sync actually works is that the flash will output thousands of small bursts very quickly to provide virtually continuous light output when the shutter is moving at high speeds. The downside to HSS is that it’s pretty harsh on batteries. The MiniTT1 and FlexTT5 communicate directly with the flash and PocketWizard came up with a means of optimizing the burst output to match the shutter speed which can result is massive improvements, 2-4x improvement in output power, 2-4x increase in battery life, and 2-4x faster recycle time.

There is yet another mode called HyperSync which allows high shutter speeds with studio strobes. While you do take a light output hit in this mode, it can enable some incredible shots that were previously impossible to get. This is a mode I am really looking forward to playing with more.

Finally there are even optimizations for rear curtain sync that ensure the flash goes off as late as possible ensuring a proper exposure while making sure the shutter is in the right position when the flash goes off.

Although you may have heard that putting a ControlTL device on your camera’s hot shoe will fool your camera into thinking there is a flash there, this is not completely accurate. The only in-camera flash control you have is Flash Exposure Compensation. Any zone control or ratio adjustments have to be done with an actual 580 EX/EX II mounted on top of the MiniTT1 or FlexTT5 device.

When the Zone Controller is available, this will help solve the ratio issue by allowing independent adjustment of three different zones without having to have a speedlite on the camera itself. This will allow photographers with two speedlites to use them both off-camera with individual output control. The Zone Controller can also operate each zone in manual or eTTL mode for maximum flexibility. The Zone Controller should be shipping at the end of May for around $70.

How I use the PocketWizard ControlTL System

I can’t really address every possible scenario but I can tell you how I have been using the ControlTL system in the shooting I have been doing. This generally breaks down into a couple of different situations. As seen in this first image, a remote flash on a lightstand is outfitted with a Lumodi Beauty Dish to provide directional lighting and make it appear as if the subjects are being lit by the sun. Shooting at this distance and still having eTTL control of the flash is a huge benefit. This is also used with high speed sync to be able to properly expose for a bright sky and still get a proper exposure on the subjects.

Usually only a simple adjustment of the flash compensation is all that is needed to dial in the exact look that I am going for.

The second most common usage is the ability to place a subject is complete shade to minimize harsh shadows from the sun but still provide the look of an afternoon sun but with far greater control over the contrast.

The bottom line is that the ControlTL system provides the means accomplish the style of images that I try to create with minimal setup time and quick remote adjustments.

Is the ControlTL System for you?

You are the only person who can decide if the ControlTL system is the right fit for your photography style and especially your budget. The components are not cheap, this is a system designed for professionals. The MiniTT1 transmitter sells for $199 while the FlexTT5 transmitter sells for $225. With the Canon 580 EX II selling for $445, a multi-light setup starts to get expensive very quickly.

Why not just use studio strobes and radio triggers? There are certainly situations where that is appropriate and even preferred. However, studio strobes are not as portable, do not offer eTTL control, cannot do high speed sync, and can’t dump their light fast enough for higher speed shots. The small speedlites are extremely flexible and having them be able to be used at fairly long distances gives you control over your lighting that you simply can’t get with a studio strobe.

For more information as well as numerous instructional videos, check out the PocketWizard website at http://pocketwizard.com

Disclosure: CameraDojo, Kerry Garrison, and associated editors do not receive any monetary compensation for any reviews or articles written for the
CameraDojo.com website. PocketWizard supplied loaner equipment to use for this article as well as several upcoming lighting tutorials.

Why PocketWizards?

This isn’t really an article about why or why not to use PocketWizards per-say, but the PocketWizards do provide unique functionality that other systems do not. Could I fire the flash with the dish on it using a $24 Cactus v4? Of course I could, and many times that may be all you need. If you are good with a shutter speed of around 1/160th of a second, these cheap wireless systems will work just fine. Let’s take the first image above, notice the well exposed sky and background, this was taken with the sky overhead in bright sun. That image was taken at ISO 200, f/5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/1,600th of a second. Thats TEN TIMES faster than a cheap manual flash can do. With a shutter speed this fast, the sky is exposed properly (this technique is called high speed sync), if I had to shoot at a much slower shutter speed, the sky would be completely blown out. Also, since the PocketWizard system is wireless, the flash can be hidden behind the dish and will still fire.

Why not just use natual light?

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/640th No Flash

Because natural light sucks. Maybe I should explain that some more. You have very little control over natural ligh and no way of “fixing” bad natural lighting. Sure, I might be able to bring in a reflector and completely blind the subject (in this case me) but reflectors can have their own issues and more often than not, they require an assistant to hold and adjust to get the light just right.

Notice with these two images that were taken at the same time, one with flash and one without, the image without flash suffers from heavy, sharp shadows and dark eye sockets (racoon eyes).

ISO 100 f/5.6 1/640th

The image taken with flash is more evenly lit. Granted, I don’t make the best subject and I am trying to overexaggerate the lighting effect to help make it more understandable, but you can see that the racoon eyes are gone as well. Learning to balance the flash and ambient is really the key to making your images look natural even when throwing in flash to help them out.

So again, yes, you can certainly start off with cheap wireless triggers but you also need to understand their limitations and be able to work within those confines, you would not be able to balance flash and ambient in a bright outdoor shoot while being limited to less than 1/200th of a second. For studio work or more controlled lighting environments, manual flash and remote triggers will very often be the only thing you need. However, if you really want to take full advantage of your system and be able to switch from manual to eTTL and let the camera and flash help get your exposures right, as well as do tricks like high speed sync, then the ControlTL system is going to be the solution you are looking for.

Final lighting setup

For those of you wanting to see the final lighting setup used on the last two images, here it is. The camera was about 20 feet away using a Sigma 24-70 lens. A 580EX II flash was mounted on a tripod using the FlexTT5 Transceiver with the Lumodi 14″ beauty dish mounted on it. The light was position to the right of the subject at about a 45 degree angle to provide direction lighting in the same angle that the natural sunlite was coming from.

In this video Kerry demonstrates using a simple light meter in a product shoot.

How to use a light meter from Kerry Garrison on Vimeo.

Related Articles:

• Using a Light Meter for Proper Exposure
• Podcast #53 – Using a Light Meter

How to get the lighting we want

By now we would hope you wouldn’t be asking how to get your lighting setup dialed in, but if you need a little refresher you should start off with the following articles:

• Lighting ratios for portraits
• Using a Light Meter for Proper Exposure
• Understanding Light Stops

For the rest of the article, different images will also be presented with lighting diagrams to help illustrate exactly how each look was obtained.

Broad Lighting

Broad lighting is certainly the easiest lighting style to use since the camera side of the face is lit brighter than the far side of the face. This look is easily obtained by simply bouncing your flash off a wall or reflector to the side of the camera back onto the subject. Broad lighting used to be taught as the “feminine lighting†but that is certainly not always the case.  Broad lighting will tend to make a face look wider which is not always a look that is the most flattering. With the right subject, broad lighting can certainly achieve very nice results.

With the subject facing to the camera right and a large light source to the camera left a broad light effect is created putting the side of the face furthest from the camera into shadow. With the tilt of her head it gave her face a more rounded appearance.

Short Lighting

Short lighting is considered by many to be the most flattering style and is certainly my personal favorite. Short lighting will tend to make a face look thinner. Short lighting is also harder to achieve because it virtually requires off-camera lighting since the light is coming from behind the subject.

With the shadow on the camera side of the face, the face looks thinner. Keep in mind, the examples so far have been achieved on the same location spot using only natural light and simply moving the subject and camera position to get the desired look.

Split Lighting

Split lighting is not very popular and is probably the least used of the different lighting styles. In split lighting the light is split down the middle of the subject’s face dividing it in half. The lighting setup is fairly simple with two lights on either side of the subject and one using less power than the other. I personally really like the split lighting effect to give someone some images that will have a different look than they are likely to get from other photographers.

As you can see, split lighting can be very effective and with just a slight turn of the head can look like a mix of split lighting and short lighting,

Summary

I hope this has given you a new set of tools to use to improve your portrait lighting techniques, done properly you can achieve a very classic, timeless look that your clients will love. The key to mastering any of these is to practice, practice, practice. Get some lights setup for one style, maybe get a model from a place like Model Mayhem, and work on each style until you really have it nailed down. Next time we will look at Rembrandt and Butterfly lighting.

Stop, Drop, and Roll

We we are talking about lighting ratios, we first need to understand a few key concepts. The first being what we mean when we refer to stops of light. For an in-depth article on this, please refer back to our article on Understanding Light Stops. To put it briefly, a stop is not a measurement of light output, it is the relative difference between two light values. If we double the output of a light source, we have increased our light by 1 stop, if we cut our light in half, we have decreased our light by one stop. This is an exponential increase or decrease since we have to again double, or half our output to change by a whole stop. For example, if we take the light output from a single light bulb, it will then take two light bulbs to increase by 1 stop. To increase by another stop we would then need four light bulbs, then eight, etc.

We we are setting up for doing portraits using light ratios, we typically want to have one side of the face lit properly and then the opposite side dropped by 2 or even more stops. Why do we want to purposely add shadows, because flat lighting (1:1 ratio) is actually unflattering. Using shadows will add depth, dimension, and realism to you portraits.

Be yee subtle or be yee dramatic – that is the question

Working with shadows can give you very dramatic differences in the mood of an image from being soft and feminine to being very hard and more masculine. While that is typically the case, there are excellent examples even when reversing the gender roles. One of my favorite recent images is of Hayley and uses some very dramatic lighting and yet because the transition areas between shadows and highlights are fairly soft, the feminine nature of the image is retained.

By making the transitions between the shadows and the highlights harsher, you can change the mood. In the following two images, the models were light with pretty hard side lighting with high ratios in order to achieve a more rough look that would really make all of the details on their bodies stand out more.

Notice in both images the shadow side of the image is almost completely dark and featureless adding to the dramatic feel of the images.

Sculpting with light

In this final section we are going to look at how we can actually appear to change the shape of someone’s face with the use of light and shadows. In the first image, Taylor is light with a 1:1 ratio which appears to make her face seem flatter and really shows her cheek and chin structure. In the second image we throw shadows into the cheek and chin which give her a different look altogether.

With the 1:1 ratio broad lighting, Taylor’s face looks more featureless and wider. With a 2:1 ratio short lighting setup her nose has more detail and her face looks thinner and taller.

Summary

Based on the recent poll here on Camera Dojo we know that many of you are struggling with lighting and we hope that this, and future articles on lighting will help take your images to a whole new level.

That Cheatin’ Histogram

Let’s look at what happens when we take a picture with our DSLRs. The exposure meter in the camera is using reflective light instead of incident light so a man’s tux will show a different meter reading than a bride’s dress even if the exposure for both of them was correct since the white dress will reflect more light than the tux, thus throwing the exposure meter out of whack. Secondly, when we press the shutter the camera creates a JPEG image with all of your picture settings and an S-Curve applied. Yes, this happens even if you are shooting in RAW mode since the display on the LCD is actually the JPEG image which is also the image the camera uses to calculate the histogram. I can’t count the times that my exposure meter was dead center, the preview looked great, and the histogram was good but when I brought up the RAW image in Lightroom, the image wasn’t quite exposed as well as I expected. Anyone who shoots a lot can attest to this issue. Yes, your LCD and histogram are usually accurate enough, but if you want to be accurate all the time then you need a reading from the point of few of the subject by measuring the actual amount of light hitting the subject and not the amount of light reflected by the subject.

What does a light meter tell you?

I asked a handful of photographers who had never used a light meter what they thought a light meter would tell them and surprisingly few actually knew even the basic functions of all light meters did with “Measure the light I guess†being the top answer. Even the most basic of light meters will allow you to set the ISO speed you want to use, then you set the shutter speed or aperture to what you want to use and the meter will give you the correct settings for a proper exposure. More fancy ones can also fire your flash equipment and some will even calculate the amount of flash versus ambient light.

Let’s say we have a nice bright sunny day and we set our ISO to 200, and our aperture to f/16, if we take a reading we will probably get something like 1/200th of a second as our shutter speed for a good exposure. With most digital light meters you can then make adjustments to the shutter or aperture and it will change the values on the screen to tell you what to change the other setting to.

If you aren’t familiar with the relationship between ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture, you should read the article we have about it (Link: The Exposure Triangle).

Testing the theory

Ok, I am sure many of you are skeptical that your camera, even a high end pro-series camera isn’t going to be dead-nuts accurate, but let’s take a few tests and see what our camera is telling us.

The following is a series of images of a product that has a black front and a light top, not something a camera’s meter is going to be good at so it will help illustrate the point well. Simply adjusting the camera’s settings to center the camera’s exposure meter at ISO 200, f/5.6 the camera gave us a setting of 1/400th shutter speed. Shooting the gray side of a WhiBal card it changed to 1/400th of a second, and shooting the gray/white/black side we got a setting of 1/640th of a second. By doing this test we can see that the camera’s exposure meter is going to change based on how reflective the subject is. In each image you can also see Photoshop’s histogram to see where the image’s exposure actually came in at.

Image 1 – ISO 200 f/5.6 1/400th – Slightly Underexposed (Based on WhiBal Gray)

Image 2 – ISO 200 f/5.6 1/640th – Underexposed (based on WhiBal White/Black/Gray)

Image 3 – ISO 200 f/5.6 1/200th – Showing good exposure (based on light meter)

Now some people may say that a perfect exposure should be centered in the histogram, however, digital sensors retain more detail in the highlights than they do in the shadows so you actually want your highlights to be fairly far to the right without going into the last little bit of the histogram which is exactly what we got with the final image.

But how does the meter know what the background is?

One of the most commonly asked questions is how does the meter know what the background of the subject is, since that should affect the exposure right? Well, let’s just try some experiments and see what we get. The following images were taken using the exposure settings provided by the light meter which were identical for both images, take a close look at the histogram for each image.

ISO 400 f/4.0 1/125th – Properly Exposed yet histogram says its underexposed

ISO 400 f/4.0 1/125th – Properly Exposed yet histogram says its overexposed

Of course the white paper is providing some bounce light that is providing more details around the edges and since I only metered for the center of center of the phone. So yes, the background can affect the exposure because you may not be metering for any reflected light, although this is typically only a problem with a situation like this. If I wanted to expose for the edges, then I could have metered at the edges. Does this mean the background affected the exposure? Yes, but only because the background in this situation actually is acting as a light source that is reflecting light into the edges around the product.

Will a light meter work properly in every situation?

So far we have looked at using a light meter for incident lighting, where this can break down is with highly reflective surfaces or in situation where the lighting is uneven, in this case a reflective meter is going to be more accurate. Most all light meters can do both types by adjusting or moving the light sensor dome. In reflective mode, the meter is going to act just like the meter on the camera.

Like anything else, a light meter is just another tool that is designed for a specific purpose. Used properly, it can dramatically improve your exposures and you camera setup time. The following image was taken in bright daylight with a large diffuser to the camera right and a large beauty dish flash to camera left. Combined with the ambient light, that is three different light values. With the light meter getting a reading taken at the subjects face, and the meter facing the camera, the settings provided were certainly dead on.

Model: Taylor Thorne

Ok, I want one, what do I do?

Light meters, especially used ones can be had for pretty reasonable prices. I see meters like the Sekonic L-358, which is a pretty nice meter with lots of functionality, often sell for $150-$200 on Craigslist. Cheaper models with less features, but still fully capable can be had for as little as $50-$60.

Model: Taylor Thorne

First off you need to realize that studio flashes like the PhotoBasics StrobeLites are not automatic like the on-board or accessory flash on your camera. A studio light doesn’t know what you are trying to do and will not adjust itself for the camera settings you have dialed in. You also need a means of firing the lights off when you press the shutter, all that and more will be covered in this article.

Connecting the lights to your camera

PC Sync port on Canon 30D

The first thing we need to do is to connect the lights to your camera, for this we are going to need what is called a PC Sync port. On most Canon DSLR’s the PC Sync port is on the left side of the camera under a rubber flap. In the image here you can see the PC Sync port and the end of a PC Sync cable. In my typical setup I will have the main light plugged into the PC Sync port to fire it and the other lights will automatically fire at the same time because they have a built-in optical slave that will fire the flash when another flash is detected. Since this happens far faster then the mechanical shutter, the effect is that all of the lights fire at exactly the same. There is a limit of how fast the lights will sync to the camera but we will address that in a moment.

Weim Hot Shoe Adapter

If you are unlucky enough to not have a PC Sync port on your camera then you will need to purchase a hot shoe adapter. The recommended one is the Weim Hot Shoe Adapter which sells for about $50 at most places. This will got into your camera’s hot shoe (when an acessory flash plugs in) and has a PC Sync output port on it.

As I mentioned, the lights do have an optical slave so they will fire when another flash is used so you may think you can just use the flash that is built into your camera to fire off the big lights. While this will work to an extent, the problem is that unless you know how to adjust your flash’s output compensation, the flash is going to fire at a level that your camera expects will be correct for the given light, when the big lights fire along with the built-in flash, your subject will no be over-lit and the scene becomes overexposed.

Rear view of StrobeLite

The opposite end of the PC Sync cord plugs into the back of the light. In this image you can see the 1/8th inch mini plug port on the bottom right hand area of the strobe head. With the camera and the lights connected, you are all ready to take some amazing images right?

If ONLY it was that easy. Now actually comes the hard part, figuring out how to get the light set right for a proper exposure. Hang in there, it won’t hurt too much.

Getting the lighting right

Output Adjustment Dial

Nice, quality studio lights make your lighting easier right? I wish! In the last section I explained that your on-board or accessory flash will meter the scene and use the appropriate output for the exposure metering, not so with studio lights, at this point you are full manual.

On the flash will be an adjust dial to control the amount of light output. On the StrobeLites this goes from full power down to 1/4 power given you two stops of light output control. If you have a light meter and know how to use it, you have all the tools you need to get the shot right the first time. If you don’t have a light meter then you will need to continue reading.

Since I shoot with he same lights, in the same studio, with the same basic setup the vast majority of the time I know the basic light setup that will work without have to take too many test shots, I can usually get it dialed in within about three shots.  A key thing to note is that your meter in your camera is basically worthless at this point. You are going to want to shoot in manual mode otherwise the camera is going to try to adjust your settings for the metered light. In manual mode you have total control. So where should you start?

For most of my pictures I start with the following basic settings:

ISO: 200
f/Stop: 11
Shutter Speed: 1/200th second

In fact, those are the exact settings I used for the previous pictures in this article so far. Why these particular settings? For one, I like shooting at ISO 200, I like the results I get at that speed, f/11 is my normal aperture setting unless I am going for a particular depth of field effect. That leaves two ways to adjust the amount of light I need. I can either adjust the shutter speed or adjust the light output of the flash. You may think that you may want to go with a faster shutter speed to make sure you dont introduce any camera blur but in most cases you can’t shoot any faster than 1/200th or 1/250th depending on your lights/camera combination. With the PhotoBasics StrobeLites and a Canon 30D, I have never had an issue at 1/250th but I like the extra margin of safety of using 1/200th. Let’s take a look at what happens if you shoot faster.

Out of Sync Image

The image shown here was shot at 1/640th of a second, while this would be perfect safe if I was using the Canon 580 EX flash, the StrobeLites cannot sync with the camera at that speed so what happens is that the strobe went off too late causing the image to be partially cutoff by the closing of the shutter mechanism. Because of this issue we are limited to speeds of 1/200th or less so I usually will stick it at 1/200th and be done. That leaves adjust the light output higher if I need more light or using a lower output or a slower shutter speed if I need less light. Knowing that the only things I will need to adjust are my light output or shutter speed I have really reduced my possible settings from a handful down to basically one, and its either shutter speed or light output.

Since most of my shots are product shots, the lights are generally pretty close to the objects so I will start at a very low power output of the flash, if its too bright at the lowest setting and I am already at 1/200th of a second the only way to cut down on the light being captured is to move to a smaller aperture setting like f/22. If the light isn’t enough I can just reach up and dial in more light or use a slower shutter speed.

With a little practice and a handful of confidence, you will be getting your lighting dialed in within a few shots. Take your picture and then look at the histogram of the image on your LCD of your camera to double-check the exposure. If its too dark, bump up the light, if its clipped out, dial down the light. Nothing will beat just a bunch of practice with your own lights/camera/lenses/environment to get you familair with how your lighting setup will work the best and soon you too will be able to get it dialed in perfectly within just a few quick test shots.

Author: Kerry Garrison

Getting Started
When we say on-camera flash we are not referring to the built-in pop-up flash on your camera, this flash is mostly useless for high-quality images as the light is a direct, straight-on light source that is less than flattering on a subject. For a flash, you will want an accessory flash that attaches to your camera’s hot shoe or can be triggered remotely via wireless, PC sync, IR, or other means. For Nikon users, the most common is the Speedlight 800, for Canon it’s the 580 ex. You can also use third party flashes if they are compatible with your camera.

Using On-Camera Flash Units
The main problem with using an on-camera flash is the same as using the built-in flash, the light goes straight at the subject and flattens features and can cause red-eye. With an on-camera flash you almost always want to use a diffuser if shooting straight on. There are a wide range of diffusers such as my favorite, the Gary Fong Lightsphere. What you really want to achieve is a larger light source to help prevent harsh shadows. Without a diffuser, your best bet is to aim the flash at something you can bounce the light off of such as a wall, ceiling, foam board, reflector, or even a white shirt. In a pinch, I have seen napkins, sheets, playing cards, index cards, and small children used to bounce light. A diffuser like the Gary Fong Lightsphere works well because it not only send light towards the subject but will bounce light from all directions softening shadows very nicely. This type of diffuser is great for event photographers (like weddings, etc) because you can’t always set up an optimal lighting setup during an event like that.

If you have not purchased some kind of accessory flash yet, the number one recommendation I can give you is to make sure that the head can tilt up and down and rotate side to side so that you have a wide variety of positions to use to utilize the bounce methods.

Getting the flash off-camera
Once you get your flash off-camera, a whole new world will open to you in terms of lighting options. There are multiple ways of firing the flash off-camera:

• Using a hot-shoe extension cable
• Using wireless triggers such as the Cactus remotes or Pocket Wizards
• Using a PC Sync cable if your flash supports it (there are camera and flash adapters available if you need to add this ability to a unit that doesn’t have built-in support for it)

From a cost point of view, the Cactus triggers or PC Sync cables are usually the best choice and provide the most flexibility.

Continuous Lights
If you want to use other light sources such as hot lights like the Photobasic’s Light Kit, this is certainly another option and you can use this tutorial just as easily with a flash or other light source.

Positioning a Single Light
Now that we have the flash off-camera, where should we start to position it? Let’s look at a basic lighting setup as shown in the picture here. With the light
source pointing at the subject from about a 45 degree angle, this will add depth to subject by actually adding shadows. While you may think that you want to remove all shadows from an image, if there are no shadows the subject will look flat. By adding shadows you bring back definition and depth.

What we want to avoid are very harsh shadows that can then distract from the subject. It is this middle ground that we normally want to achieve. If there is enough ambient light, or light coming in from a window, it may be enough to soften the shadows and give you the look that you want, if not, you may end up with a look that is too dark on one side or has shadows that are too harsh.

Single Light Source

Using a reflector as a second light source
The easiest and cheapest way to add a second light source is with some form of reflector. As we have mentioned before, there are a number of things you can use for this purpose such as a reflector from a company like Wescott, Photo Basics, or Photoflex, white foam core board, or other reflective surfaces. A mirror actually does not do a good job because it will not diffuse the light the way you will want it to and you will usually end up washing out the shadows that you actually want to maintain. What we are really talking about here is bouncing excess light from the main light source back to the subject. Since this light will be a reflection, it will naturally be softer than the main light source so it usually won’t completely remove shadows but it can be used to soften them enough to give you the depth and definition you are looking for without washing out the shadows entirely.

In this diagram, notice that we have not moved the camera or the original light source but have added a reflector to the side of the subject (camera left) to soften up the harsh shadows caused by the key light.

Single Light With Reflector

Faking a Ring Flash
The final single light source setup we are going to cover is what we call a fake ring light. A real ring light is a circular light that creates a light that appears to wrap around the subject, this can be a great light source. This can be a very flattering light because of the way the light comes from the edges of the subject instead of totally straight on. The way we are going to fake the ring flash is by placing a large umbrella directly behind the camera. While this may seem odd to be blocking the light with the camera, the size of the light source will not only make up for it, but it will actually look good in the subject’s eyes by showing the ring instead of a solid light source. With a large enough umbrella you can even stand in front of the umbrella without blocking too much light.

Fake Ring Flash

While we have only touched on the basics of using a single light and a reflector, we have seen very elaborate lighting setups with only a single light source and a number of reflectors to provide fill light, back lighting, hair lighting, and more all from a single main key light. Foam core is available at most office supply stores and craft stores and makes an excellent material to experiment with and build up your lighting skills.

We would like to see what you can do with a single light source, so please get out and take some pictures and post them to our flickr group and tag them with “single light” and cameradojo.

Author: Kerry Garrison

To get started, the basic rule is that the longer the snoot is, the narrower the beam of light will remain. However, building a really long snoot isn’t always feasible, so fortunately there is a little trick. If you take a shorter snoot and create an internal baffle, you can get the effect of a much longer snoot, and that is what we will do here.

You will need a few supplies first:

• 2 pockets of black straws (Panera bread is my favorite supplier)
• Some thin stiff cardboard like cereal boxes
• Glue (I used a hot glue gun)
• Scisscors
• Ruler
• Pen/Pencil
• Gaffers tape

First you want to measure and cut out a pattern for your flash. Make sure you have at least 1/2″ of overlap. The straws we used were 7.5″ long so we cut them into thirds to give us 2.5″ pieces then for the length we wanted 3/4″ on each end giving us a total length of 4″. I can’t stress enough that you want to measure carefully and test fit several times to make sure you have a good fit. Few things are worse then getting finished and then figuring out that you have a poor fit. There are two reasons for have the extra space on the end of the snoot from the end of the straws. First, it will look cleaner than having the straws flush and second, it allows you to use colored gels if you want.

First off you need to find some black straws, the ones from your local Panera Bread work very well. If you are going to walk out with pockets full of straws, at least buy a sandwich and a drink for their trouble. While the straws will cut easily with scissors, pieces will have a tendency to go flying when cut. You then need to start glueing down layers of straws onto the cardboard. Hot glue works well but can be kind of messy so pick your adhesive carefully. Take care and put it together carefully, the nicer of a job you do, the happier you will be with it in the end.

Once its all finished, wrap it with black gaffers tape. The gaffers tape will serve two purposes, first, it will again make it look better, and second, it will keep light from spilling out. I added a few extra layers of gaffers tape on the inside lip that goes over the flash to give it a tighter fit. As you can see, it actually looks pretty decent for something literally built from carboard, straws, and masking tape. This setup is definitly not a good fit for on-camera flash so you will need some way of firing your flash off-camera such as the Gadget Infinity Remote Flash Triggers.

So how well does it work? Let’s take a look at two pictures taken with the exact same setup and the only difference is the use of the snoot.

Regular Flash	Flash with snoot

What an amazing effect! With a little experimenting there is no limit to what you can do. While this is a very extreme example, you can see more examples at Flickr and check our some work from Dave Black. We took our snoot with us on a wedding shoot this weekend to put it to use in a live environment.

Make a few different sized snoots and start seeing how it works for you.

Now get out there and start shooting!

If you aren’t an avid eBay’er, this isn’t a bad time to get started, but you can find all of the components you need at your local stores. The following is the parts list we will put together:

(3) Clamp-on light holder
(3) Fluorescent bulbs (1700 lumens)
(3) Cheap tripods or microphone stands
(2) Large clamps
(1) Roll of seamless paper

Seems like an odd list of items for a photo studio but this will allow you to setup some pretty respectable lighting. The standard clamp lights we found at Home Depot, instead of the cheapest opnes we could find, we went up a level and dropped $14 each for some nicer units.

For the bulbs, we do not recommend using standard light bulbs as you end up with small hot spots that you end up trying to remove by diffusing the light with muslin or other material. This isn’t a good idea because these lights get pretty hot. Fluorescent bulbs provide a larger light source and are signifigantly cooler. While we used some 1700 lumen bulbs we found at Ace Hardware in a $6 2-Pack, it will pay off to spend a few more bucks on eBay and find some photo bulbs (5000 kelvin) which will cost around $15-$20 each.

For the stands, most people have some ancient tripods laying around in a back closet somewhere, if not a cheap tripod or microphone stand can be found at swap meets, flea markets, or eBay for only a couple of bucks each.

For our background we actually headed over to Samy’s Camera and grabbed a roll of gray seamless paper ($29) and two large clamps ($3 each).

So what does this look like? Here is what we have so far minus the third light to be used for backlighting or direct overhead light.

You can see the roll of paper coming down off a bookshelf and onto an old computer desk and held down with the clamps. So far we have spent under $100 for everything so far.

With the cheaper bulbs, I set the white balance on the fluorescent setting and shoot in RAW to maximize my ability to correct it later. But how well does this setup work? Here are a few shots so you can see for yourself.

Sangoma a200 Card

Polycom 501 IP Phone

Aastra 408i CT Handset

As you can see, the end result is pretty darned good. An overhead light would have cut down on the shadows a little bit but I was simply too lazy to get it setup.

Happy Shooting!