Syl’s new book LIDLIPS Lessons I Didn’t Learn In Photo School is available on Amazon for only $13.45.

Be sure and check out Syl’s websites: http://pixsylated.com and  http://speedliting.com

Show Host

Kerry Garrison
http://kerrygarrison.com Twitter Facebook FriendFeed

You can listen to this podcast now using our player widget in the right hand sidebar

This podcast is also available on iTunes.

• Hot Shoe Diaries
  Joe McNally [Amazon $26.39]
  You cannot go wrong with Joe’s tips on lighting, simply superb, a must read
• Fast Track Photographer
  Dane Sanders [Amazon $26.95]
  Run your business, don’t let it run you. Learn how to get your career on the right track
• Digital Photography Book 1, 2, 3
  Scott Kelby [Vol 1 Amazon $16.49] [Vol 2 Amazon $16.49] [Vol 3 Amazon $16.49]
  I am including all three books in the series (hence 17 books), these recipe books help you get the shot you want
• The Moment it Clicks
  Joe McNally [Amazon $34.64]
  Excellent background and stories on different shots. Inspirational and educational
• Light: Science and Magic
  Fil Hunter [Amazon $30.91 ]
  Some consider this to be the ultimate book on lighting
• Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
  David DuChemin [Amazon $26.39]
  Within the Frame is a book about finding and expressing your photographic vision, specifically where people, places, and cultures are concerned.
• Beaton: Portraits
  Terence Pepper [Amazon $40.50]
  This is an essay of the works of Sir Cecil Beaton who was a major contributor to Vogue and Vanity Fair
• Lighting for Photography: Techniques for Studio and Location Shoots
  Glenn Rand [Amazon $23.07]
  This book shows how to perfect lighting in the studio as well as on location
• Sculpting with Light: Techniques for Portrait Photographers
  Allison Earnest [Amazon $23.07]
  “With tips for working with individuals and groups, indoors and out, this book is not to be missed.”  —ImagingInfo.com
• The Daybooks of Edward Weston
  Beaumont Newhall [Amazon $44.97]
  This book gives an intimate view into the day-to-day trials of a working artist, Edward Weston
• Keith Carter Photographs: Twenty-Five Years
  Keith Carter [Amazon $35.00]
  Be inspired by looking through 25 years of Keith Carter’s work
• Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography
  Kirk Tuck [Amazon $23.07]
  “Pure gold, showing real solutions to real lighting situations and along the way creating some of the most natural-looking on-location portraits.”  —Shutterbug
• Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography
  Kirk Tuck [Amazon $23.07]
  “Richly illuminated with location portraits and a few still lifes, and written in a clean down-to-earth style.”  —ppmag.com
• The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos
  Michael Freeman [Amazon $19.77]
  The Photographer’s Eye shows how anyone can develop the ability to see and shoot great digital photographs.
• Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera – Bryan Peterson [Amazon $17.13]
  For serious amateur photographers who already shoot perfectly focused, accurately exposed images but want to be more creative with a camera, here’s the book to consult.

If you have some favorites that I missed, please post in the comments.

During this tutorial Kerry shows how to use a light meter to determine the difference between the background and the subject to achieve a good high-key look as well as using the meter to determine the proper exposure.

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 Haley 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

• Canon EOS 500D (EOS Rebel T1i)
• Epson R-D1x
• Hasselblad CF-22
• Hasselblad CF-22MS
• Hasselblad CF-39
• Hasselblad CF-39MS
• Hasselblad CFH-22
• Hasselblad CFH-39
• Hasselblad CFV
• Hasselblad 503CWD
• Hasselblad H2D-22
• Hasselblad H2D-39
• Hasselblad H3D-22
• Hasselblad H3D-31
• Hasselblad H3D-39
• Hasselblad H3DII-22
• Hasselblad H3DII-31
• Hasselblad H3DII-39
• Hasselblad H3DII-39MS
• Hasselblad H3DII-50
• Kodak EasyShare Z980
• Nikon D5000
• Olympus E-450
• Olympus E-620
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1
• Sigma DP2

To download Camera Raw 5.4, go to http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.4.

“Hey Guys,

I got a question for ya. Sorry the answer to this might already be on your site somewhere but I’d just thought I would msg you instead. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for photography books either having to do w/ business or the technical side of things. I’ve read Professional Wedding Photography by damien lovegrove and am in the process of reading understanding exposure bryan peterson. I have fast track photography on order..

Maybe one to do w/ posing??? Its weird I study photography all day long everyday.. but when it comes down to being w/ the couple it’s like I forget everything I ever learned and freeze. Then i want to slap myself because I could have done this or this shot but was having a brief moment of anxiety. I suppose posing and things will come with practice and the more I do it but I really thought I would have the hang of it by now. Any suggestions? ”

Yes Heather, David and I both have a list of suggestions for you.

David’s Picks

• Jerry Ghionis’ Pic Pockets $80
  These are small reference cards that show a specific scene, then on the back it goes into detail as to how the shot was taken.
  https://www.theicesociety.com/?page=72
• Bambi Cantrell’s Cue Cards $100
  These are stacks of cards demonstrating different poses and ideas to give you recommendations for setups.
  http://cantrellportrait.com/extra/online_store.php
• John Mireles Look Book $75
  More like a paint swatch sampler, the look book contains a wide variety of common poses to help you from getting into a rut or just for inspiration if you need some.
  http://photographerstoolkit.com/lookbook

Kerry’s Picks

• Photographing People – Rotovision $26.00
  Excellent book on posing and lighting setups and each shot includes a 3D drawing showing exactly how the set was designed with the placement of lighting, subject, reflectors, camera, etc.
  Photographing People: Portraits, Fashion, Glamour
• Posing for Portrait Photography: A Head-to-Toe Guide by Jeff Smith – $21
  This is  great book that goes through the correct placement of each section of the body from head to toe with plenty of example images to help make the point.
  Posing for Portrait Photography
• Professional Portrait Posing: Techniques and Images from Master Photographers by Michelle Perkins $23.72
  This book goes through the particular styles of a handful of professional photographers to show their distinct styles for posing and lighting subjects.
  Professional Portrait Posing: Techniques and Images
• The Moment it Clicks – Joe McNally $39.59
  Joe is a master of lighting and this book, while designed as a book on lighting, uses almost exclusively human subjects so it also is an excellent book for posing.
  The Moment it Clicks

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

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.

Author: Kerry Garrison

Do I need to know this?
If you are always using your flash in automatic modes, you may never need to know much about guide numbers but in manual modes, if you don’t have a flash meter, understanding how guide numbers work can be a powerful tool in helping you to get your lighting setup faster. Many older flashes even have built-in guides to help you calculate the aperture setting for a given distance.

Using the guide number to determine aperture
At the end of this article is a link to an Excel preadsheet that will do much of the work for you as well as containing the guide numbers for a handful of popular flash heads. First off you should understand the math behind it and how to read the guide number information for your own equipment.

Some flash devices will simply have a single guide number value while others may have different numbers at different ranges and even ISO settings so you need to pay attention when reading the guide number. Let’s take a look at a typical flash setup. A Canon 580 EX II flash has a listed guide number of 191, if we divide the guide number by the distance in feet we should get a good estimate of the aperture to use. In this example we will use a distance to the subject of 30 feet.

Guide Number / Distance = Aperture
191/ 30 = 6.3

The closest aperture setting on my Canon 30D to that is f5.6 so that would be an appropriate aperture to use if I was using ISO 100. If I was using a higher ISO number then I could use a smaller aperture. The following chart shows the multiple factor for common ISO speeds:

ISO Multiplier Table
ISO 100: 1.0
ISO 200: 1.44
ISO 400: 2.07
ISO 800: 2.99
ISO 1600: 4.30
ISO 3200: 6.19

To expand on the previous calculation, we can add in the ISO to give us more aperture options. Using the same guide number and distance while adding the ISO, let’s see how this affects our aperture setting:

(Guide Number / Distance) * ISO Multiplier = Aperture
(191/ 30) * 1.0 = 6.3
(191/ 30) * 1.44 = 9.1
(191 / 30) * 2.07 = 13.1
(191 / 30) * 2.99 =19.0

The most common question now is how to determine the distance to your subject without measuring it with a tape. Most lenses will have a distance readout that will show you the distance to your subject once you focus on it. Just press your shutter half way down while aiming at the subject, take your finger off the shutter, and then look at the distance readout. We aren’t aiming at hyper-accuracy here since the aperture settings in your camera aren’t going to exactly match the calculations but we are trying to get as close as possible and avoid a lot of trial and error. Using this information you should be able to get your light dialed in much faster than just by guessing.

Determining Maximum Flash Distance
Using a similar method we can also determine the maximum distance your flash can be effective at, this is extremely useful when trying to determine if you can light up a person on a stage from the back of an auditorium for example. The calculation for this is the guide number divided by the f/stop, and again the ISO value can be used here as well. In this example we will use the guide number of a Canon 580 EX II (58) and an f/stop of 5.6.

(Guide Number / f/stop) * ISO = Max Distance
(191/ 5.6) * 1.0 = 34′
(191 / 5.6) * 1.44 = 49′
(191 / 5.6) * 2.07= 70′
(191 / 5.6) * 2.99 = 102′

Since the f/stop and the ISO determine how much light enters the camera, you see how using a larger aperture (lower number) and a higher ISO can really affect the range of your flash. Let’s compare the difference between f/5.6 and f/2.8 as an example:

GN 191@ f/5.6 100 ISO = 34′
GN 191 @ f/5.6 200 ISO = 49′

GN 191 @ f/2.8 100 ISO = 68′
GN 191 @ f/2.8 200 ISO = 98′

These calculations will help you determine if a long distance shot is even possible or if you need to bring in additional light. If you are too far from the subject for your light to be effective, you could place your light closer to the subject and fire it with a wireless trigger, this would allow you to shoot from a distance but get the desired light effect.

Summary
I know this can seem a little intimidating at first but understanding these concepts will help you get your lighting technique under control much faster and help make sure you can get the shots you want. You can even use the calculations to build a custom “cheat sheet” for your particular flash that can print out and keep as a handy reference. The spreadsheet that we have made available for you has both the f/stop and maximum distance calculators but has a second worksheet that will create the cheat sheet for you by simply changing the guide number on the first line to match your flash device’s output.

Calculation Spreadsheet [ Download ]

Author: Kerry Garrison

Quantity

The first property of light that we want to look at is Quantity. This is the amount of light that is hitting the subject. You have several ways of adjusting the amount of light the camera will see. In some cases you can adjust the light output of your lights or use diffusers to cut down on the light if you have too much. You should all know that you can also adjust your aperture or shutter to adjust the amount of light coming into the camera. With DSLR’s, don’t forget you can also adjust your ISO setting. With four main ways to adjust for light quantity, this is one of the more versatile of the three properties.

Quality
The light quality is one of the more confusing properties and the one that gives new photographers the most trouble. Quality is not about the color of the light, it refers to whether the light is very harsh and will cause hard shadows, or is it softer with smoother shadows. The quality of the light will affect the overall contrast. The way we adjust the quality of light is by changing the apparent size of the light source. The reason this is confusing is that you initially think that the close a light is to the subject, the harsher the light will be. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The closer the light is to the subject, the larger the light source will appear to be. Take the Sun as an example, far and away the largest object in our solar system, but because of the distance, it acts as a very small diameter light source causing harsh shadows. If you only have a small lightbox, moving it close to the subject will make it appear much larger and thus will soften the shadows and provide a more pleasing light source.

Harsher Side Light

Softer Side Light

Direction
The third property should be fairly simple to understand. The light direction will also affect shadows and the final image quality If you are using small lights, you can simply move them in order to create a more flattering light angle. If you are using window light, or other unmovable light source than you can still change the orientation of the subject to the light source.

Side Lighting

Direct Frontal Light

Come the the Flickr User Group to discuss this and other topics.

The seminar itself is almost 4 hours long and the price includes a DVD with another four hours of training on it. At $49.00 this is one of the best deals around. Based on some of the things we learned there, watch for some upcoming tutorials on lighting and angles to help flatter your subjects.

Seminar information: Captivated by the Light workshop

Was it as simple as cleaning out the garage and painting the walls? Absolutely not, continue reading to see what else we did to put some finishing touches on the studio.

As you can see from the shot here (of David from Esquire Photography), notice the rafters of the garage have been covered with white paper. This was actually done with spare rolls of paper from a print shop. The paper acts as a big reflector adding at least a stop of light onto the scene. You can see this effect by noticing the gradient getting lighter as it goes closer to the subject. Without covering the rafters, if you tried to bounce flash in the area you would end up with an orange color cast from the light bouncing off the bare wood. Adding the paper strips provides more light and eliminates any unwanted color casts. You can still see a few spots that have to be cleaned up but the area is now better than 95% completed.

While David is an ok subject for a quick test shot, let’s face it, what’s better than a cute girl on a motorcycle? The main lights are the Westcott TD5 Spiderlites while a little extra pop was wanted so an on-camera 580 EX flash was bounced into the ceiling. We wheeled David’s Ducati into the garage and asked Taylor Thorne to do a few quick poses for us.

It only took a few test shots to get the light and camera settings dialed in nicely and the pictures we were getting showed us that the home studio setup is going to work perfectly. I didn’t take much time trying different lenses as we were just checking light balances and I couldn’t be happier with the results. One of the things I plan on adding is a dedicated station for a laptop for tethered shooting with Breeze Systems DSLR Remote Pro.

What’s left? The following is a list of the remaining items that will totally finish off the studio completly:

• A few more strips of paper towards the back of the room
• Taping up all the seams for a cleaner look
• An overhead two bulb flouresenct fixture with daylight balanced bulbs (hair light and background light)
• White muslin drape to seperate shooting area from the rest of the garage area

We hope you have enjoyed following how we have built our home studio. Now we can get back to writing some more articles. If you have a home studio or want to ask any questions about ours, please come to our group to discuss it.

If you are into Do-It-yourswelf projects, be sure and visit our friends over at DIYPhotography.net.

Author: Kerry Garrison

Painting the main wall
Once the area in front of the main shooting wall was cleared away and scrubbed down, there were just tons of holes in it from different shelves that had been installed over the years. Some spackle took care of the holes and I used some to smooth out the transitions between the drywall sheets as the drywall in the garage was pretty much slapped in, nowhere near the quality of the finish inside the house.

Being unpainted drywall that was installed about 30 years ago, this was not going to be a single coat paint job. I had a full can of spray primer that I used first, the drywall pretty well sucked up the primer. During the cleaning I found a few gallons of an off-white latex, so two more coats of that and the wall is looking pretty solid. Along with the spackle, I also bough a new can of high gloss white that will be the final coat.

Costs so far
Since I had primer and basic painting supplies, I have so far only spent a total of $47 at the hardware store for the white paint, spackle, stir stick, putty knife. Considering that I have also made about $1,700 in selling old crap on craiglist, I am still well ahead of the game.

What’s left?
Without a truck to haul stuff to the dump, I am limited to what I can throw away in two trash bins and one recycle bin every week. In the picture here you can see one last pile of trash that is left, the vast majority will go into next week’s trash containers and there are a few old printers that have to be disposed of.

Once the final coat of off-white paint dries then I will give the wall and baseboard a coat of the high-gloss white. I am still debating about what to do with the floor. If you have any suggestions please post a comment here are in the Flickr Group.

Please come to the Flickr Group and show us pictures of your home studio,

If you are into Do-It-yourswelf projects, be sure and visit our friends over at DIYPhotography.net.

Read Building a Home Studio Part 3

Author: Kerry Garrison

Step 1 – The Garage
The garage was a total disaster, it used to be a big workshop for me to work on Radio Control vehicles and actually had a small area for taking product photos of the products I was reviewing and writing about (my first real experience doing a lot of photography). Once I sold off that website, the garage began turning into a total junkyard of…well…junk. We had built a large worktable which became even more space for even more junk. In order to even begin this project the garage needed to be cleaned out, and this has been my project for the past six weeks so far. Every week I have filled all of our available trash cans with trash and have sold everything worth selling on craigslist.

Six weeks, 10 trashcans full of stuff, tons of craiglist sales, and a lot of organization later, and the space that will become the new home studio is really coming together. When finished, the main shooting area will be 17′ x 15′. I still have enough trash to fill two weeks of trashcans, the wife has huge piles of plastic organizes to…organize, and we have boxes and bags of stuff to donate to Goodwill and we need to buy one or two storage racks to finish the areas off. This will complete the cleaning process and allow the build stage to begin.

While you may never build a home studio as complete as our studio is going to be, the ideas that we present will help you build your own home studio to fit your own needs, budgets, and desires.

Step 2 – The Plan
With the garage coming together and seeing how much space we have available, its time to start doing some planning on exactly what we are going to do out there. The garage has a built-in workbench on the right side that I am going to leave for storage and shelf space. The right side will get hangers to hold 10′ pieces of seamless paper, and a white muslin sheets will seperate the shooting area from the rest of the garage area.

Now you know what I have been up to for the past few weeks, one one hand its taking a long time to build this studio project out and on the other hand it’s actually going better than I expected. In upcoming articles we will look at how to overcome issues such as the wooden rafters, using inexpensive lighting techniques, how to mount lights, and a number of other issues we are seeing that are going to be issues that we need to deal with. Hopefully this will inspire you to take your home studio to the next level as well.

If you have a home studio, please go to our Flickr Group and share some thoughts and pictures of your home atudio with everyone.

If you are into Do-It-yourswelf projects, be sure and visit our friends over at DIYPhotography.net.

Read Building a Home Studio Part 2

Author: Kerry Garrison

In the first of our Mythbusting series we are going to look at a common myth that you should always use the lowest ISO number possible to get the best results This is based on the knowledge that the higher the ISO number you use, the more noise (digital artifacts) will be created in your image While this is certainly true, what we are going to examine in this article is wether or not you should always shoot in the lowest ISO number your camera can handle in order to get the best images Will this myth be confirmed or busted? Continue reading to find out

Understanding ISO
The different ISO settings will control the light sensitivity of the camera, the problem is that the higher you crank the ISO setting, you will introduce more noise effects In a dim room with no other lighting available, you can increase your ISO setting in order to make the camera more sensitive to light New cameras actually perform quite well at ISO 1600 which was unheard of only a few years ago Upcoming cameras will be able to shoot very usable images at ISO 6400. If we don’t want to add any unneeded noise or digital artifacts if possible if we want the cleanest images we can possible get

Myth Expectations
According to the myth, if our camera will go down to ISO 100, then so long as we can have the aperture that we want to use and a fast enough shutter speed, then we should shoot at ISO 100 whenever possible. To test this we will take a series of images of the same scene at different ISO resolutions and compare the results. If this myth is true, than our images at the lowest resolution will be the ones to keep.
The caveat here is every camera does behave differently and the results may vary slightly between different makes and models, but the overall result should apply to pretty much any camera.

Testing the myth
We setup a shot in mid-day that could easily be handheld since the shutter speed will be plenty fast enough. By zooming in we can see the differences between the different images.

ISO 100 – 1/250th

ISO 400 – 1/1000th

ISO 800 – 1/1600th

ISO 1600 – 1/4000th

At these resolutions the differences between these images is very subtle and you really need to look closely at the leaf you will see some color noise. While this at first appears to be the only real difference, we should be able to see even more when we zoom in even closer.

ISO 100 Detail

ISO 400 Detail

ISO 800 Detail

ISO 1600 Detail

Now you can see the noise that is present in the ISO 1600 image a little better but you can also see an odd effect in the ISO 100 image, note that the ISO 100 image is not as sharp at the ISO 400 image.

This is actually a phenomenom we noticed when shooting a lot of wedding photos. While we always believed that shooting at the lowest ISO setting would give us the best image, it actually was a sacrifice between noise and sharpness. The higher the ISO image the more noise you get, but the lower the ISO setting the less sharp the pictures were. The sweet spot for different cameras may vary but with many other settings, you will not get the best results from either of the two extremes. With our Olympus E-500, the sweet spot for ISO was between 200-400 ISO and with our Canon cameras the sweet spot is between 400-800.

Results
While it may sound intuitive that the lower the ISO the better the image but the results do speak for themselves and show that this is not actually true, the best shots will result in a setting that is not at the extreme of the available ISO levels.

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

Summary
I most often work with constant lights because I can turn them on and adjust the lights until I get the exact lighting that I want. However, for this shoot, I had several things working against me. First off, I was working in my home office which is very cramped for space, not enjoyable when working with hot lights. Second, the product had a plastic bezel and metal case, the two were not reflecting light the same so I was having trouble color matching. Third and most importantly, it was hot, I mean really hot, it was 91 degrees with high humidity, and the hot lights are exactly that..HOT. I use two 500w bulbs and 1 100w backlight and not only was I sweating like crazy but just as I got everything setup, we started having brownouts. Not wanting to risk blowing out a bulb and not wanting to suffer under the heat, it was time to move to flashes. The advantages of using strobes in this situation include:

• MUCH cooler operation
• Different color temperature on this item worked better for color matching
• 2 of the three strobes are battery operated so less to worry about with the power brownouts

The Setup
The new strobe lighting setup included the following:

• SL-150 Strobe for key light on lightstand pointing into a silver umbrella
• Quantaray QB6500A flash for fill light on lightstand pointing into a gray umbrella
• Olympus FL-50 flash on lightstand for background light overhead with Gary Fong Lightsphere

The SL-150 and QB6500A were fired using Cactus remotes while the FL-50 was using an optical slave adapter. The SL-150 was set to about 3/4 power while the QB6500A and FL-50 were set to 1/8^th power. The product was sitting on thick plexiglass on top of white muslin to achieve the reflection look the client wanted.

Here is a shot of the lighting setup with a test item on the table. You can see the two front lights are angled at about a 45 degree angle away from the camera. The background light is positioned behind the product by a few feet so most of the light will go onto the background.

While the out-of-camera result will be really good, you may end up with a line across the image where the plexiglass ends, you will need to edit that out in a photo editing program, other than that, very little work should be needed if the exposure is right. Kick up the exposure as high as you can without loosing any detail as this will help blow out any wrinkles in the muslin.

Results
This setup works very well for a quick lighting setup that not only gives fantastic results, but doesn’t require its own air conditioner during the summer. The other advantage of using flash heads is that if they are all battery powered, then this setup is completely portable and can be used even if you have no electrical power. If you are looking for inexpensive but high quality flash heads, check out the Vivitar 285HV available from Gadget Infinity.

This shows that you don’t need to spend tons of money on high-end lighting gear in order to get really good results.

In this tutorial we will take a look at the different types and show how the light will act differently with the different types.

Bounce umbrellas come in a variety of choices, usually either a solid color or mix of white, silver, gray, or gold depending on what effect your are trying to achieve while shoot thru umbrellas are usually either white or a soft silver. A browse through the umbrella page on Westcott’s site will show you a good selection of what is available.

Let’s start with using the bounce umbrella. The Photo Basics kit comes with a light silver umbrella which gives a nice even light without it getting too harsh. Figure 3 shows an image taken with this umbrella.

To aim the umbrella, point the shaft at the item you want to photograph. For this shot, we raised the light a couple of feet above the subject and pointed the shaft of the umbrella at the subject. With the light silver, we get fairly even coverage and a soft shadow on the right side of the subject. Also not the specular highlight on the bottle, has some of the detail of the umbrella in it, but not too much.

If you are looking for more contrast, then bouncing into a highly reflective silver umbrella will throw more light which may create more shadows. Figure 4 will show the same image as before taken with a silver umbrella. Notice how the shadow on the right is much more pronounced. With much harsher light, we now have a very distinct specular highlight on the water bottle where you can plainly see all of the panels of the umbrella.

The next type of umbrella is the shoot-through type. Usually this is a white although there are also light silver but white is certainly more popular. As you can see from the picture here, the umbrella is acting like a giant softbox and evenly illuminating the subject. We rotated the light around and pointed the light head at the subject, shooting through the white umbrella.

In figure 6, notice how the shadows are much more subdued when compared to the previous shots. Also take note of the much softer and non-distinct specular highliting on the water bottle.

It can sometimes be difficult to really see the difference that the different styles of umbrellas can make, especially when only previewing through your camera’s LCD screen. The most important differences are in the light quality/shadows and how the light plays off other objects in the scene and how specular highlights can be used to add extra dimension to an object.

We highly recommend a small selection of umbrellas since they are typically pretty affordable, especially on eBay, so you can experiment with different lighting setups. A light silver, bright silver, and a shoot through are great starters and if you are doing portrait shots, we recommend a gold/white or gold/silver reflector which will add some warmth to the subject face.

Get yourself a few brollys and start experimenting!

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!

First off, we setup some light stands with sone Pivot speedlight flash mounts with built-in umbrella holders. To the left of the camera was one flash set to 1/8 power shooting into a silver reflective umbrella as the key light. This gave us the contrast that we were looking for against the white background but left the opposite side of the product in a shadow that we didn’t want. To solve this we added another flash set at 1/2 power shooting through a white umbrella as a fill light. This balanced everything out nicely. To fire the flash units remotely, we used the Cactus V2 wireless system. The background is actually plain white paper from a roll of leftover stock from a printing machine.

So now let’s look at the lighting setup in detail. You should click on this image to open it so you can see the detail we are going to discuss. As I said, we used the umbrella on camera-left with a silver reflector as a key light, while this does create a larger light source, it is a very sharp light and focuses the light together causing harsh shadows. On camera-right, the exact opposite occurs, the light from the flash expands outward bringing in a soft diffuse light. The combination of a harsh key light and the soft fill light does the job exactly as we wanted.

Just so you don’t think that was all there was to it, here is the unedited photo. Notice the cords coming out of the back, this took a few minutes in Photoshop to take care of. We could have disconnected all the wires but the client wanted to show the screen being on during the photo and we opted to shoot it in one piece rather that take one photo with no wires and a second shot of the screen over composite them together.

Again, we hope this has helped you take a different look at taken shots like this. Now go get behind the camera and take some photos.

Let’s take a close look at the photo by using a larger image of it.

Take a close look at the angle of the shadows, you will detect a light left-to-right shadow and a darker right-to-leftshadow. The background is a soft gray color.

To take the shot, some gray seamless paper was setup on a small table and curved back and up onto the wall behind it. A Lowel Omni light 800w with a shoot-thru umbrella was setup to the left as a key light. The flash on the camera was turned to the right at a 90 degree angle and reflected off a sheet of white foam core.

This simple two light setup can be very effective for a very quick a simple setup. With only a little practice, a simple piece of foam core can be a very effective reflector. Note that in the photo, the light from the flash, even bounced off the foam core is a brighter light than the 800w bulb from the Omni light. To balance it out, all you need to do is move the foam core board further away.

You don’t always need a huge studio lighting setup in order to get really good images, with a little imagination and understanding of how you can effectivly reflect light you can really do wonders with very little lighting equipment.

Happy Shooting