The reality is if you are taking the time to place more than one light or even one light with ambient by definition you are not in that situation. Manual control is quicker, it’s easier, it gives you more consistent shot to shot results and you will get exactly what you want. Instead of railing against that today (well I guess I just did) I wanted to post a 30 second exercise that I just did with my auto everything DSLR and point out some things if you insist on wrestling against the computer in your camera with the “quick and easy way”.

For these I used two flashes on TTL w/ compensation controlled wirelessly via a D200 in commander mode. The shot at the top is just ambient metered the way I would probably do this kind of thing in a pinch, it actually retains good atmosphere – I would just stick a person in it and make sure the wonderful window light was hitting them the way I wanted it to. If I had to retain detail in the room and the background I guess you have to do flash or some nutty HDR stuff.

Here is matrix metering alone.

Here is on camera TTL flash – cool we have a perfect exposure that looks like absolute shit. If this is how you use your flash I would suggest getting a hammer and breaking it your images will thank you.

Okay – now we need detail in the room and the background but I want a similar sense of atmosphere that we had without the strobes. What do we do? Well as best we can we try to mimic what the natural light is doing and reproduce it’s direction as much as possible – from the back with front shadows that are just a higher value. Okay step one put a flash behind the flowers and backlight them, let it do double duty and put some light on the ceiling as well but we need to block it from the wall the windows are on with a handy dandy magazine scrim. Turn it up a notch to give it some direction. Step two fill in the shadows with soft light that mimics the way the ambient light is working. Move it around until the relationships are similar to the shot at the top of the post. Okay now we have a little bit to dark in just a couple of areas – turn the on camera flash on and way way down so it doesn’t cast it’s own shadows  Crap it is reflecting in the window – change position a bit so the reflection is somewhat hidden by overlapping it with a natural highlight.

There we have it – quick and easy matrix adjusted TTL powered PIA IR remote that won’t let you  place the lights exactly where you want them wonderfulness.

RB

Ps. The lesson was try to emulate what you like in natural lighting conditions no matter what lights you use. Seriously. Oh and the corollary was to not worry too much the background let it go white it is rarely important anyway. Make a conscious decision on what you are photographing and what detail adds to the image – Some of the best photographs do not have detail everywhere – in fact most of them don’t.

I am a little picky – I admit it. I think 99% of commercial images published today are at best mediocre – formulaic – flat – juiced up in PS. I blame the audience for being so… accepting of what amounts to juiced up crappy images shot with not much care nor attention to detail. So what kind of glue was he on when he shot these images? Here is the blog post if you want to learn how NOT to position your lights, unfortunately he does not detail how he set his camera and gelled the lights to get one of the most horrific color balances I have ever seen between background, fill, and key.

Is it me? Are you this lax? I sure hope you can see what has me all twisted up here.

RB

Okay – I had a reader write me about an image posted somewhere in an Aperture article. Actually it was a series of images that happened to be in a screen shot of an Aperture screen from way way back. The question was not about Aperture at all, it was quite literally “why does your softbox look different than mine?”. After a long email exchange – that answer came down to distance and fill light. I thought boiling that discussion down maybe useful to some of you that are have started to take your flash off the top of your camera. I randomly picked an image from the sequence that we discussed that happened to use a couple of the things that we talked about. It’s a JPG strait out of the camera – my usual M.O. when doing workshops.

When working with any light and especially a softbox or something similar the main goal is getting a bigger light source. If you make the light bigger but have it really far away it doesn’t accomplish much. You want to get it close – really close. Just about everyone knows this – well not everyone, in fact most people’s issue is that their definition of close is really not that close.  At some point when you reinvent your definition of close the results are still not what you “expect”. Why is this? Well if you happen to have a really really really gigantic light source and you are taking a picture of something really really small one light really really close may work extremely well. In most cases the biggest things you are going to use practically are a 3×4 or 4×6 box or smaller on normal sized things like people.

Getting a light source close does two things simultaneously, the first and usual goal is to make it “softer” or in other words make it bigger in relation to your subject. The second thing that it does that is usually unintended, at least to the lighting newbie, is that it makes everything else darker – your background – your reflected fill light – everything. In a way this makes it harder at the same time. Most people’s definition of “soft” when it comes to lighting visuals is a gradual shadow transition AND a somewhat close ratio between fill and main lights – sort of – you do not usually want it really “flat” – soft but not flat. Soft = good, flat = bad. At least my taste. The effect of moving your box closer and closer in a lot of cases can be counter productive to what you are trying to do. In summary you want it close but not too close, in most cases you want it closer than it is without causing everything else to get dark and the lighting ratio to increase too much.

What to do? Well you could add a fill light but that is for wimps and usually is not the best solution, not that adding a light is bad but most of the time it makes things more complicated and can lead to FLAT. It also chucks another catch light in the eyes (not good) – this is not the case if your fill is really really really really big but that takes a lot of work and space – usually not a reality for most location shots.

Wait we can use reflectors – yea that’s it. The problem with reflectors is as you get your softbox closer and closer the reflected light becomes darker to the point of pretty much useless if you want your box really close. most people solve this by placing the reflector as close as possible and then adjusting the distance of the softbox distance until they get the ratio they want. I am going to offer you a better way right now and the one most of my workshop participants are shocked at when they see the way I setup my lights.

Here is the big secret that works really well with softboxes and reflected fill – get your box really close and point it away from the subject towards the fill. Not all the way away of course but more away than flat on your subject. In most cases your softbox can be pointed so that the front is almost perpendicular to your subject plane. Doing this does a lot of things without changing the overall characteristic of the light. It changes the way specular highlights are rendered in some very interesting ways that you probably do not expect – in a lot of cases for the better. It increases the effectiveness of your reflected fill – be it from your environment or reflectors that you placed yourself. It can cut the light out of one side of the picture or reduce it. The real magic is that you can adjust how much of these things happen or don’t happen by simply twisting the way your box is pointed a little this way or a little that way.

So the image at the top – A reasonable sized room but not gigantic and to be blunt a little close for my taste. To camera right I have a 3×4 box really really close in front of the subject and a little to the right. Just out of frame. maybe 20 degrees to the right and in front. About 2 1/2 – 3 feet away. Really. It is pointed way more to the left than at the subject. On the left I have some very large white reflectors that run from in front to behind the subject. The walls would have done to but would have polluted the color a bit since they have an odd green-ness to the off-white. There is one other light – it is very far behind the subject on the left side. A 1×3 softbox that I have twisted, angled, and positioned in such a way that it is providing light on the background that is about 1 and 1/2 stops less than the main while providing a subtle rim light for separation on the left that is about 2/3 stops less than the main. That light has nothing to do with fill. In fact if you have two lights the last thing that I would use the second light for is fill unless you are going for flat.

Here is another with the same concept – box is a little to the left and in front of the subjectmaybe 10-15 degrees off axis of where I am standing about 2 1/2-3 feet from the subject but it is pointed more up than right down at the subject. There is another light for the background and very very subtle rim light but it is angled so far behind the subject that it has nothing to do with the fill – you can see it where the light actually starts to go into black and then get’s lighter again.

RB

Ps. If you want more lighting stuff let me know, the only thing I have to go on if feedback from readers.

Here is a more simple approach that will apply even if you decide to add additional light sources to the mix. The keyword here is decide. Deciding how to use the light that you have on hand is the key to making consistent images in just about any circumstance. They mght start out as consistently bad but that is good. You can modify one thing at a time until they are consistently good. Auto fill flash has it’s place and may make “useable” images that would have been unuseable if you didn’t have it but for for the most part using it with no attention to what else is going on with light in the image will not result in great results. In fact I think auto fill flash really get’s in the way of most people learning how to deal with light by making them numb to what is really going on in the scene. I see fabulous images that use fill flash all the time in National Geographic and other places. The one thing that they have in common is that the photographer made decisions about the rest of the scene as well.

When the sun is really high there are a couple of things to watch for that wilth a tiny little bit of practice will pay off big time for you down the road no matter whether you decide to use fill flash, a reflector, or add another light source. A technique that I use all the time is using the sun as an accent light. Meaning position the subject (or yourself) in such a way that the sun acting like a hair light or edge light to provide separation and not the primary source of illumination for your subject. This works great for just about any circumstance and has two main variations. The first being every thing in the background is also lit by the sun and goes way bright compared to the subject – this can actually work for a lot of things by de-emphasize the background.

You go this direction you cannot be timid you really want to let the background go and lot’s of things will be “blown out” technically speaking but in a lot of circumstances it’s a who care proposition and there was nothing back there that you needed or wanted lots of detail. You will get a sense of what is going on. I have seen a really high end wedding photographer on the west coast that makes a living with this technique and her images are way better than the typical auto fill flash wedding crap that I see most of the time with perfectly detailed and exposed subject and background where both subject and background have really crappy light. The background has high noon light and the subject has crappy on camera flash light. Wonderful.

The other direction you can go using the sun as an accent light is with a background that is not lit by the sun but lit by the sky. This in general will give you a very high degree of separation between subject and background. This is a much more common scenario than you might think. Just take a look around next time you are outside at mid-day and note the infinte variations of backgrounds that are in the shade – cant’f find one – turn around and look the other way. The image at the top of the post is that circumstance.

So is this one. I screwed this up from a little bit from a timing perspective but she was walking toward me very fast and there was a very small window as she was walking into the shade to get the sun off of her face but still acting as a rim light. Hey I am not HCB but I will bet you he would consider this a keeper to.

One other note – your DSLR will probably get this exposure wrong. Maybe not but it will be a hit or miss thing. Most of the time your DSLR on evaluative metering will do everything in its’s power to keep from blowing out the highlights – what you really want is to spot meter the face of your subject that is not in the sun and open up for about a stop more exposure (Zone VI) or so depending on the skin tone of your subject and what feeling you want in the image.

The key here is to look at what is going on with the light in the scene and make conscious decisions about how you are going to handle it. After a little practice and the wonderfulness of quick feedback with digital this will be come second nature to you. Your pictures will thank you.

RB

A couple of disclaimers first. Yes I use small strobes on occasion, I always have. I happen to use Nikon SB800′s and SB900′s (two each) and I think that the Nikon CLS is superior to other camera makers systems in concept and sometimes in practice under very specific circumstances. The reality is it falls short in most practical situations and therefore is equivalent to other systems for the vast majority of reality. Personally I really don’t get the popularity of small strobe sites, workshops, books, etc, etc over the last couple of years. This stuff has been done with “portable” flash units for decades, there is no magical digital newness that makes this easier or different than it ever was. Here are some of my thoughts.

Small flashes are almost useless without external battery packs, the recycle times, battery costs, and battery life times are crap. That brings up another point, small flash units are not cheap. The units themselves are hundreds of dollars, external battery packs are expensive, and you still need stands, modifiers, etc. The wireless systems are crap, they are line of site IR nonsense that I find highly unworkable in real world situations. The last thing that I want to worry about and fool with is whether my lights are going to fire. If you really want to be sure they will fire and you want placement flexibility you are probably going to want radio slaves (aka pocket wizards) also not cheap. As soon as you add these bye bye TTL metering and controlling output/ratios from the camera. Yea I know about the company that is converting the IR to radio and preserving the TTL but why? It is a kludge of a solution, adds a bunch more stuff to fail and debug and TTL really is not that useful for multi-light setups in the first place. It’s okay for quick and dirty balanced fill flash when you are on the run, or for snapshot work, or for photojournalists (although really good PJs have always used off camera portable flash and most of them had no use for TTL auto balance anything, check out 90′s National Geographic Images). The only thing it is really good for is light background dark foreground quick and dirty exposure “balancing”.

Let me break it down for you. Let’s say you have the time to set up a couple of lights, two for arguments sake, and to position them, and to push all the little buttons to put the lights in the right “groups” in Nikon CLS speak, and then set all of you camera menus correctly. I really don’t care what the situation is. Indoors, outdoors, whatever. Let’s even say you want to balance the strobes with ambient. Okay you are all set to go, none of that “happened” spur of the moment, split second. Now what’s going to happen next? Are you going to put your subject in there or wait until they show up and then take one shot and that’s it hoping every thing will turn out? If you do you may end up with a usable exposure given that the CLS system is pretty good but hey I could probably do the same thing by guessing at flast positions and ouput levels and the exposure setting for the camera without metering anything on manual everything. Maybe you can’t but that’s just because it maybe the first couple of times that you have done something like that. The reality is if you are setting up lights you are going to test it and make adjustments to positioning, power output, camera exposure, etc. Okay we can either do that via +/- TTL settings for the lights in the camera menus and see what happens because it is not even close to predictable, well I guess it is predictable and quite amazing that it works as well as it does but there are a million variables that will cause it to react differently shot to shot from your settings. OR… you can make the exact same adjustments not using TTL anything and have the lights do exactly what they did shot to shot with NO variation from what you told them to do while making adjustments to your setup. Where is the time savings? What is the upside? I really don’t get it. Don’t get me wrong I do use TTL flash, just not for anything remotely complicated or where I need to test and want shot to shot repeatability. Make’s no sense. I am sure that there are occasions where things are changing so fast that you just need to get the shot but again wouldn’t your lighting angles and positioning be changing to?

Returning back to power for a second. As soon as you start to diffuse the light with boxes, light panels, silks whatever you are going to lose a bunch of light coming out of the strobe. With the little puny guys this is no big deal if you are inside and shooting with a camera that you can bump the ISO up a bit but it’s a whole different story outdoors. You need more stands, worse more flash units in a large number of circumstances. Like a lot more flash units. Don’t misunderstand there is some cool stuff you can do, especially with the super duper strange flash mode on CLS that fires the flash for the entire shutter movement so that it can sync up to 1/8000 now you can under expose daylight by a couple of stops and make stuff that is really cool like the shots you see Joe McNally doing out in the desert in broad daylight. Oooops just one thing the power really goes down the tubes in that auto-fp mode so all you need to do is pickup like 13 SB900 units. Very economical but hey the DIY crowd eats this stuff up while discussing how to make a beauty dish out of a salad bowl for $1.23 (see why I don’t get the craze).

So what are these little guys good for? For me, they are good for traveling really light and serving double duty – quick and dirty stuff as well as more carefully controlled stuff while traveling. You still are going to need some stands and modifiers and and and… but at least the stands can be crappier stands (smaller, lighter) and so will your lights but don’t kid yourself, you will not save a lot of money and everything get magically easier by going with a couple hot shoe flashes rather than a bigger more powerful system. If you don’t travel much for me it’s a no brainer. I do mean travel, as in on a plane, not load up the car and go shoot somewhere.

If I were looking to do serious work on a realistic budget I would probably opt for some of the more traditional systems out there, there are a lot of options that balance power, portablity, cost, versatility far better than hot shoe units. I guess my point is don’t get sucked in to some fantasy that a bunch of the latest $500 shoe mount flashes that happen to do wireless and TTL are going to be some sort of magic potion that will make great images automatically or even do anything a whole lot faster and more “automatically” than a more traditional/versatile system.

If portability and ability to run without wall outlets are a concern some of the traditional strobe manufacturers have introduced some fantastic solutions over the last few years that integrate very will with their existing systems.

RB

Ps. For anyone interested the shot at the top was done with one SB800 in broad daylight/high noonish. Here it is with the flash in the same exact position everything set to TTL auto auto auto auto auto balance i-CameraMagical CLS. I was just goofing around on Memorial day having a conversation with and e-buddy and took a couple of example shots to explain something to him and this happens to be about 3 steps from my computer. I actually use the same technique with people in the scene when I have to shoot on ugly crappy days at ugly crappy times.

Actually this is David Drebin’s photo that just set an auction record for somewhere north of that price this month. Don’t believe me? Google it, the title is “Movie Star”. I have no issue with David Drebin. I have an issue with society in general, you have got to be kidding me. Yeh, yeh, yeh, I am missing it, I am an idiot, I have no idea what it took to make this image, the blood, the sweat, the planning, the humanity, the suffering. Screw that, I cannot believe this crap. But wait it’s a “limited” edition of 30″x40″ digital C prints. You see this art is so rarified that the bits deteriorated after just a few of the ultra rare digital C print process and you just can’t make them any more.

Hilarious.

RB

No news here but the way he did it was amazingly clever and drives home the point that I was trying to make in my previous article. The point was to make do with whatever you have around and be creative. Corners are eaay, everyone has a corner. No need for an expensive backdrop or lighting gear to light the background differently than the subject. Well Kamil didn’t have a corner. I am sure he did but not one that was convieniently located or something, you’ll have to ask him. Kamil made a corner out of a light colored piece of cardboard just big enough for his head and shoulders self-portrait. Awesome idea + one window and viola – what I think is a really nice portrait. Great choice in the black jacket as well. Perfect.

Of course Kamil is also an Aperture user he has a bunch of variations of his self-portrait session here at his site. I actually love some of the black and white versions. He also has a wider shot showing his cardboard “corner” . My original article is here: simple portrait lighting.

RB

I really don’t have the answer to that question. I have an opinion. I have an opinion on anyone that thinks that they do have the answer as well. Long story  converted to a short story – I guess I think that the image at the top is pretty important – if you were me. Here is what I mean. This tiny little bundle of energy, intellect, and future has gone through way more difficult surgeries than I ever hope anyone of you will face and she just get’s on with it. In the background is my Dad. I am the uncle. I have daughters of my own. It’s pretty important to me. To you it’s just another image with okay lighting, not quite exactly right choice of lens, crappy background, and the shutter speed a bit too slow but to me it is way way more important.

So I guess if I had to answer the question as asked my priorities would be…

1. Whatever is important to you.
2. Whatever affects you.
3. Whatever you feed yourself and your family with.
4. The rest.

RB

The main light is to camera right. It is a 3′ x 4′ softbox that positioned very close to the model at about 3′ away just out of the camera frame. It is also as high as I could put it in a room with 9-10′ ceilings, that is the bottom of the box was about waist height. I did this so that I could get as much falloff as possible towards the bottom of the frame. Subtle but there, helps to keep the attention focused on the face. The second light, used as an accent, was to camera left and is as far behind the model as I could put it, given that she was about 2-3′ from the background. The light was in a 1′ x 3′ softbox about 3′ away from the model placed as high as I could and angled down a bit, mainly to get as much on the hair as possible without blowing the skin. This second light was about 2/3 stop less measured at the model than the main (like f8 1/3 vs. f11 for the main or there abouts). If I wasn’t working quickly I probably would have gone with a grid spot as well focused on just the hair and cranked it up until I got the separation that I wanted. The reason that the rim light shows up so much even though it is less exposure than the main is two fold. One – the angle that the light is striking the skin. Two – the bigger reason is that it is on the shadow side of the model so that the main is actually going almost to black right before getting to the rim light on the shadow side. In other words there is a lot of contrast.

The last light is usually a surprise to the uninitiated, surprise – a background light. The background is really black but has a light with a 10º grid on it to focus it and keep the spill to a minimum along with a red gel. Power – just cranked it up until I got the tone I wanted, turn it up lighter red, turn it down richer darker red. I was going for tones somewhat similar to the prop sofa at the time. When working in small spaces where it’s difficult to control spill onto the background I use this kind of thing all the time so that I can control the background relative to the subject. It works great with colors or without.

There you have it. If anyone cares about the actual equipment, brands, etc. let me know I would be glad to let you know but it really doesn’t matter that much. If you are interested in any of the lighting workshops drop me an email at rwboyer[at]mac.com. I try to do them regularly and we all have a blast doing them as well as make a couple of nice images.

RB

Ps. Thanks to a reader that just alerted me that I should probably link the article on histograms.