Lifestyle portraits and teenagers

Some of my favourite people to work with are teenagers. There curiosity and willingness to try things make photographing them a delight. The images in this post are from a recent lifestyle portrait session that I did at Kates Park in North Vancouver. It was close to sunset, maybe an hour before, when these images where taken. Although they were done at about the same time and same place, two very different techniques were used to capture the images.

The first image was taken in direct sunlight. The subject was turned so that her back was facing the sun. When photographing a portrait in direct sunlight, I work at having the subject between the sun and the camera. This technique gives the beautiful rim light that I have in this portrait and allows me to control the light on the face.

When taking this portrait, the sun was low enough to cause flair in my image that I did not like. to correct this, I moved to be at a slight angle to the sun - correcting the flair problem.  A reflector was used to control the light back into the face.

Post production was in Lightroom. To soften the entire image, I used the clarity slider and then added some grain. I also wanted to have a lighter feel to the image so I used the split toning feature to create a look that appeared to be more of a morning light. I have also made some skin tonality adjustments using the luminosity sliders. finally a light vignette was added. I liked the effect so I made it into a Lightroom preset.

The second image was taken about 15 minutes later at a different area of the park. I am facing North East here and the sun is low in the sky - on the other side of the park. As a result, there is sun shining across the water lighting the boat and the opposite shoreline, but the beach we are on is being shaded by the trees.

To get this image, I set my exposure for the background. I wanted to show off the beauty of the setting so I needed to insure that it did not disappear. If I had exposed for the subject, the background would have become very overexposed. By exposing for the background, I put the subject in dark. This gives me the advantage of being able to control the exposure on the subject using Flash. I put two 580 EX 11 flashes in a 40" umbrella and balanced the exposure on the subject to the exposure on the background. The final exposure was F 5.0 @ 1/200th,  ISO 200 on a Canon 7D. Lens 10 - 22mm set at 21mm.

Final touches in Lightroom were minor skin tone adjustments and a vignette.

This session was a lot of fun and I know the client had a great time as well. We had a lot of time to try some different things and to just play, and the result were well worth it.

Photographing in a Alley

When I am photographing a portrait, I often find the background I want to use, but the lighting on the subject just isn't there. In situations like these, the flashes need to come out.

The photograph attached to this post was taken in a very narrow lane in downtown Vancouver. Sometimes, if you work near the end of the lane, you can get directional lighting, however, this stretch of wall was in the middle of the lane, giving only top down lighting t work with. The existing lighting would have created very dark shadows under the eyes resulting in a generally unpleasing image. A quick solution would have been to pull out a reflector and shine some light back into the shadowed areas, however, this would have also light up under the nose and chin, a look that I am not particularly fond of. I felt that a better solution was to pull out the flashes.

My primary light source was 2-580EX2 flashes placed inside of a 2x2 Apollo soft box. The light source was placed to camera left. The exposure was set to balance the ambient light. Balancing the flash with the ambient minimized shadows on the wall and careful placement of the light and subject all but eliminated them. The net result was a portrait that looked natural yet still light the mask of the face.

This image was taken with a Canon D6, 70-200 IS f2.8 lens at 200mm, f 5, ISO 800, shutter speed 1/60. The image was finished in Lightroom with a vignette.

Five Lights and Two Reflectors

What I like about photographing in the studio is that it gives me total control, particularly in the way I light it. When you are on location, you need to be able to incorporate the light that exists and then add supplemental lighting to create the final image. In the studio, you start with black and add light where you want it.

Sometimes, what appears to be a simple image can prove to be quite complex from a lighting perspective. The image accompanying this post appears as a straight forward head shot. However, it took five lights and two reflectors to create the lighting that I wanted. Here's how I put this lighting together.

The primary light source, the one lighting the face, is a 3ft x 3ft soft box placed almost directly above the camera. The lighting pattern this gives on the subject is a butterfly style of lighting. Even though the light source was large, the shadows created on the face were still a little to deep. By using two reflectors below and on either side of the camera, I was able to direct light into the shadow areas that I wanted to open up. I have at times used a single reflector directly from underneath, but I found that I did not have as much control over the placement of the light.

To add depth to the image, I put a light on the background. It is very important to make this light as subtle as possible. Too bright and it becomes distractive, too dark and you will not get the separation.

This subject has very dark hair. The danger with very dark hair is that if it is not properly light, it will blend into the background and have no detail - it will just be a black, flat area in the image.. To light the hair properly took three lights - one directly from the top and one from each side. the lights were placed behind the subject with lighting controls that allowed me to carefully aim the light source and prevent the light from flaring the camera.

Five lights and two reflectors to create this head shot. But the results are well worth it.

More mixing Ambient light and flash

This image was done at a recent session in a clients home. We did a few shots using window light alone bit there was a very interesting piece of furniture that I wanted to use as the background. I had the client lye on the floor in front of the hutch  and began photographing.

The window light coming from the glass doors created a nice light on the subjects face but the hutch went into darkness and lacked the separation needed for the subject to stand out so I had the subject move more into the centre of the room with her back toward the the window. This made the subjects face very dark relative to the hutch but gave a nice light on the hutch. It also gave that beautiful rim light that you can see in her hair. I then put a speedlight into a 2x2 Apollo soft box and used it to light the subjects face. Now I had total exposure control and was able to adjust the relative exposure of my background over the subjects face and created this image.

Using this technique allows the photographer to separately control the exposure of what is light by the window light and what is light by the speedlight. I could have easily
chosen to have the background darker or lighter but I felt that this was the best balance for the image.

The final image was tweeked in Lightroom with some skin softening and a vignette. Lightroom 5 has a new tool called a radial filter that allows the user to centre the vignette anywhere in the image. I love this tool.

Mixing natural light and flash

Wedding portraits can prove to have very tricky lighting to work with. This wedding shoot was at the Brock House on  beautiful sunny afternoon. The location is spectacular - on old mansion right on the beach. But, the lighting proved to be tricky.

Being mid day and sunny, the light was very harsh and top down. The result was racoon eyes and really deep shadows. Here was our solution.

First thing was to look for an area with open shade. We used a giant tree. This gave us directional light coming off the water providing a nice portrait style light. Keeping the sun behind the subjects insured that there would be no mottling on the subjects and provided an interesting texture as it filtered through the trees.

At this point it looked good but the shadows on the subjects was still too deep. A gentle fill light was provided by a Speedlite to open up the shadows and the lighting was completed. The Speedlite was on TTL and set to expose 1 2/3 stops under.

The image was converted to a toned black and white in Lightroom and a texture overlay added in Photoshop to complete the image.

Flash exercise

Last weekend I held a two day workshop on using hand held flashes or Speedlites. By the end of the two days we had created some great images and everyone walked away with a better understanding of how to incorporate their speedlites into their photography.

One of the exercises that we did was to use the speedlites as accent lights only, using another light source as the primary light. In this example, we used a window as our main light. Window light can be a very beautiful and soft light source but very often the background can get too dark. If the subject has dark hair, then you run the risk of loosing the definition between the hair and the background, ultimately creating a not so nice portrait. this first image is a good example of how nice window light can go bad.

In the next image a speedlite has been incorporated to light the background. Notice how the subject now stands out from the background and the image has a greater sense of depth to it. Also notice that as the background comes closer to the tonality of the clothes that the model is wearing, the less the clothes dominate the image.

In the final image, we put a speedlite to camera right and behind the subject. This adds a little more sepeeration to the hair and picks up more detail. The image was then reframed to eliminate more of the dress and fill the image with the subject. To finish off, in Lightroom we did some minor skin softening and added a vignette.

Flash For Accents

I am a huge fan of using speedlights. In fact, one of the courses I teach a course at a local school, Focal Point, is on speedlight and small flash photography. Uses flashes could to light the subject is the obvious use for these units. But flashes can also be used to highlight certain areas in the image or be used to place light where there actually was none.


The Image that I want to share today was taken a couple of weeks ago on a ranch. The weather was nice but it was still quite cold so we went into the barn to warm up. The light coming through the barn door created this beautiful light on the model. A little light reflected back onto her completed the lighting on the model.


The background was a different story. the background is a vacant horse stall that rendered almost black in the image. To compensate, I needed to bring in some artificial light. A single, off camera flash placed in the stall and to camera right was all that was needed to complete this image.

Skateboarder

This image was taken during a lifestyle session that I did over spring break. This young man was in to all the high energy sports - skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, mountain biking. We spent the day going to numerous locations to capture him "in action".

I captured this image right at the beginning of the session, before we really got into the action. It was captured with a 10mm lens so the skateboard was just inches from the lens. The perspective of the lens gave the image this interesting look. I had a single 580EX flash to camera right with it zoomed to 105mm to add an extra punch of light to the face. The balance of the image was lit by ambient light reflected off the building  Black and white conversion was done using Nik's Silver Effects Pro 2.

My Challenge #5 Image

It was fun to work with a model who is easily motivated by a cookie. This is an image of my dog Maxx. As you can tell, he is no puppy - in fact, he is almost 14 years old.

I took this image with a speed light to camera left. It was diffused through a panel to give a softer light on the dog. A second light was pace above and behind to give separation of the black dog from the black background.

Both the flash and the camera are on manual. Camera, Canon 7D with a 70 - 200 mm lens at 145mm, f8 at ISO 400.

Granville Island Alley

Las t week it poured rain here in Vancouver. I had planned to take my students down to Granville Island to practice balancing flash and ambient light. That morning the weather cleared and we had fantastic conditions for photographing. Only problem was that it was really cold - for Vancouver anyways. The coldest of the group were the models, but they persevered and we came back with some great images.

This image was taken on a Canon 7D with a 24-105 lens.  To keep out of the wind, and to try and stay a little warmer, we were working in very narrow alleys. The natural light was very top sown and proved to be port lighting for the models. By placing a 580 EX II flash on camera right, we were able to create directional light on the model. Exposure was 1/60th at f5.6, ISO 400. All other light was ambient.

Bouncing Off The Walls

Last weeks challenge was to create an image using bounce flash. The goal was to create an image that had directional lighting.

On camera Direct Flash

Very often, photographers will dismiss using on camera flash because of the harsh, specular light it creates on the subject. Two weeks ago I was discussing on camera flash techniques to my students at Focal Point. The first image, shown here, was taken with direct on camera flash. Notice the small, bright specular's, the harsh shadows, and even though the wall was some distance away, the very obvious shadow on it.

So how do you have an on camera flash and still create directional lighting. The answer is in bouncing the flash. But from where? The first thing that comes to mind is to bounce it off the ceiling. the problem here is that you wind up with office lighting and racoon eyes. The better option is to try and bounce it from the side. The easiest is to get side lighting is to bounce the flash off a wall. If one isn't within range, try a reflector or a white shirt. Anything that will bring the light from the side.

On Camera bounced from wall

In the class, we bounced the light off the wall, the results are shown here. Some great information about flash photography can be found on Digital ProTalk. This link, David Ziser - Digital Pro-Talk , will take you to a video on his site that speaks directly to this topic. If you want to learn more about flash photography, I would encourage you to check out this link.

Have fun and great shooting. Come back tomorrow for next weeks challenge

Fill Flash Challenge Image

Last weeks photo challenge was to photograph a portrait using on camera fill flash.  The real challenge with fill flash is not allowing it to overtake the image.

Very often yo can find yourself in a situation where you have nice directional light but the shadow density is to much to allow you to make a print with detailing both the shadow and the highlight. The on camera fill flash, when used correctly, will let you reduce the shadow density of the image yet maintain the directional light. When it is really well done, the use of on camera fill flash is barely noticeable.

When photographing this image, I found myself with a very strong and high directional lighting.  the first thing I did was lower the light angle by putting a gobo above the subject. I found that the shadow on the subject face was too dark.

To fix this, I put a speedlite on camera, set the mode to ttl, and set the flash exposure compensation to minus 2.  this gave me just enough light to open up the shadow without giving the image a flashed look. The only real give away in this image that it is flashed is the catchlight generated by the flash.

Come back tomorrow for the next photo challenge.

Photo challenge #1

This is the first of 52 photo challenges. The goal is to present one new technique each week and then produce an image that incorporates that technique. You can submit your image to photochallenge@photolen.ca . I will post 2 to 3 images that I receive.  There is no prize for the best image for the week, best overall image, or anything else. But, you will have the chance to learn and practice 52 photographic techniques over the course of 2012.

So here it is, the first challenge.

On camera flash gives you very flat lighting. Refer back to my post on December 7, 2011, On Camera Fill Flash. For this weeks challenge, use on camera fill flash to reduce contrast in an image. Very often, light on a subject can be very harsh. Super bright on the lite side and really dark on the shadow side. By using fill flash, you can reduce the contrast by putting light into the shadow area.  The trick here is to not overdo the fill flash. As soon as the image starts to look flat, you have overfilled.

This week, create an image that uses on camera fill flash to reduce shadows yet remains natural looking.

On Camera Fill Flash

On camera flash is generally not considered to be the most flattering light source - especially when photographing people. There are times however when on camera flash can make a big difference in an image.

Many photographers love to use available light because it can create a very beautiful light on your subject.  Sometimes however, the light can be very contrasty, creating detailless shadows on the shadow side of your subject.  The natural reaction is to find some sort of reflector to fill light in to the shadow side.  Well here is another possible solution that when executed well, will give you excellent results.

It is well known that a soft, wrap around light source, needs to be large relative to the subject.  the problem with a speedlight or on camera flash is that it is a very small light source, which will create a very harsh or hard light. When handled properly though, this is OK for fill light. Lets see how that works out.



Figure 1

Take a look at this image. It is a Styrofoam ball photographed with a speedlight inside of a 2 ft soft box. Most definitely a soft light source or this object. Notice that the ball is virtually shadowless except for a little around the edges (this is because the object is round), making it an excellent fill light.
Why is this an excellent fill light?  The purpose of a fill light is to reduce the contrast in an image. A fill light should bring the exposure level up in the shadow side of your subject. Most of the time because you want to have detail in the shadows. a good fill light will create no shadow of its own. If it does, you can start to get very unnatural looking double shadows on your subject. A soft box (or any other larger light modifier) is one way to help prevent this from happening. Another is placement of the fill light.

A light source that is on the same axis as your lens will not produce a shadow that your lens can see. In figure one, the light source was place as close to the lens axis as it could be without putting the camera directly in front of the light source. This further helped to create the shadowless lighting.



Figure 2

 Now take a look at figure 2.This was taken with a bare speedlight or flash. Even though it is a hard light source, it created a shadowless light on the Styrofoam ball. To achieve this shadowless light, the flash was also place as close to the camera axis as possible without having the camera in front of it. The fact that the two light sources created a nearly identical light can be put to use.

Consider the next time you are out creating a portrait and you have very contrasty light. Instead of grabbing a reflector, try using a flash to fill in the shadows. Here's how you can do it. Determine the exposure of your subject so that you get detail in the highlights. Put your flash as close to the camera axis as you can - this will usually be on the hot shoe. With your flash on E-TTL or I-TTL if you use Nikon, set the flash exposure compensation around -1.5 to -2. Take your image then readjust exposure to achieve the results you want.

Here are a couple of pitfalls to watch for

1. Do not overpower the flash. this will create an unflattering, flashed looking image.
2. Keep the flash above the camera, even if it means always shooting horizontally then cropping to vertical later. Because the flash will not be exactly on axis, it will create some shadow and it looks more natural when it is going downward.
3. Have your subject far enough from the background so that any shadow will fall behind the subject and not show up on the background.

Go out and have fun with this technique. Once you master it you'll love it.

Summer Light

Vancnouver is being hit with a late summer this year.  It never really warmed up over the summer months and we never really saw much blue sky.  Now that has changed and it is awesome.

During the main summer months the light is direcectly over head. And when it is clear sky's you get a lighting that wedding photographers love to hate - harsh, strong, and unflattering.  But, cloudy summers change all that.  Why? The suns harsh light is diffused by this giant soft box called cloud cover.  The light is soft and beautiful.  As photographers, all we have to do is give it some direction.

Sunny weather this time of the year also makes for great light because the light is no longer directly over head.  Now the light is coming at an angle pretty much all day.  Awesome!  Now I have directional, punchy light - outdoors. I'm looking out the window right now and seeing the sun is starting to go down. Absolutely beautiful.  Want some real fun - try shooting after the sun goes down and use the penumbra as your light source.  Light direction is from the west but the sky acts as a giant reflector now, giving you a soft but none the less punchy light.  You gotta love it.  Don't forget to do a custom white balance though.

Compositional Balance

This image was taken Sunday morning in downtown Vancouver.  I was a beautiful sunny morning, well before the crowds had started to come out.  Compositionally, I wanted to balance the green of the young mans shirt with the green of the sign in the background.  The sign was not in direct sunlight, bit was none the less significantly brighter than the subject.  Had I taken the shot with the existing light, the sigh would have been burnt out and the value of the color would of been lost. Instead, I chose to slightly underexpose my background by dialing up my shutter speed..  I lite the subject with a Canon 580 EX speedlight in a 32" umbrella.  A white reflector was used to fill in the shadow side.  The image that came out of the camera is what you see here.



Portraits in Bright Sunlight

Well my Commercial Portrait Photography course at Focal Point is well under way. The one problem I have though is that the course runs in the evenings, making it difficult to demonstrate many of the techniques I want to show the students. Solution - field trip.

This past Sunday we went out during the day to make some portraits.  It was a bright sunny day with harsh lighting.  Perfect, at least for what I wanted to show them.  Most times we do not have a choice as to the time of the day we have to shoot or the lighting conditions that we work in.  A large part of the course is about learning to manage and control all types of light to get the image we want. Bright sunny days are one of the most difficult situations to work with requiring an implicit understanding of your gear as well as the nature of light.

The first situation we set up was in the middle of a field.  The sun is harsh and direct.  For folks like me who are "follicular-ly challenged", one of the most important pieces of gear to have is a hat.  I had misplaced mine and was starting to feel the sun on my scalp within minutes of being there. Today is Tuesday, I still feel the sun.

When creating a portrait, this type of lighting is considered to be the worst. Sunburn aside, the lighting on the face is harsh and unflattering, but, we were able to work through two techniques that got us reasonable portrait images.

For both techniques, the first thing we did was place the subject between the camera and the sun. This did three things

1. It got the harsh light off the subjects face and created separation by back lighting the subject.
2. It created very flat lighting on the subjects face
3. Created lens flare in our camera

Perfect, now we just need to light the subjects face so we get a nice wrap around lighting.

Our first technique was to use a combination of scrims, reflectors, and gobo's. First we set up a white reflector to use a key light on our subject.  The reflector was large enough to create a soft light source giving us the gentle shadow edge transfer that we like.  The shadow side of the face was still very light so do darken it down we used a black gobo.  We had the look we wanted on the face but the back light from the sun was burning out the hair and shoulders.  A white scrim between the sun and the subject solved this problem.

Our second technique was to use a flash.  The downside to using a flash in this situation is that you need one powerful enough to overpower the sun.  The advantage is that you can control the exposure of your background relative to your subject by changing the shutter.  In terms of flash placement, it needs to be off camera in order to get that wrap around look. In bright sunlight, shutter speeds will be high, so will need to place your flash on high speed sync.  David Ziser on his blog, Digital Pro Talk, has some fantastic examples and explanations for this technique that you can check out here.

Open shade is often a more desirable place to take portraits and will be the topic of my next blog.

5 tips to improve on camera flash

Coming up on May 7th, I will be giving a workshop on flash photography.  Here is a primer for the workshop.

5 tips to improve on camera flash

1. Avoid pointing the flash directly at your subject. This creates a very harsh, unattractive light. Try using a diffuser like the ones made by Gary Fong. 
2. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling is an effective way of improving the light quality.  The idea behind this is that ceiling are usually white so there won't be any colour shift issues and it will increase the size of the light significantly, giving it a softer look.  The problem here is that the light is top down and will create unflattering shadows in the eyes. Putting a white card on the flash to reflect some of the light into the eyes will help.
3. To get a wrap around feel to the light, try bouncing it of the wall.  This will give it a wrap around look and be very soft.  Downside here is that the light will take on the colour of the wall. Make sure to do a custom white balance - but you should be doing this for every lighting situation.
4. If the wall or the ceiling are just too far away to bounce from, use some sort of reflector.  If you have a reflector in your kit, awesome.  If you don't, try bouncing off a person wearing a white shirt or find a towel, table cloth, sheet, or anything that will reflect a neutral light colour.
5. Flash exposure, within the limits of the camera sync speed, are not affected by shutter speed. Adjust the shutter speed, leaving the aperture set for flash exposure, to balance the ambient light with the flash to gain a more balanced looking image.

These tips and many more will be discussed and practices at length at the flash workshop on May 7th.  To reserve you spot at the workshop, please call Len at 604-307-4566. See you there.

Sisters

A week ago I had the pleasure of putting on a flash workshop.  During the workshop we talked about, and practiced, many techniques.  During this session of two sisters, I was able to use many of the techniques we discussed so I thought I would post some of the images to show how effective these techniques can be.

This first image was taken about 2 hours before sunset.  The light was harsh so we went under a bridge and found some open shade.  The light was coming in fairly evenly on both sides sides so we placed a translucent scrim on camera right to reduce the intensity of light on the shadow side.  The light direction was still high so a hand held strobe was place in a 32" umbrella and brought in from camera left to give the final lighting.

This next image was taken in a very narrow alley.  The light was totally top down creating a very unflattering light.  By using a strobe, again in a 32" umbrella, on camera right, we were able to come up with this interesting shot.

By the time we did this final image, the sun had almost gone down but we still had that warm glow of the penumbra or twilight.  this light was augmented with a strobe to camera right to create this image.

Flash workshop - big success

Last Sunday's flash workshop was great.  We kept  the class size down so that everyone was able to get lots of hands on time to practice the new techniques.

The next workshop will be on creating table top product photography for small retailers and E-tailers.  If you want to make your product shots stand out, this workshop is not to be missed.