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.

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.

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.

Rainy Wedding

Fall in Vancouver means rain.  A fall wedding in Vanocover means a mountain of challenges for a photographer.  Last weekend it happened.  A rainy Saturday wedding.  But, with the help of a very kind Minister who let us use her church as a studio and the basic off camera techniques we have been talking about in the last two entries, we were able to pull it off.

This first image was taken with a single strobe and a reflector.  The strobe was on the Brides left (your right) and was aimed into a 32" umbrella. A white reflector was to the brides right (your left) to fill in the shadow.  The background was lite with ambient light and balanced to the strobe light by dragging the shutter.  Lightroom was used to desaturate the photograph and to put a vignette around the image.

This Second image was taken using exactly the same technique except without the desaturation.

Of course its alway fun to see what you can do with the light that exists.  I am always on the lookout for interest light pockets.  One part of the church was an art gallery with spot lights intended to light the artwork. To create this image I positioned the bride so that the lights would shine on the dress and bring out the detail in its design. I then had the bride look up to the light to create a pleasing light pattern on her face.  Lightroom was used to desaturate the image and put a vignette around the edge.