Five-Minute Portrait, Dean Collins Style

Software Cinema has released another of the 27 shoots on the 'best of' Dean Collins DVD set into the wilds of YouTube, following up on the hot lights motorcycle shoot. And this time it is a 14-min video of an annual report cover Collins did of two airline bigwigs back in the '80s.

Hit the jump for parts one and two, and links to the full DVD set.
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(If you are reading this via feed reader or email, click here if you do not see video directly below.)


Part One




Part Two



This particular shoot has a little backstory, at least as Collins used to tell it while lecturing on the road. This is the shoot that was happened upon by a pair of camera-ladened, elderly "lookie loo's" while Collins was waiting for the CEO to show up.

I won't repeat it here, but if you missed it the first time it is at the bottom of the original review of the DVDs.
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More info, and another embedded video:

:: The Best of Dean Collins on Lighting - 4 DVD Set ::

Multumesc, and Spasiba

Thanks to the concerted efforts of several multi-lingual readers, Lighting 101 has been released in two more languages: Romanian and Russian.

The Romanian team included Christian Vladoaica, Anica Pandrea and Andrei Botesteanu. The Romanian translation can be retrieved as a pdf here, via Mediafire.

The Russian team included Dmitry Mayorov, Irene Ponomarova, Kosmynin Ivan and Max Polivanov. The Russian translation can be retrieved here.

Many thanks, in many languages. (And cool design, on both!) More L101 translations are in the pipeline.

-30-

On Assignment: Prep Quarterback

I love football.

My first 50 or so assignments as a stringer for the Leesburg Commercial in central Florida in the early '80's were high school football games.

We were shooting in towns like Eustis, Umatilla, Tavares and Groveland, who at that time could claim exactly one McDonald's restaurant between them.

It was small-town (but not small-time) high school football. The fields were hideously dark, the action was great and the Commercial's deadline wasn't until 9:00 the next morning.

That's because the paper was a PM daily, which meant we could print in the darkroom all night long while eating cold pizza and watching bad movies on our safelight -- a 9" b&w TV with a dark red gel over it. I was in heaven.

And as much as I liked shooting college and pro football later, I always loved shooting preps just as much if not more.

Earlier this season I shot Damascus (MD) High School standout QB Connor Frazier for Rivals.com, dragging out my then-new AlienBees to overpower the mid-afternoon sun.
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Tear it Down, Build it Back Up

When we got to Damascus High School they were in mid practice. So we had a little time to scout a shooting area while they wrapped up. I was with Erik and Dave, two local readers who had answered my standard tweet looking for any VALs who might be interested in helping out with a shoot.

(If you would like to assist or hang out, follow me on Twitter and keep a lookout. I have a project starting up which will take me to many cities, and a local set of eyes and hands always helps.)

The sun was ugly and to our backs, so we walked across the field to be able to turn back and shoot into it. When the sun is not your friend, shooting into it gives you control.

First step, which should be beaten into your head by now: Go to 1/250th of a second. This buys you the best possible aperture for shooting with flash. Then, we knock the ambient down -- way down -- with a closed-down aperture, chimping as we go. Stop when it looks cool.

Next, we'll build Connor back up with flash. This is something big lights allow you to do -- even if you are softening the light -- with ease. We start with what will be the fill light (an ABR800) as we will definitely need to get inside that helmet. A ring light will let us dial that internal detail up or down without casting its own shadow. That's why I like ring fill better than shadow-side fill.

Once the fill is cranked up to where we want it (leaving our pre-set exposure alone, to preserve our ambient look) we can then move on to the key light. That was courtesy an AB1600, in a beauty dish. Not too hard, not too soft. And again, we dialed up the power on this flash until Connor was lit to the proper exposure against the suppressed ambient background.

For just a smidge of added dimension, we used a VAL'd SB-800 speedlight at back camera left to throw a little edge light on the left side of the ball and the helmet. It's a little thing -- and very subtle on the exposure -- but I think it makes everything look more crisp and 3-D.

One other thing -- we overclocked the sync a little bit (1/320th, maybe?) to get that unsync'd zone across the bottom. Gave us a little more control over the sun and kept that white jersey from walking your eye right out of the bottom of the photo.

Here is a setup shot, which shows just how contrasty and crappy our straight ambient light was at the time:

That pic (courtesy Dave Kile) does not include the VAL'd SB-800 -- it would be coming from just out of the frame at left.

One thing you can see here is that I have detached the ring light from the camera so I can feather it up quite a bit. This allows me to keep the bottom of the frame, which is much closer to the ring light, from getting too hot. Actually I feathered it a lot higher than in this photo. But you can see the disconnect from the lens axis and the light axis, which is what is important.


Portrait and a Headshot

The job called for a single portrait with a little space in it. But I always include a tight headshot, for several reasons.

Number one, headshots get re-used -- a lot. That was something I learned freelancing back in college when every penny counted: Always make a habit of including an extra headshot. Do it often enough and you will be rewarded by little surprise re-use checks for years to come. They are never big, but then, it's found money.

Plus, a headshot, lit well, can also morph into a cover if need be. And those checks are bigger.

The sun was getting a little lower so that gave us some options. We scrounged a shipping container (naturally, on a football field, right?) as a shade/sun background and went to work there.

I say shade/sun because the container was in shade but the area in front of it was getting sun rim light. That's gonna make this headshot easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, as the gecko says.

The whole thing is built on that ambient rim light. We put it over his camera-left shoulder and dropped down the ambient exposure until the color was rich and the rim lit area was just losing detail.

Here's the setup:

In the past, I generally would have the key light and the rim light coming from opposite directions. But lately I prefer to key and rim from the same side if I have detail and separation on the shadow side. Just makes for a cooler looking wrap, I think.

So we brought the beauty dish in from upper camera front left and cranked it up until his face looked good. Notice -- no flash meter. Again, it's just an add-salt-to-taste progression that goes very quickly and leaves you the natural option of doing something other than the "perfect" flash exposure.

I used to obsess about perfect. Metered to a tenth of an f/stop. (Screw The Force, Luke. Trust your Meter.)

Now, I could give a rat's butt about "perfect," preferring to go with what I think, looks best. It's the relationship between the different light levels that matters, anyway. And if you always go for perfect exposure values (as conferred upon you by your Almighty Flash Meter) your photos start to look a lot alike.

That's another reason to embrace a little randomness, IMO. Make mine al dente, please.


Here's the final. It's a quickie headshot that will look fine as an inset mug, but could do more if asked. And who knows? Connor might go on to be a hotshot NFL QB. So a badass-looking high school headshot might be a good thing to have in ten years.

(We did a looser version, too, but I prefer the headshot.)

Is it a "perfect" exposure as defined by a flashmeter? No clue.

But I like it, and I am a Committee of One where exposure is concerned. (It passed, unanimously.)


Football Football Football Football Football

Now that I am no longer spending my fall Saturdays away from the family shooting college football for the paper, I have had the chance to go from being a mere Florida Gator fan (my alma mater) to being a crazy, raging, full-on brainwash-your-kids Florida Gator fan.

But long before I went to the University of Florida, I was an University of Alabama fan. Way back in the days of Major Ogilvie, I wore Crimson and yelled "Roll, Tide!" from first snap to final whistle. And during the years I shot for the paper at UF, road trips to 'Bama were my favorite away games to shoot. Great teams, great fans and great parties afterward.

On Saturday, my two favorite teams, both undefeated and now ranked #1 and #2, will play each other in the SEC championship game. The winner will go on to play for the national championship in January.

I will admit to being a little conflicted. But not much.

On Sunday I will go back to being a fan of both teams. But until then, Go Gators. Beat Alabama.
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Next: Shooting for Social Media

An Exercise in Seeing Light

This time of year, I usually take a moment to point to an archive post from 2006 on how to photograph holiday lights.

It is a fun (and festive) exercise in getting a feel for how your camera sees relative light levels differently than you do.

In addition to being a good excuse to spend a little quality time with your family, the improved understanding will help you better understand ratios and light levels for your own lit photos.

-30-

First Look: Pixel TR-331 TTL Remote Nikon Triggers

UPDATE #1: Full manual has been uploaded (as a .jpg) here. Off-camera TTL flash is easy to figure out and works pretty well. But iTTL (i.e., master/slave TTL multiflash) continues to elude me.

UPDATE #2: We have our beta tester. Please, no more volunteers...

Just got in an early set of Pixel TR-331 (Nikon compatible) TTL remote triggers. First look, and a call for local Baltimore/Washingon TTL Nikon shooters who might want to give them a test drive this weekend, inside.
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First Impressions

Right off the bat, they look a couple of notches above the typical "eBay" remotes in build quality. These guys are tight, and built solid.

All TTL connections are hot-shoe based and very solid. There are screw locks and locking pins. Your flashes will be secure.

Right now they only have Nikon models, but Canon are supposedly coming early next year.

They are essentially a wireless TTL bridge, supporting TTL flash and high-speed FP sync. They can also be used in manual mode as dumb triggers. You can use manual mode in FP sync, too.

Quick testing showed them to be pretty reliable. Not rock solid, but neither did they miss very often. I'd put it in high 90's for normal working distances.

I have one transmitter and two receivers, and found I could vary the TTL output level at the physical setting on the flash itself to easily create ratios between the two flashes.

TTL results looked to be just fine, although I am not generally a TTL shooter so I do not know whether the remotes or the internal camera TTL systems get credit for any exposure variances.

I tested it in FP mode and got reliable sync speeds right up to 1/8000th of a sec. Because of the way FP sync works (using pulses) the power levels of the flash were predictably lessened as you walked up the shutter speed scale.


High marks for the supplied sync cord choices. You get two screw-lock PC-based cords which will connect the remotes (in dumb sync mode) to any flash which syncs off of a 1/4" or 1/8" jack.

Frequency on the unit is 2.4Ghz, which means it'll be cool to use anywhere in the world with regard to various countries' radio frequency allocations. But you will also be competing with the likes of cordless phones, wi-fi and microwave ovens. FWIW, I was testing these indoors about 15 feet from a wireless router and getting good sync percentages, tho.

Biggest irk, given that I have not yet been able to test them thoroughly, is that they run on (for me) hard to find CR2 batts. These are sub-sized and 3v.

I spent two hours hitting two Targets and a Wal-Mart with no luck. Finally just had some shipped from Amazon. Pain in the butt. I sure do wish they would sacrifice a little form factor and go AA's. You get way more battery life and universal sourcing on the batts.

Lastly, the instruction manual is predictably funny and confusing -- and replete with (presumably machine) translation hiccups. Actual line in the manual:


"This is electronic products accessories, some of the environment causes may affect the working. However, this is hardly ever to get this situation. Don't Worry!"

Okay! I won't!


Calling Local Beta Testers

[UPDATE: We have our local beta testers all lined up -- to professional shooters in NoVA who use Nikon TTL frequently enough to eval them way better than I could. Thanks to those who volunteered! -DH ]

If you are local to Baltimore/Washington and would like to give them a full test drive, I would be happy to lend them out for a few days. I am booked solid well into next week and will not be able to give them the testing they deserve in a timely manner.

Here is the deal:

1) You should shoot Nikon, and be familiar with Nikon TTL flash. One of my weaknesses in testing these is that I I do not know if any inconsistencies are coming from the remotes, the camera, the flashes or the idiot pushing the button. I am a manual guy. You should be familiar with Nikon's TTL results.

2) You should be willing to pick them up and drop them off in Ellicott City and prepared to shoot over the weekend.

3) You should be willing to supply pics and your impressions of the units' performance.

4) Preference will be given to more than one person who may wish to work together, for diversity of opinion. So if you normally hang with a local meetup group or a shooting buddy, that would be ideal.


For time purposes, I can only choose one beta tester, and will pick from volunteers based on the above criteria by midday Thursday. If interested, please mark your comment as "Do Not Publish" and leave email and phone number as contact. I will update this post after I choose someone. (Got 'em. -DH)

Of course, I will relay the shooter(s)' pics and findings in a future post.


Obligatory Lighting Geek Stuff

Thought some of you might be interested in the makeshift printer paper studio I just used to shoot theses.

Everything is on manual, mostly around 1/64th power. I tripped them with low-power, onboard flash on the Canon G11 point-and-shoot I used to shoot the pics.

If you need to shoot something small quickly, printer paper and small flashes are your friends.

Choosing Big Lights: AlienBees

The last installment of the Big Lights series is a look at AlienBees, a very popular line of studio strobes available in the US -- and recently, in Australia/NZ. But before I get into them, I will preface the post with this:

Early this fall when it came time for me to pull the trigger, I was having a very difficult time deciding between the Elinchrom Quadras and the Profoto Acute line. So I decided to go with a very comprehensive set of AlienBees.

Confused? Lemme explain…
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An Inexpensive Way to Learn

Having spent a significant amount of time deciding on which line of flashes I was going to marry, I realized that my main unknown was not so much the gear itself but rather my not knowing what kind of a big lights photographer I was.

My experience with the bigger flashes falls mostly in the neighborhood of nuking large areas -- gyms, large interiors, etc. And that is not the kind of thing I want to do, going forward.

I had grown much more comfy with my SB's than I was with my WL 600s, and that scared me. Not from a standpoint of inexperience but from that of not knowing exactly how to distribute what would amount to a big chunk of cash when buying lights.

So I decided I would date the AlienBees before deciding which flash system I wanted to marry. And who knows, if the AlienBees proved sufficient my wallet would come through the process largely unscathed.

And not knowing what I wanted, I bought ... everything.


Cheaper by the Dozen

By themselves, the lights and modifiers are inexpensive. But there are also quantity discounts to be had. Buy four flashes, as I did, and you get 20% off of every accessory you purchase at the same time. Which almost makes them free to test drive.

This is because, unlike your late-model digital camera which just lost $100 in value as you read this sentence, flashes hold their value very well. And new gear bought at a 20% discount will pretty much get you your money back on eBay whenever you are ready to sell. Which was my plan.

I bought three AB800s, an AB1600, stands, booms, strip boxes, a soft box, beauty dish, grids for the boxes and dish, tele reflectors -- pretty much everything that was for sale on the site, it seemed.

I did skip the remotes, as I am already full up on PocketWizards Plus II's. But when I was done I still had not managed to rack up a $3,000.00 total, as the 20% off added up to some pretty big savings.

And why not go crazy? My thinking was (and still is) that I could use them for months at almost no net cost. And if I liked them enough, I was done with my flash search.

It was a pretty heady day, getting the contents of a full studio delivered to the front porch by the UPS man. And over the last few months, I have learned a lot about AB's -- and about myself as a lighting photographer.


Likes, Dislikes

There is a lot to love about the ABs. At the top of the list, of course, is price.

You can get an AB800, with reflector, power cord and sync cord for $280.00. Which is about what it costs to see a movie in New York City. You can get the AB400 for $55 less, but that is a very small difference for one full f/stop. My advice is to skip it and go for the AB800.

This is ridiculous, silly cheap for a studio flash. So much so, in fact, that it has sort of blown the curve of what people think is an appropriate amount of money to spend on a big flash. Paul Buff sells direct only and manufactures by the boxcar load. He has created an entirely new business model in the industry.

Are they built like a Mercedes? No, they are not. But their service/repair policy is so generous that it does not really matter for many people. And they are sufficient for most uses, and that is what matters to their owners.

Buff also extends that "built good enough" ethic to his modifiers, with mixed results. Soft boxes, the dish, grids, and many other items I have found to be first rate and surprisingly heavy duty. The stands are serviceable, but are not what you would call confidence-inspiring. Also, his standard reflectors are ingeniously designed to accept a 7" grid without an accessory clip. But I would be happier if they were parabolic, rather than conic.

In short, the ABs allow you to jump in the pool for cheap. Try stuff -- heck, try it all -- and see what you end up using and/or liking. I especially like the Vagabond II, a $300 battery pack and pure sine wave inverter which will run (3) AC-powered AB800s on full power for 300 pops.

I bought two of them. I was like a shark in chummed waters -- I got that crazed look in my eyes that my wife gets when Ann Taylor has a 75% off sale at the mall.


What You Won't Hear

While I absolutely recommend experimenting in the shallow-priced AB waters, here is one thing you will not often hear said among AB owners:

"I just love the quality of the light..."

You hear that about Profoto, Elinchrom, Hensel, Broncolor, etc., But when AB/WL people start talking they usually come down to price and/or portability.

And you are not going to hear me rave about the gorgeous light quality either, because ABs do have a bit of quirkiness to them in that department. I can't quite put my finger on it or quantify it, other than to say that I am sometimes a little surprised by what I get from them.


So of course we did some testing. Here is a series, shot all of the way up and down the power range of a single AB800. They are not dead on, but neither are they grossly inconsistent. Maybe it's a UV thing? I really don't know.

And don't get me wrong -- I have been shooting assignments for months with these things with no complaints. And I still do not know if it is the lights themselves, or me not being fully used to them.

There are people (usually from expensive, prestigious photo schools) who turn up their noses and reject the AlienBees out of hand. That's ridiculous. They are the number one selling brand of studio flash, and for good reason. Similarly, there are people who are just as rabid in their support of the units.

I suspect that the truth lies in the middle somewhere. They are an amazing value, to be sure. But they are not the equivalent of a high-end Broncolor system, either.

And frankly, for the money I can live with a little quirkiness. I have some On Assignments coming up on which I used the AlienBees, so I will let you judge for yourself. It is a very subjective thing, light quality.


Want vs Need

What do I want? That's easy -- I want everything.

Which is pretty much what I bought. And exactly what I would not have been able to do with, say, Profoto. Not without knocking off a rich relative a commercial loan, anyway.

But what do I really need? That's a different story.

And that has been the most valuable part of my AlienBees experience -- learning what I need in a big light system as opposed to what I want.

Here's what I found out: Ninety percent of the time I shoot, I am going to be making a portrait and using two light sources. This is proving to be a transportable and predictable workflow from my speedlight shooting. Heck, it is probably because of my background working out of a waist pack that I have evolved that way.

Generally, it will be a restricted key and an on-axis fill of some kind -- ring, light off of a white wall behind me, umbrella behind the camera, whatever. Or maybe I will use ambient as a base and use one light as a key and other as a separator light. Usually as a rim light or a light on the background.

While sometimes I will use a third source, that is surprisingly rare. But having the third source gives you backup on the first two, which is very important. Any system you design should leave you without a single point of failure. Which is one reason I gravitate to monoblocs over pack-and-heads. And why six SB-800s in a small bag are more useful to me than one or two big monos.

Occasionally, I throw a lot of light sources at something. Just once in the last three months, shooting social media headshots for a local financial company, I used five sources. (But that was 3 AB800s, an AB ring flash and an SB800.) So maybe if I went with more expensive lights, I might have to miss out on an occasional job. Or just have to shoot differently. Or rent.

As an aside, the shot above was done using the three lights visible in the frame, and two more. The center light lit the background. The side lights lit each other. There was on-axis light from a ring. And an SB-800 on the ground shot a little up-light kicker to define the lights.

I may stay with the ABs, and I may not. But for less than the price of a single Profoto Magnum reflector, I have essentially been able to sort of "rent" a huge set of lights, stands and mods for months. That rental fee (net buying/reselling costs) was recouped many timed over on my first assignment with them. Which is why I am so pleased to have used them to discover how I want to light.


Learning from the Experience

Using what I learned from my drunken AlienBees gear orgy, I could now estimate with more confidence what I would need to buy should I decide to go with, say, Profoto.

I would want an AC pack, three lights (two regular heads, one ring) some pretty specific mods, and battery-powered packs to power at least two heads. And with the year-end specials Profoto is running, I am actually giving serious thought to pulling the trigger. If that seems strange, remember that I bought the ABs a while back, and that part of my reason in getting them was to evaluate both them and myself as a lighting photographer.

Here is the 40th Anniversary deal that is making me drool for Profotos: If you buy an Acute 600B (battery unit) or an AC-powered value kit, they throw in $1000.00 worth of accessories. Different countries have slightly different rules on the promo, so check if yo are interested.

This bonus appears to be stackable, too. So I could get two 600B packs, and an Acute 1200 value kit. For under $8k USD, that would give me two heads and the ability to run them on AC or battery power. My only single point of failure is the AC pack, and that is covered by the battery units.

And with the $3k USD in free accessories, I could get extra battery modules, a ring light head, a soft ring reflector (working with the Moon Unit has made that a must) grid reflectors and a Magnum reflector. I could get by with my ratty, 20-yr old White Lightning 7" grids that are pictured above. That is a setup I could live with for a long time. And I never would have been able to know that with any confidence without using a wide variety of AlienBees gear for several months.

Would I drop $8k for that? Absolutely.

And I am less concerned about the up-front price than I am about really knowing what gear I want to settle into. This is long-haul stuff -- a marriage. And I still have a month to decide before the special expires.

(Curse you, Profoto, for making the deal last up to the last minute of tax-spending season. That was evil. It's like a month-long test of fortitude, taunting me until New Year's Day.)


Back to the Bees

Do I regret jumping on the AlienBees? Not for a second. They have been very serviceable (not to say inspiring on all counts) and have provided some very valuable clarity for essentially no net cost should I decide to change horses. And I very well may stick with them for the long haul. I haven't decided yet.

If you have access to them (the AU/NZ distributorship is selling to surrounding Asian/Pacific countries, it appears) you can hardly go wrong as an entré into bigger lights. And given that they all have built-in slaves, they will definitely play nicely with your existing speedlights. (AB becomes main light, speedlights become fill/rim/background, etc.)


[UPDATE: The AU distributor of AlienBees confirmed that they are shipping to different countries, which will be good news for some of you who are outside the US.]


They are just so deliciously inexpensive. And with the (upcoming) "Einstein" versions, ABs get even more interesting as the light color issues are supposedly vastly improved. A lot of other improvements coming, too. I'll be keeping tabs on that.


Getting off of the Couch

Yeesh, I feel like I just went through a therapy session. And believe me when I say that is an honest a look as I can give you into my thought process on buying personal lights. And six months after I started, I am both well-equipped and yet strangely in limbo as to what I will do next.

So in some twisted way, I hope that this has been of at least some help. Hell, it probably just left some of you more confused. I am a little conflicted in that I now know enough to have prompted some questions I did not know to ask at the start of the process.

And I hope you AB/WL owners will sound off as to your experiences in the comments, good or bad. This is too important a decision to go on just one person's say so. Your opinions certainly will help others make better decisions.

Please share them with us.

On Assignment: Planes and Arrows

As part of a long-term project I am working on with a local school, I popped into the gym after school recently to shoot archery practice. And it brought to mind a quickie tip for lighting big spaces.

A gym is a big-volume place, full of ugly light. You can't hope to light the whole thing very effectively with a few speedlights. But you can light selective planes and create the illusion that large, 3-D areas are lit -- even if you can only place lights at the periphery, lest your lights get skewered.
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Always start with a first look at the ambient. That's what I always do when assessing an area to light. A quick shot on auto exposure and daylight balance lets me know how much ambient there is, and what color it is.

Answer: Not much, and puke green. Perfect.

The auto-ambient is 1/15th of a sec at f/5 at 200 ISO -- pretty dark. And honestly, the darker a big room is (within reason) the better as far as I am concerned. With big areas, I want to give myself a friendly aperture to be able to hit with strobe when I build it back up.


Step two, is to knock out that ambient while leaving myself as much ability to light as possible. So, go to my sync speed (1/250th) and close down the aperture just until the bad things go away. 1/250th at f/6.3 is plenty dark. In fact, I probably still have a stop or so of leeway, in case I need to adjust my strobes' exposure by remote control by just tweaking my aperture setting later.

Just enough, but not too much on your new, ambient-killing exposure. I could easily nuke ambient with f/16 at 1/250th, but then I would have to light it to that level. Not an easy thing to do with speedlights at distance. Make life as easy on yourself as possible.
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The trick to working with speedlights in a volume this big is to realize that you do not have to light that whole volume. Just light the planes you are going to shoot -- be they walls, targets, people or whatever.


Case in point: Strobes #1 and #2 are lighting my shooters. Not much -- just enough to give them a little wrap detail and keep them from being a sillo. And you could easily light this whole thing with just two flashes if you were cool with the shooters going black. That's a pick 'em, or an easy out of you did not have enough flashes.

The two lights nearer to the camera (#3 and #4) are lighting the targets. I aimed the left flash at the right target area and vice versa, for even coverage.

Setting my flashes on 1/4 power at a 105mm throw, I can easily light up the targets at a significant distance. Ditto for my archers.

Another consideration here is that my lights are lighting both shooters and targets without being in the line of fire. I thought about placing them between the shooting alleys near the arrows' flight paths. Then I watched some of the shooters warm up. Ummm… No.

(They aren't making SB-800s anymore.)

And not that this light is anything major special, either. But remember the sickly pea soup we were in a few minutes ago -- it is that difference that is important to me.


Once we have lit the two planes, I can use the same setup to grab a detail shot, too. And it looks completely different with a longer lens -- almost as if that (now visually compressed) space is not even there.

If I want to adjust the exposure (liking this one a little more saturated) that's an easy fix by varying the aperture. No need to adjust the actual lights, as the whole thing is built on flash.

Your aperture is now your volume control.
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Same Principle, Different Approach

This project is activity-driven as far as subject matter goes. But the important part to me is producing a series of portraits of middle schoolers who are mastering their environment. The project will ultimately be aimed at incoming 6th graders, who are looking at middle school with mixture of garden-variety fear, and total, unadulterated fear.

So after the practice, I grabbed a portrait of the best archer in the group. And just like the above photos, this one is built with lighting on planes -- albeit in a different sense.

Their gear is pretty spartan, with nylon reusable targets and arrows of rather dubious fletching. We used three of the better arrows, and posed our archer against the target. There were only a couple of minutes to shoot, as class was ending and he had to go.

The target is much lighter in tone (especially at the edges) than is the archer, and I wanted to switch that relationship around, to place emphasis on him.

In the same way we can light planes, we can choose to exclude them -- even if they are practically adjacent. The target is lit by an on-axis (or nearly so) umbrella placed behind the camera. By lighting him to two stops down, we provide fill on his face and take the target down to saturate the faded colors while taming the white edges.

Two birds killed with one stone, we light the face next.


As you can see above, even though his face is right next to the target, we can light both planes separately by using a grid on his face and feathering it away from the target.

The important thing to remember is not to aim it at his face, but rather in front of his face. Just skim him to the front, and you can use the edge of the gridded beam to light his face without hitting the target.

(You could also gobo off the light to get this effect, with slightly different results. But I like the way the edge of the beam looks on a face.)

So, we are lighting a face on a completely different plane that is the lighting on the target which is just a few inches away. This means we can gel the face but not the target, which is exactly what is done here. A 1/4 CTO warmed up the flesh tones just a tad, without coloring the background at all.


Plane and Simple

By thinking of your lighting zones as planes, you can bypass large amounts of unneeded dead space. Or you can also be picky about just where your light goes and where it doesn't.

And the efficiency of lighting on planes helps you to easily overcome yucky ambient in large, dark spaces.
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