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Today’s Friday Night Lights article is all about taking your studio strobes outside to add some extra oomph to your images. When you know how to control and modify the light around you then you start to “make” your images rather than simply “taking” them…

Here is a YouTube video that I posted on the subject:

For this shoot I used an Alienbee AB1600 studio strobe powered by a Paul C Buff Vagabond power pack. Pocket Wizards were used as my wireless triggering device and was shooting with my Nikon D700.

Setup for this shoot typically involves me setting my camera to Manual mode and then dialing in my shutter speed to what the camera’s particular sync speed (check your camera’s manual for what your particular sync speed is since most are different – usually 1/200″ is a safe bet but this can vary) . From there, I set my aperture so that I can take a nice photo of the ambient light with the flash excluded. I want to preserve the ambient light, especially the clouds and sky colors, so this is the most important step!

Once I have my settings dialed in and I take a picture (still without my flash firing) I should get beautiful sky detail with my subject being a silhouette. This is where the flash comes in. I position the flash so that it will hit the subject and do a test shot… If my subject is blown out then I will either:
a) dial down the power of the studio strobe
or
b.) move the strobe further back from the subject
or
c.) a combination of the two

Obviously, I do the opposite measures if the subject is too dark. You could use a light meter but in the digital world, you could easily just take a shot and view the back of the LCD to check exposure, histogram and the angle of the light. Modify as needed!

Hope that helps and I will talk to you on Monday.