Professional Resources for Photographers

I wanted to go over my recent inLIGHTin Workshop for today’s Friday Night Lights segment.

I gave an inLIGHTin Workshop to about a dozen photographers over at the iPrintFromHome.com Headquarters over on Niagara Falls Blvd. For those local to Buffalo… did you know that we have an awesome photo lab right in our backyard?

So we started at 6pm and went a little over three hours! This workshop was all about lighting. We talked about everything from free and available light, to continuous light, speedlights (on and off camera) and ended up on studio strobes… There was A LOT of content and could have easily spent an entire day talking about things…

I had a great time and wanted to thank everyone for attending. I hope to see you at other workshops of mine and as always, call or email whenever if you have any questions guys!

Here are some pics from the workshop that my assistant, Martha, shot during the workshop:

Thanks to the George and Sarah over at the iPrintFromHome.com family for letting us use their space.

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.

This is a simple tip on how you can achieve a better (and more accurate) colors with your images. Mind you, this is for when you are shooting with a speedlight (whether on or off camera) like the Nikon SB-900 or Canon 580EX II or even with studio strobes.

Let’s take this down to the most basic situation where you will be using a flash to help convey my message.

So you are shooting a wedding in a normal sized room that is light with incandescent bulbs. These bulbs are giving off a warm, amber color. If we were shooting without a flash then our in-camera white balance should be set to incandescent or a custom Kelvin temp of something like 3200K or something within that range. That is all fine and dandy so shoot away.

But what happens if the room is dimly lit and you need a flash to help light things up? Flashes are daylight balanced around 5400K so what will happen is that the light from the flash will conflict with the ambient light from the incandescent bulbs and you will get various color casts on your subjects or background. Welcome to Photoshop hell at that point!

All we need to do is gel our flashes with the proper CTO filter so we can essentially modify the daylight balanced speedlight and mold it into becoming about the same Kelvin temperature of the ambient light that is around. In the situation above, an amber filter over the speedlight would bring that 5400K speedlight down to the 3200K range. DON’T FORGET TO SET YOUR WHITE BALANCE TO INCANDESCENT AND NOT FLASH!

If your white balance is still off then that is okay because you are at least in the same realm of light without worries of any serious color cast that would be noticeable. This is a very easy fix if you shoot in RAW.

Nikon’s SB-900 comes with a couple gels to correct for different lighting conditions. These gels even have some intelligence to them and allows the flash to know which one is mounted. If you are shooting in Auto white balance mode then the flash can tell the camera what filter is over the flash so the camera can take the necessary actions for providing you with a fairly accurate image and color rendition. They even include a real spiffy gel filter holder that snaps on to the flash.

So what is the lesson we learned today boys and girls???

GEL YOUR LIGHTS!