Shooting Conditions & Location

When you are shooting with the sun, the time of day, location & your positioning are very important. Believe it or not THE SUN IS BRIGHTER THAN YOUR FLASH which can make it very hard to balance, especially since you can only use a limited range of shutter speeds due to the flash sync speed. Shooting a bit later in the day can make your life a lot easier, especially if you’re wanting to shoot with a wider aperture. I did this shoot at around 5pm when the sun was just starting to fall out of the sky.

If you are shooting with the sun behind you, lighting the background & subject, it would be fairly pointless adding a flash you either want to be shooting into the sun, almost creating a silhouette of your subject, or shooting from a location that’s shaded, or both. I went for both on this shoot — I found a nice spot in the woods facing the right way for the sun set, under the cover of a lot of trees.

Basic Framing & Exposing The Available Light

After I’ve got my location right what I like to do is get my basic framing; nothing set in stone (it can be tweaked later) I just need the general idea so I can start getting the available light just how I like it. I use a tripod for quite a lot of my shoots so I get it setup, camera locked into place & then wander round till I’m relatively happy with it.

Whenever I am doing a strobist shot I ALWAYS get my available light, in this case daylight, exposed correctly before I add in any flashes. It will make subsequent steps so much easier to get right & help you get to a better end result in less time. With this shot I wanted to get the nice orange tones out of the sunset & leave my subject quite under exposed, almost silhouetted, while staying within a useable range.

Usable Range — When you are setting up your camera for a strobist portrait remember you only have a certain usable range with some of your settings. As we are shooting a person we want our shutter speed at at least 1/50th & we are using strobes so no faster than 1/250th. We’ve got to consider aperture here too — if we are shooting very wide, e.g. F/1.4, it’s easy to over expose the daylight; if we are shooting very narrow, e.g. F/16, we could soon be in a position where the flash just isn’t bright enough.

Too Dark

ISO100 — F/2.0 — 1/200th

I guessed some initial settings that I thought might work with the daylight & give me the look I wanted. First try left my shot much too dark all over but I got a good starting point to work from.

Too Light

ISO400 — F/2.0 — 1/50th

The next lot of settings I tried were much too bright for what I wanted & I had lost the colours from the sunset.

Just Right

ISO200 — F/2.0 — 1/80th

Third time lucky, I split the difference between the last two shots & nailed it. My background looks good & subject is underexposed — now I can start thinking about adding some of my own lights to bring the subject back to life.

Add Strobes

Because I was in such a dark shaded environment, I wanted to use two strobes in this shot. The first as key light to expose the subject nicely & then a second fill light reducing the contrast of the scene & illuminating the area around the subject a little giving us a little context. The fill light isn’t essential, you could happily shoot without it, but I thought it really added to the shot & would save me time trying to rescue some of the details on the ground & trees in post production.

I always start by getting my key light right first; I wanted to get a really nice soft light & cast a gentle shadow onto the tree from the subject. The process of getting the exposure for the flash right is very similar to exposing the ambient light, except this time we are changing the settings & position of the flash.

The Key Light

I put my Canon 580ex into my Westcott Apollo & placed them out wide & to the side. I set it to a low power, 1/32th, & took a shot, it was too dark & the shadows were too flat — I turned it up & moved it slightly further from the camera then took another shot. I did this a few times until it was on 1/8th power & I was happy with the positioning.

Adding The Fill Light

Once my key light was dialed in I set up my fill light, for this I was using a Canon 430ex in an umbrella box. The umbrella box is great for giving a good even spread of light. I set it up camera right — quite high & angled down. I then used the same process to get the power right — 1/8th. You can see that the fill light gives us much more environmental detail.

It can take a little bit of playing around to get the lights just right, it’s very trial & error, but after a little experience you’ll notice it’ll take you a lot fewer tries to get it right. I’ve done a nifty little top down lighting diagram for you too just to make it a little easier for you to get your head round where everything was.

The Shot

All the strobes are in place, the natural light is exposed beautifully, all that is left to do is take the photos! Work through some poses with your subject, remember you are meant to be having fun, talk to them lots, put them at ease, make them laugh. Take LOADS of photos, if you take 100 photos & you have 1 good one then you are WINNING & you’ve probably got some tigerblood in ya.

This is one of my finals with a touch of editing, mostly a bit of contrast and some tonal adjustments. You can see this shot on my Flickr where you’ll be able to check out the large version & see all the EXIF data… if that’s your kinda thing.

Watch Me

I didn’t even think it was possible, but I think this video is even worse than the last, at least you’ll be able to see the shoot a bit… I should have planned better.

Home Work

So basically cancel whatever plans you did have for this weekend, you’re going out to do a photo shoot. No seriously, I don’t care who’s birthday party/bar mitzvah/funeral you are meant to be going to — cancel it. You are gunna do a shoot, in the daylight, with a flash, like this. Once you’ve done it leave me a comment & let me know about it. You should upload it to flickr too & add it to my Flickr Group!

You should follow me on twitter to hear about my nextpost, oh & all the other adventures I get up to.

Thanks

Big thanks to John for doing the behind the scenes footage, Leah for modelling & Abi for doing the makeup & styling — & to Josh for letting me borrow his 550D to film this on.

The first shot/upload taken from my 450D.

The project went well for me, during the course I really got into off-camera-flash photograph, portraits & I even did a Project50 within it.

My first ever ‘strobist’ shot.

Post 365 I didn’t stop taking photos, photography was such a big part of my life by this point it felt strange when I didn’t take a photo for a few days.

In July I had a serious craving for a project again, and started my 2nd Project50. I knew I could do the photo-a-day part so for this project I wanted to concentrate on a consistent quality & style.

I actually felt a lot more drained after project 50 than the 365, probably due to the amount of pressure I put on myself. But I soon got my photivation back and have been shooting like a maniac since.

It’d be rude to end this post with out mentioning my new baby, I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings. I recently got a Canon 5D MkII… my dream camera. I am so stoked to have her, nothing has changed the way I shoot more, the only thing I can compare it to is getting my first prime lens.

Quantifying Creativity?

I was in two minds about publishing these stats, I worry about looking narcissistic but some people might find some statistics from the last two years interesting.

• 952 Photos Uploaded Publicly On Flickr
• 111 Photos Explored
• 24 Photos Featured on Flickr’s Front Page
• 853,697 Total Flickr Views
• 4 Projects Completed (365, P50-2009, Week Of Self, P50-2010)

Thanks

I’ve met some great people and made some great friends through photography, I’ve gotten a lot of support from people I know and complete strangers alike. It’s great, I only take photos for myself but when someone else appreciates them too that’s awesome. So thanks to anyone who has involved themselves in my photo journey.

Here’s to another two years.

I don’t really know what to do with myself to get out of this funk, I don’t particularly want to do another Photo-A-Day project (Like my 365 or Fifty of Fifty), but maybe some sort of other project would be good for me? Something that focuses less on time & more on a particular image aspect or style but still applies a little presser. Or maybe it’s my last project that has made me feel like this & I need to just step back from it all. I could maybe even just shoot film for a few months… But then I work well under pressure, I even relish it blah.

Without some sort of direction it just doesn’t feel right, but right now I don’t think I’m able to choose a direction so I’m floating. I fear that’s making me feel slightly apathetic toward it. This is all just me thinking out loud I guess but if anyone has any thoughts or opinions I’d love to hear them.

I’m going to London on Thursday with Kym for a long weekend away, bit of casual shooting, coffee & good company might do me some good.

A Bit Of Planning

A bit of planning goes a long way! It’s always good to have a fair idea of what you want to achieve before you go out to do a shot, it’ll save you time when you are out in the wild. Sometimes I’ll even do child like drawings of the sort of thing I want to end up with, or very sketchy lighting diagrams, or even save similarly styled/lit shots to my iPhone so I can flick through them when I am out.

Also if possible grab a friend/spouse/co-worker/stranger in the street to pose for you, it’s a lot easier & quicker than doing it as a self portrait.

The Shoot

The first thing you need to know about a Lowkey shot like this is it does not need to be done at night, in fact doing it at night is a hell of a lot harder… how do you focus on something you can’t see!? I’m not saying you can do it in brilliant sunshine, but as long as the sun is setting or you are indoors you should be fine. I did this shoot at about 9:00pm & shot at a narrower (higher number) aperture to cut out the ambient light which, in this case, was the sun.

Finding a suitable location was easy for this one, I just needed somewhere with a bit of space. I could have found a giant car park with nothing in the backdrop, but I thought picking somewhere with walls behind my subject would give me a chance to talk a little bit about light to subject to backdrop ratios without going into the inverse square law.

The first thing I like to do when I get to a location is set up my kit roughly how I think I am going to use it. Then I start framing up my shot but I am not thinking about the lighting from my strobes just yet.

The light I want to focus on first is ambient light, which I want to completely eliminate. This is the easy part. First thing I do is make sure my ISO is set as low as it will go, then I set my shutter speed to the very fastest it will go with the triggers I am using. With my current triggers (RF-602′s) I can sync up to 1/200th of a second (FYI unless you can sync really fast shutter speed will not effect the strength of your flash). The fast shutter speed does a great job of getting rid of a lot of the sun light.

Then it’s all down to the aperture, starting with my aperture as wide as it will go, I progressively narrow it until I cut out all of the ambient light. This is where the histogram is particularly useful, if you aren’t familiar with histograms I recently did a small post explaining them. Every time I narrow my aperture I check the histogram until it tells me that all the light from the photo is gone. Kinda exactly like this:

The benefit of working like this is that you aren’t making your aperture any smaller than you absolutely have to, which means you won’t have to work your flash quite so hard. I started with my flash at 1/4 power for this shot, which left my subject a little underexposed & my backdrop was getting some light.

Boo! But don’t panic — this is pretty easy to fix. You have three options, the first & easiest is to turn the flash up & move the light out to the side of the subject so less light is pointing at the backdrop. Second, again turn your flash up & move everything further away from the backdrop, your subject, your lights, your camera, all of it. Third — hold on I need a new paragraph for this…

Unfortunately it’s not always possible to move away from your backdrop or you don’t want your lights out on the side; lucky for us there is something else we can do. If you move the light closer to your subject, lets say half the distance, you can actually then bring the power down by two stops while retaining the same level of exposure on your subject. Because your light is on a lower power the amount that gets to the back drop will be dramatically reduced. In fact if you started off with your light, subject & backdrop with even spacing in between them, your backdrop will be under exposed by about eight stops which should stop it from showing up all together!

If you aren’t getting it don’t worry, the best thing to do is just get out & try it out, it’s much easier to learn when you can see the results first hand. I’m also going to do a post about this sort of stuff soon to try & break it down a little more, do some funky diagrams, you know — all that good stuff.

After a little setup tweaking & turning my flash up to 1/2 power, I got exactly the sort of light I was looking for. I used an umbrella box for my light modifier on this shoot because I like the softness that comes with it. But you could have used a snoot for a bit more control or even done it with a bare flash. From that point I just rattled off a whole bunch of shots, getting Mikee to pull some shapes for me — what a pro. So this is my final image, which has had pretty much zero editing done to it, just a crop & tiny bit of desaturation.

You can check this shot out on my Flickr where you’ll be able to check out the large version & see all the EXIF data… if that’s your kinda thing.

The Video

Yep… video’d the whole thing! I thought it might be helpful. Errr please note — this is the first time I have ever done anything like this, so it’s a little on the amateur side & the audio is a little quiet in places — sorry.

The End

If you’ve read all of this, thanks! It’s kinda long but I hope it’s helpful to at least a few people. Also if you’ve had a go at this, I’d love to hear about it. In fact it would be really awesome if you could post a link or preview of the photo in the comments!

Follow me on twitter to hear about my next post, which hopefully will explain stops in a clear & concise way.

I have made a Flickr Group so it’d be rad if anyone trying out this technique could add their photo to it. Or just join it to see what other people add.

A lot of people will tell you that a good photograph must have a nice even histogram, this is a blatant lie & you must immediately set fire to who ever told you that. What you should do is think of a histogram as a light meter for after you’ve taken the shot — a light meter on a cocaine fuelled acid trip with a dab of heroine and a touch of speed.

Anatomy of a histogram — from left to right the histogram will tell you about the dark, mid & light content in your photo, and from top to bottom it will tell you how many pixels in your image are affected in that area.

When I review a photo, I am probably more interested in what the histogram tells me than what the image preview is trying to show me. I am not looking for a good or bad histogram, there is no such thing, I am looking for one that matches the style of photo I am going for. So I have put together a few examples of histogram shapes and the type of photos they might match up with.

So the next time you go out with your camera, try checking your histogram out after you’ve taken shot, hopefully it will give you a little more insight into how your photo has been exposed.

To get to your histogram on most Canon cameras you press the Info or Display button & on most Nikon cameras you press the up or down button when previewing an image to cycle through the different views.

Stay tuned for my next post “How I Shoot: A Lowkey Portrait” due out on the 26th May 2010!

So the new plan is to do several posts, a series if you will, each featuring a different style of portrait, all using off camera flash. I want to start simple so the first of these posts will be a one light portrait onto a perfect black background — not dissimilar to this one:

After the first post I will then continue to cover other styles like: low depth of field street portraits at night (my favourite kind!), crisp portraits on white, day time shots balanced with a flash — stuff like these:

I plan to publish the first post on the 26th of May, a few gentle nudges over the next 2 weeks would be appreciated. So how does the new plan sound? Is there anything specifically people would like to see that I haven’t mentioned already?

When 6pm rolled around I don’t think any one was expecting the amount of people that turned up! It was nuts, all the Droplets sold out in 58 minutes! Fifty Fifty was jam packed as was the gallery downstairs.

Anyway, the real reason you are here is to see the photos I took right? Yeah, I thought so. I took around 200 which I will try and get up in some sort of gallery this week, but for now here are some of my favourite shots.

I had an awesome day, & it was good to put some faces to names, I didn’t manage to say hi to everyone but it’s not personal, I was busy taking photos! :P

Keep your eyes on my flickr for more uploads.

I went to get the film processed as soon as I got back, but the labs I went to told me that they would have to be sent away & because of Christmas there would be a long wait. So I waited till post Christmas & took it into the Lincoln branch of Jessops. I thought taking it in after would minimise the delay & reduce the chance of them losing the film (Paranoid).

I kinda wish I hadn’t taken it to Jessops – it took them over 3 weeks to process it, they didn’t have a clue where my film was at any point and the staff were unhelpful when I was trying to get them to chase it for me.

I think it’s safe to say the development process of Delta 3200 has put me off shooting it for a while, back to the Fuji Xtra 400. I think I am so used to the speed and convenience of digital that if I can’t get a film developed & onto my computer within a day I can’t stand it! I think I am mumbling now, just check out the photos, let me know what you think:

It took some doing to convince myself to part with the amount of cash that an L series lens costs. I was eyeing up the 100mm f/2 USM (not the f/2.8 macro) and I probably would have been happy with that lens if I hadn’t tried out some L series glass in LCE. After that I knew I wouldn’t be settling for anything less.

I am SO glad I did make that jump, the Canon EF 135mm f/2 USM is an exceptionally sharp lens, I thought my 50mm f/1.4 USM was sharp, but it is blown away by this. Even wide open at F/2 it just blows my mind with the level of detail it picks up and the depth of field gets silly small. I took the shot below at f/4 and uploaded the full size image to show off the detail picked up, you should definatly check out the face area, you can see the texture in the paint, every speck of dust, all of it! Take note that this image is 2922px x 4386px and about 2mb eek, still go look at it.

This lens suites my style of shooting so well, if you have ever ventured onto my flickr you’ll have seen low DOF portraits with a healthy helping of bokeh, this lens is already helping me take that to the next level. I’ve only had it week but it has quite possibly ruined me for all other lenses. Telephoto Primes Rock My Socks!

My Tools

So these are the core tools that I have in my bag when I go out to do these sort of shots. I found it really hard to know what bits to pick up when I was getting into off camera flash photography so I wanna explain some of the options you have.

Lights

Aside from the camera arguably the most important part of the strobists tool kit. There are loads of options here depending on budget. I use the Canon 430ex, other options are the Canon 580ex, Nikon SB-900 Nikon SB-600, Nikon SB-24… the list goes on. Vivitar & Sunpak make some cheaper flash units that might be investigating if you are on a tight budget but you do get what you pay for. The key things you are looking for is that the power can be adjusted, you don’t need to worry about a flashes automatic capabilities, unless you are willing to part with some serious cash for the new Pocket Wizard ControlTL triggers, I shoot with all my flashes on full manual.

Triggers & Receivers

So really good triggers are really expensive, the real industry leaders here are Pocket Wizard – they are reliable & have an insane range. But they aren’t for me. I just can’t justify spending the amount of money on them that I would need to. A set of two go for £320 and you need one per flash and one for the camera, that would put me out £640 for me to run my current set up! I can’t justify that. I currently use the very cheap but popular PT-04 triggers, you can pick the newly designed ones up from amazon around £20 for a trigger & receiver kit. They do misfire some times & the range is no where near as good as the PWs but for the price they are great.

I have recently been looking at the Seculine Twinlink T2D kit, which seems to be something that fills the gap between the cheap triggers & the expensive ones. I think some time in the near future I will be making the upgrade to these.

Hotshoe With PC Port

I don’t connect my flash directly to the receiver, I actually sit my flash into a hotshoe with a PC port on the side, I then velcro my receiver to the top of my flash & run a cable. Mainly because I don’t trust the cheap plastic that the receivers are made from, I have already lost one flashgun because of it falling off a light stand, I don’t want to lose any more thank you very much. The hotshoes I have are made of metal and hardened plastic they also have a locking nut on them which means I can get them really tight on the light & umbrella bracket. They aren’t going anywhere! Mine are pretty similar to these bad boys but I sure as hell didn’t pay £10 each for them! I think they were around £2.50 each, totally worth it!

Light & Umbrella Bracket

This one is pretty easy, there are a few on the market, they all the do the same thing really. I have these ones, they hold an umbrella & a flash in place nicely but they do require that the flash, or hotshoe if you are using one, screw/lock in to be held securely in place.

Light Stand

Another straight forward one, you can’t really go wrong. As long as they go up to a decent height & aren’t going to fall over you are safe. I use the Konig brand ones which are available from Amazon for just under £12. But there are plenty of other options.

Update: This evening I put together a diy light stand out of some old bits I found in my dads garage, you can check it out here.

Umbrellas

Umbrellas get a little more complicated. Firstly the bigger the umbrella the more diffused the light will be. Secondly the bigger the umbrella the more power you will need to put through it. When using speedlights a good guide size to go for is between 60-100cm. There are 2 main types, shoot through and reflective, I like to keep both handy they are pretty inexpensive so it can’t hurt to have a seclection.

Shoot throughs are the white ones, you point the umbrella at the subject and pop. They also spill light everywhere though, so you don’t have quite as much control over the light, but it will spread it out better. This one would do a fine job.

Reflective umbrellas are the black ones, you point the umbrella away from the subject and the flash into the umbrella. Then the flash fires into the umbrella and all the light shines out, these will still give you the same soft light as a shoot through, but you can control where it goes a bit better. Something like this should do you.

Actually there is totally a third type, this is the kind I use pretty much all the time. I call them umbrella boxes, because they are sort of a softbox & an umbrella all rolled up into one – seriously awesome. I picked mine up from ebay & never looked back.

Camera & Lens

Use what you’ve got… that’s all there is to it. Nikon, Canon, Sony – whatever, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you’ve got a hotshoe on the top that you can get a trigger into then you are good to go. If you want to get a really dramatic bokeh effect though you are going to need a lens that hits the right sort of Fs! The lower the number the better the bokeh! Both Canon & Nikon produce a lens dubbed the nifty fifty, these are 50mm prime lenses that go down to F1.8 & retail for around £100. Really worth having in your camera bag.

Did you find this useful? Let me know by leaving a comment. Or maybe you use some different kit, I’d love to hear about it so get involved.