Exploration of
Off-Camera lighting
The Challenge: To
shoot a beautiful portrait in every room of our house.
I hear all the time
from beginning photographers that they wish they had a studio space to shoot in and use
that as a mental hurdle for not being able to take good photos. We have a small studio space in our
basement, but decided to not use that space and instead shoot everywhere else
in our regular home. A friend of ours
needed some photos and always wanted to do something like this so she made the
perfect subject for us to experiment and practice with. We are very new to off-camera lighting so
there was a lot of adjustments and trial and error as this was mainly a
practice session for us. There were
things that went very well and things that could have done better which I tried
to outline in the text below.
Overall, we were very happy with the results and look forward to doing more of
this in the future.
Let’s jump right into it and look at the rooms along with the photos. Unfortunately, since the flashes were on
manual, I don’t have a full record of what all the flash settings were, but I’ll
do my best to fill in what I know.
Equipment Used:
580 EX
580 EX II
Canon 30D with 17-55
f2.8 IS
Canon 40D with
70-200 f2.8 IS L
3 Pocket Wizards
3’ ft round fold up
reflector. It has a white screen that
can be used as a diffuser along with a cover that provides a black side for
removing light or a silver side for reflected light.
Lite Panel Micro
video light
For inspiration on
posing and lighting, we have subscriptions to Vogue, W, Bazaar, GQ, Allure
1) This first one is a shot of part of our consultation space leading into my office. We ended up closing the double white doors and then turned that black coffee table for her to sit on the corner with the white doors behind her.
We cropped out the
table on the left side.
Flash 1 was camera right pointing at the door behind her with a gobo to block
the light from hitting her. Flash 2 was
up high camera left to shoot over her shoulder to also blast the door with
light. To set this up correctly, I
should have had a third flash on the ground behind her to light up the
carpeting under her feet, but I didn’t have an extra flash so I ended up just
whitening the area around her feet in Photoshop.
The fold up
reflector was used with the black side to help absorb some of the reflected
light. It was held just out of the
frame on the left as close to the subject as possible to keep her body as dark
as possible.
Shutter speed: 1/200 sec
2) This was also
shot in our consultation space. We
closed the french doors and sat the subject on the carpeting.
This was lit with a
single light out in the hallway. It was
pointed at those solid white doors in the background at full power to blast a lot
of reflected light back in through the doors.
Shutter speed: 1/200
sec
3) This was shot in
our main living room. We pulled that
octagonal shaped table a bit off the wall and used that for her to sit on.
Flash one was positioned behind the subject on a light stand
and set to ½ power to provide a really light backlight. Flash two was positioned high to the right
and shot through the diffusion screen from the fold up reflector to provide
softer light.
Shutter speed: 1/100 sec -
Aperture: 5.6 -
ISO: 100
4) This photo was shot in our downstairs bathroom. The subject was sitting on the ledge by the
shower. There was bare 580 up high
camera right. I originally tried to
backlight this scene, but the ugly yellow tiles started showing up too much and
it looked better keeping all that dark.
Shutter speed: 1/100 sec -
Aperture: 5.6 -
ISO: 100
5) This was taken in our laundry room. The room was pretty messy so we moved a
couple things around and found a piece of carpet scraps that we could lay
across the face of the washer and dryer to hide all the dials.
We tried to make this photo look like ambient light. It WAS partially ambient light, but there was not enough ambient
light for the image. I would have had
to shoot this at a wider aperture and a high ISO which would have been ok,
however, the goal of this challenge was to use off camera flash.
For this image, we had one flash off camera left and pointed it at the
window/blinds at ¼ power so that it would reflect off and make it look like
ambient light.
Shutter speed:
1/250 sec -
Aperture: 5 -
ISO: 125
6) This was shot in our main living room and as you can see,
we have a lot of junk. We had to move
some of that out of the way to utilize the archway shape.
For this image we
used the light from an overhead can light along with some additional overhead
video light to fill in some of the shadows a little bit. To use a lower ISO, we could have shot this
by placing a CTO gelled 580 next to the can light, but I wanted to try doing
this shot with combining the overhead with a CTO gelled video light. As you can see, the iso had to be much
higher and the aperture was wide and the shutter speed was slower than most of
the other pics down with flash.
Shutter speed: 1/60 sec -
Aperture: 2.8 -
ISO: 1000
7)
This next image was also taken in our
living room looking the other way. The
day we shot the photos, it was a little bit more gloom y outside so there
wasn’t as much sun coming through the blinds as what this shows. However, there was still enough light to
give the look I wanted.
This was shot with
one bare flash camera right.What I
should have done is allowed more ambient light to come through the blinds to
those vertical lines would have been blown out white. I could have achieved that by using a wider slower shutter speed
to control the ambient light without affecting the flash power. I had done that for one of the later images,
but the pose wasn’t as good, so I ended up going back to this one. If I really wanted to, I could lighten those
vertical lines in Photoshop.
Shutter speed: 1/125 sec - Aperture:
3.5 - ISO: 100
8)
This
was taken in our bedroom. The sun was
out in the afternoon and some beautiful light was coming through the back
window and making a neat pattern on the carpet. There are lots of ways that this light could be used, but I chose
to use it as the background.
To
take this photo, I stood in the bathroom looking into the bedroom and
positioned her so that the pattern of light would fill most of the frame behind
her. The light source is from a Lite
Panel Micro video light held about 2 ft. from her face camera right which was
about all the space we had. The
distance was just a bit too close to try to use a 580 flash so we were happy
with the softer light that came from the video light.
Shutter speed: 1/50 sec Aperture:
2.8 ISO: 400
9) This photo was taken in our nursery room. We took the baby photos off the walls and
moved some of the junk on the ground to use the bare red wall. There was some natural light coming through
a window, but it wasn’t bright enough so we blasted a 580 flash at ½ power into
the blinds to get some nice soft reflected light that looked like natural
light. I kept the shutter speed slow to
allow some of ambient window light to affect the image.
.
10) Here’s another photo taken in our bedroom. We have some really tacky mirrored closet doors and wanted to try and do something with the reflection. We mostly closed the closet doors but left them open just a little bit so that I could see multiple reflections when looking over the subjects shoulder
This was a picture that had a number of problems that should
have been correct BEFORE taking the image but instead had to be fixed later in
Photoshop. First, the closet doors
themselves were really dirty and the flash reflected off all those dirt spots
leaving marks all over the image. We
should have wiped the door down. Second, the shutter speed was too slow along too much ambient light into
the room which I had to do a lot of burning in Photoshop to make it look like
what I had in my head. The single flash
was held camera right. If I had made my
shutter speed faster, this image would have probably looked very close to the
final result in camera and it would have saved me some computer time later and
that is the ultimate goal.
Shutter speed: 1/40 sec Aperture:
4 ISO: 200
11) These next images were taken in the hallway. We recently added a lot of fun colored paint to a lot of the rooms and we decided to try to take a photo that mixed some of those colors.
The first image was taken with just a flash backlighting the
subject. There was some beautiful
window light coming through which is what originally gave me the idea, but it
just wasn’t bright enough, so I put a flash on a stand behind the subject at
probably ¼ power. For this shot I went
with a slower shutter speed to provide some ambient light that showed off a bit
of the colors on the walls.
Shutter speed: 1/40 sec Aperture:
4 ISO: 200
The second shot had a second flash positioned camera left to provide some nice
side lighting on the subjects face.
All camera settings were left the same and we just turned on the second flash
and adjusted the power until the light looked right. I intentionally wanted the light to hit the blue wall to give me
color. If I had wanted the light to be
just on the subject then the light could have been snooted or the flash head
could have been zoomed to concentrate the light more.
12) This next photo was also taken in the same hallway. But a
little farther to the left out of camera view.
It was lit with a single off camera flash camera right and I
was standing in our bathroom to take this photo. For this photo, I didn’t worry too much about the camera settings
since there wasn’t any ambient light in the photo, so we just set the flash
settings to whatever made the pic look good.
Shutter speed: 1/50 sec Aperture:
5 ISO: 200
13) We then headed outside just to do some testing with the off camera light. It was a bright sunny day with a really washed out blue sky. The first image shows what the ambient light looked like.
After that, I underexposed the ambient light
until the sky turned a deep blue. This
was done by having the lowest ISO, fastest shutter speed to allow
flash sync and then tightening the aperture until it looked
good. The sun was used as a hair light
positioned behind the subject and then the flash was set to half power with the
flash head zoomed sitting camera left.
Shutter speed: 1/250 - Aperture: 20
- ISO: 100
After that, we did one more outside using three lights. The first light was the sun which was
hitting the top of her hair. The main
light was set camera right to provide the fill light on her face and the third
light was placed camera left. And provided a bit of separation between the edge
of her face, the earing, the collar on the jacket, etc. Since the bright sky was not in the scene,
the aperture didn’t have to be nearly as tight to significantly underexpose the
background.
Shutter speed: 1/250 sec Aperture:
14 ISO: 100
14) It was really
cold and windy outside so we didn’t stay out there for long. We came back into
our house through the garage and we have this funky stairwell that leads from
the garage into our house. This was a
really awkward place to try to shoot a photo because it’s really narrow.
For this image, a flash was put outside the door to make it appear like bright
sun was coming through the window. That
flash was set to full power. A second
flash was held up high camera left. The
shutter speed was kept fairly fast to try to cut out most of the ambient light
in the room to create a moodier look. The flash outside was already set to fullpower but I think a lot of the
light was reflecting off the glass and not coming in so to make it even more
intense, the aperture was widened in camera. This made the inside flash intensity powerful as well so that had to be
turned way down to I think 1/128th
15) Once we got back
inside we had a little bit more time left so we chose to finish up in two of
our ugliest rooms. The bathroom and the
storage room.
This first one was obviously taken in the bathroom. Yes, we did scrub the tub down before making her lay in it.!
This was taken with a single flash up high camera right. I was trying to mimic a shot that we found
in a magazine and that shot had a lot of even ambient light which is why I
chose a slower shutter speed. However,
after seeing the photo in the computer, I decided that I would prefer it to be
a much more focuses light source so I ended up having to do quite a bit of
burning to get this to look right. If
I had realized that during the shoot, I could have used a faster shutter speed
to cut out the ambient light along with a snooted flash and then I wouldn’t
have had to do much post processing.
Shutter speed: 1/50
sec Aperture: 4.5 ISO: 125
16) This last shot was taken in our storage room
which is a super cluttered room. We
were able to find a couple different options but because of our lack of space,
this one worked out the best. We found
the only clean wall in the room which is right next to the doorway. We also found a piece of shelving with white
wire lines (shown leaning against the wall) that would make a good
shoot-through pattern on the wall.
For this image, one light was placed out in the hallway
camera right and provided the beautiful hairlight. The other flash was held up high camera left and shot through the
wire shelf to provide the lined shadow on the wall.
Shutter speed: 1/200 sec Aperture:
2.8 ISO: 200
