Terra is a budding professional photographer from Ankeny, Iowa. She has a strong eye for portraiture, a winning smile and a great deal of patience. In our Digital Studio Safari class on Saturday, I was demonstrating to Terra and Gail (on the left) and Marnae, the how and why of using portable strobes in an environmental situation, using an infrared remote on my Canon SLR.
Zeroing in on Terra, I demonstrated that sometimes the ambient light of a room isn't intense enough to be able to hand-hold a heavy digital SLR. Also, the light isn't very interesting. Here's the starting point:
So, here is the shaky image depending on some overhead but mostly window light. Not very good. We need to improve the situation.
The lighting gear I'm using are two Canon speedlites and an infrared remote trigger, that fits into the hotshoe of the camera.
But we begin with one strobe in the hotshoe.
The first step, when I'm teaching this approach, is to place the portable speedlite on the Canon camera and give the subject the old blast in the face, lots of light, oh my, this is what Terra would look like to a coal miner. Flash on camera. Yuck.
So first things first, we get that light thrown up into the ceiling by bouncing turning the flash at 90-degrees to the subject. A slight improvement.
But I know I'm going to use two lights so I take the strobe off the camera and place it to the side. At 45-degrees to subject Terra will look better...
A huge improvement. Now it's time to separate Terra and that sassy blonde hair with the red streak from the background. A second strobe, on the same channel as the infrared remote is placed behind her... like this.
And now it is time to play with the angles and exposures to keep Terra separated from the background, while making sure the light in front is not too direct.
This is only a partial success. The camera is set at ISO200, f5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second. At that exposure the we aren't taking advantage of the significant ambient light in the room, mostly daylight streaming in through eight windows. As I try dialing down the shutter speed, Terra gets bored...
But now I'm getting closer. The last exposure was 1/125th of a second at 5.6. I drop down the shutter speed to 1/60th and VIOLA!!! Success.
Click on the photo to see it larger. It's a simple idea but really makes a difference for an environmental portrait.
No comments:
Post a Comment