We had an interesting weekend, Started out with a Birthday party Friday Night, and then it was Monday morning 10 minutes later. We had a some good shooting all weekend and got some great pictures I’m sure our clients will appreciate. The above images in from a shoot about 2 weeks ago at Ault Park, I posted one ohter image from it, This images was taken in under a shade arc in the garden, I used a little fill flash to take out the shadows and make the couple stand out. I could see cropping in a little more although I like this image as is.
I got a chance to play around myself with some lighting Saturday morning. Tried out some new wireless flash triggers that worked great. My model for the morning still had breakfast on is face, but it wasn’t worth the fight to wash his face, and I was very lucky that he fit me into his very tight schedule during a commercial break of Phines and Pherb (I probably slaughtered the spelling) but this is what you expect with a 5 year old on a Saturday morning the weekend before school starts up.
Okay as promised I’m taking a little time to go over a little of the lighting techniques that we find useful. One of the toughest areas of lighting that we encounter are mirrors and shiny alters. Like anyone that has shot any pictures around these, you know that you are very likely to get a BRIGHT ball of light reflected back at you from a shiny surface, it could be polished wood, brass, a mirror or even a sweaty forehead. Well the forehead you can wipe off, and even apply a little make up to make it NOT SHINE. But what do you do for a mirrored surface?
A couple things come to mind, short of not using a flash there are still things you can do. If you think of the light striking your subject and the reflective surface, your on camera flash is a really small spot of light, and being small, it tends to reflect brightly off of surfaces. If the light was as big as your subject it would be a very even light, completely flooding the entire scene. One thing we do is try to make the light source bigger. This doesn’t mean getting a huge light, sometimes it is a simple as an umbrella in front of our flash. Other times we reflect the light off of something. Maybe we will use a reflector, but more commonly a ceiling or wall. If we prevent the flash from directly hitting the reflective surface it won’t be as bright of a reflection. Now simply aiming our flash a the ceiling works wonders, but will cause some issues in it’s self. The eye sockets are the most noticeable, they will be dark, so when aiming at the ceiling we use a little reflector mounted on our flash. On the Canon 580IIex there is a built in little card for this. This will not fix the whole issue and might cause a reflection from your subject.
This is going to take some experimentation on your part to get it working the way you expect it. Something we do, is not just bouncing off a ceiling. Think about direction the light is traveling. If you bounce off a wall to light the subject and there is a mirror behind them, your flash will not hit the reflective surface but will light up your subject. Also think about the wall behind you.
I know this is not a lot of help to our point and shoot fans as you can’t do a lot to control the direction of your flash. Although there are things you can try, you can put a piece of tissue over the flash part of the camera (thin) and experiment with that effect to defuse the light some and make it softer.
Also besides bouncing flash to move it, you can take your flash off camera to change the direction of lighting, but that is beyond what a short tip can do for you.
I got a chance to play around myself with some lighting Saturday morning. Tried out some new wireless flash triggers that worked great. My model for the morning still had breakfast on is face, but it wasn’t worth the fight to wash his face, and I was very lucky that he fit me into his very tight schedule during a commercial break of Phines and Pherb (I probably slaughtered the spelling) but this is what you expect with a 5 year old on a Saturday morning the weekend before school starts up.
Okay as promised I’m taking a little time to go over a little of the lighting techniques that we find useful. One of the toughest areas of lighting that we encounter are mirrors and shiny alters. Like anyone that has shot any pictures around these, you know that you are very likely to get a BRIGHT ball of light reflected back at you from a shiny surface, it could be polished wood, brass, a mirror or even a sweaty forehead. Well the forehead you can wipe off, and even apply a little make up to make it NOT SHINE. But what do you do for a mirrored surface?
A couple things come to mind, short of not using a flash there are still things you can do. If you think of the light striking your subject and the reflective surface, your on camera flash is a really small spot of light, and being small, it tends to reflect brightly off of surfaces. If the light was as big as your subject it would be a very even light, completely flooding the entire scene. One thing we do is try to make the light source bigger. This doesn’t mean getting a huge light, sometimes it is a simple as an umbrella in front of our flash. Other times we reflect the light off of something. Maybe we will use a reflector, but more commonly a ceiling or wall. If we prevent the flash from directly hitting the reflective surface it won’t be as bright of a reflection. Now simply aiming our flash a the ceiling works wonders, but will cause some issues in it’s self. The eye sockets are the most noticeable, they will be dark, so when aiming at the ceiling we use a little reflector mounted on our flash. On the Canon 580IIex there is a built in little card for this. This will not fix the whole issue and might cause a reflection from your subject.
This is going to take some experimentation on your part to get it working the way you expect it. Something we do, is not just bouncing off a ceiling. Think about direction the light is traveling. If you bounce off a wall to light the subject and there is a mirror behind them, your flash will not hit the reflective surface but will light up your subject. Also think about the wall behind you.
I know this is not a lot of help to our point and shoot fans as you can’t do a lot to control the direction of your flash. Although there are things you can try, you can put a piece of tissue over the flash part of the camera (thin) and experiment with that effect to defuse the light some and make it softer.
Also besides bouncing flash to move it, you can take your flash off camera to change the direction of lighting, but that is beyond what a short tip can do for you.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment