Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Posts tagged lighting
Lighting in Portrait Photography
Mar 29th
Portrait Photographer Wakefield
A photographer I follow on twitter recently tweeted about a sort of lighting mega resource in a post called 20 Resources that will get you lit. I have only glanced at it but there seems to be a load of great links to anything related to lighting, well worth a look. So with this in mind I thought I would post a shot from a recent portrait photography shoot I did in my studio in Wakefield. We usually use a clean white background to provide the modern high key type look which works really well but I like to try and mix things up from time to time.
Modelling with my coloured backgrounds
Feb 28th
I’ve recently got some coloured gels for my studio lights as I wanted to do something a little different than the white background studio photography shots. The background is just grey but if you put a gel in front of the background light you can turn it any colour you like and as the colour of the background can really alter the mood of a photo, they are very handy to have. The lighting was a little more sophisticated than my usual lifestyle portraits so we couldn’t do a lot of moving about but as I was just doing test shots it was no big deal. So with the help of a very photogenic friend I did a few test shots and was quite happy with how they came out. Although she isn’t a model, she is very comfortable in front of the camera, I knew this as I covered her wedding last year (she was the bride going over the stepping stones at Bolton Abbey). It’s always easy to work with people who are very natural when they are having the photo taken, be it in the studio or out and about. I might look at doing some time for print shots with models looking to build up their portfolios as it’s mutually beneficial, but that’s probably a bit down the road.
Model portrait photography with colourful backgrounds
Model portrait photography with colourful backgrounds
Lighting wise I used a beauty lighting setup where there was a large softbox overhead providing top down lighting and a large triflector in front and below bouncing back up to the models face, there was also two lights to the left and right behind the model providing a little hair and rim lighting, these were small speedlights. The forth light was my background light with the coloured gels, the tone of the background depended on the power of the background light, if I wanted a light, hi key tone I put it up quite high, if I wanted a darker more saturated tone I lowered it, this gave me a good range with each colour. The shots were taken with a 70-200 lens at f/11, ISO 100. Thanks for looking guys.
Mushroom Lighting Tutorial
Sep 15th
It’s been pretty overcast today so not the most exciting in terms of light so today I created my own, in a non divinical sort of way. I’m posting 2 shots, a sort of before and after the addition of some directional light. As it’s autumn the fungi are starting to come out and these make great photographic subjects. This one is a fly agaric, or a close relative, which is actually a toadstool. They are the traditional, Alice in wonderland, mind expanding type mushroom and well worth a shot if you find one.
The light however was less than ideal, luckily I had my 580II EX and an off camera cord, if you can get the light off camera, do it. These cords retain all the automatic ttl functions so you don’t have to worry about flash powers and such if it’s a bit in depth. I prefer to keep the flash on manual as it’s a bit more predictable.
70mm, ISO100, f/11, 1/20
The first shot was straight out the camera (on aperture priority) just to show how it would look if you just wanted flat, overcast light. It was taken at ISO100, f11, 1/20, 70mm. I wanted a smallish aperture to maximise the depth of field.
It’s okay for a macro shot but not the most interesting in terms of light, I could warm it up using the white balance during the RAW conversion but it wouldn’t change the direction of the light, this is where the off camera cord and flash come into their own.
The next shot I have attached the flash which has a diffuser and a CTO gel to give that warm, sunset type light, I also opened the aperture to f/8 and reduced the shutter to 1/80. So from the last shot the aperture has been opened by 1 stop (f/11 -> f8) and the shutter has closed by 2 stops (1/20 -> 1/40 -> 1/80) so we have reduced the ambient light by 1 stop, however it looks brighter as I’ve zapped it with an external flash gun. The flash output on the 580 was set at 1/4 power and the zoom to 24mm and it was about 2 feet to camera left.
65mm, ISO100, 1/80, f/7.1 (pretty much f/8)
The 2nd shot is a marked improvement and I actually packed up after getting it as I was quite happy with it but I thought what if I wanted to do a light tutorial for the blog, what else could I do? Well I looked at the LCD and thought the background could do with being a little darker to draw more attention to the toadstool (for anyone looking at the out of focus, under exposed grass on the right). Luckily this was a very easy adjustment to make. I could leave the flash how it was as I was happy with the levels on the Fly agaric, but to reduce the background light I just needed to speed up the shutter from 1/80 to 1/200 (about a stop and a half). How come the shroom didn’t get darker you ask? Easy the flash only cares about aperture as the pulse of light is the same if you have the shutter set to 1/200 or 1 second. The toadstool would have got darker if I had pulled the light back further from the subject or lighter if I’d have increased the ISO (this would also effect ambient) but I didn’t.
Final Shot ISO100, 68mm, f/7.1, 1/200
We are left with this last shot that looks (in my opinion at least) as it was taken during a nice sunrise or sunset as opposed to midday in the drizzling rain. Obviously if the conditions had been anything like I was trying to convey I would have said nuts to this fungus and swung the camera round to the mirror like lake I was next to that would have looked like something out of a fairytale, instead it looked like the river Styx! Thanks for reading guys.