Dragging the shutter 

One of the most powerful tips I can teach people is a very simple technique called dragging the shutter. In essence a cool way to control the ambient/available light and the strobe. 
An easy way to remember this is to always use this little helper :

Aperture = strobe 

Shutterspeed = available light

This works wonders if a client is looking over your shoulder on location and lets you know he would love to see a bit more light coming through the windows or the sky a bit darker. You can wow them by just lowering or raising your shutterspeed and as Magic what he/she wants happens. 

There are some problems of course. For example with most strobes (besides small flash) there is the limit of x-sync what means you can use for example up to 1/124 – 1/200 as a max shutterspeed before you get some darker areas on the shot (the shutter curtain)

Outside you can fake this by making sure your model (hit by the strobe) stays out of that area. I explained this technique in our instructional video “mastering the modelshoot : on location” which you can download from this site under direct video downloads. 

But even with that limitation you can work some magic if you choose your starting point correctly. If you know you need to go darker start with the lowest possible shutterspeed. If you know you probably want to go lighter start with the highest possible shutterspeed. Your model will always be correctly lit by the strobe (unless of course the ambient starts overpowering the strobe). 

For the modern strobe systems this limitation of shutterspeed is lifted. With these systems from Elinchrom, Profoto, Phottix etc you can easily break the 1/1000 shutterspeed without too much light loss from the strobe (after 1/1000 light loss will get pretty obvious). And it even works with your older strobes (the slower the flash duration the better). 

Anyway let’s keep it to the tip I want to give and not dive into the more technical stuff. 

The shot on top was done during one of our workshops and actually shows Ingrid holding a lume cube. These little things emits a tremendous amount of light but I still needed to lower my shutterspeed because we shot this on a smaller aperture. (It was not planned this way, a students suggested using the LumbeCube and I loved the idea)

So the next time you want to perform some magic for your client remember that YOU are in control of your lighting and that not the lighting is in control of you. 

Have fun. 

Btw the background is fake 😉