grid Archives - Frank Doorhof

One simple light

February 22, 2014/in blog, Visions and technique/by Frank Doorhof

Often I get the compliment that I only work with one light and get some “pretty cool images”, of course it’s nice to get compliments but…. well it’s not 100% true.
Let me put it differently.
I strongly believe that if you can pull something off with only one light… why use more?

It has nothing to do with the fact that there is only one sun, I never really supported that case, well ok I agree there is only one sun for us earthlings but if we look at the light around us there is much more than one light source, look at reflections, the ambient light etc. etc. actually we life in a world filled with light.

No the real reason I often only use one light is the simple fact that it just does the trick, I love the more darker looking images sometimes and let’s be honest when you use one light with for example a grid you are already half way there. The other reason is also a bit “because it’s easy” you don’t have to drag around a lot of lights, setups are very fast and the results are always great without the chance of double shadows etc. However… and I really want to make this clear, I’m not a 1 light kind of guy, on the contrary I love using multiple light sources to really add mood to a location, pin point the model with one and add the rest with a second (or third), add some accents where I want them, add a splash of color and sometimes…. well I bought a lot of lights and Annewiek wants me to use them at least sometimes (Ok that was a joke…. or was it).

Now most people somehow struggle with the use of one light, so today a small sample about how you can learn to master your one light.
For this setup I used one striplight with a grid (shot during the workshops in Eersel for Studio76 with Nadine as my model).

Try something simple for once….. or twice

January 8, 2014/5 Comments/in blog, Visions and technique/by Frank Doorhof

A lot of people always complicate light setups, if we bought we 4 lights we better use 4 otherwise the “wife” will be angry “why did you buy 4 if you only use 1” right?
However sometimes simple can be so much more spectacular.
Today two images with an incredibly simple light setup.

I used one Elinchrom head with the standard reflector and a grid.
Now most books, videos, workshops (including my own) start with the tip to get the light OFF CAMERA, well yeah that’s true… however that doesn’t mean that sometimes it’s very cool to shoot in the same direction as the light. In this case the light is of course OFF CAMERA, for the very simple reason that you “can’t” mount a studio strobe on your hotshoe (although I’m sure somewhere on ebay you will find an adaptor), but for this setup it’s actually just a little bit above my camera, so I’m shooting almost with on camera flash (only it’s placed about 40-50cm above the camera).

As you can see there is nothing wrong with the effect, it’s actually pretty cool.
The background is also very simple, it’s just wallpaper, we have several movable walls in our studio that are covered with wallpaper, we need app 2 rolls per wall so it’s very cheap and easy to change wallpapers if I’m bored with them.

Grid for Maxilight from Laserlight grids/Honeygrids

July 25, 2011/10 Comments/in blog, Reviews/by Frank Doorhof

I love the maxilight from Elinchrom, I’ve already mentioned this a few times.
It’s a modifier that gives you a lot of extra light from a Quadra and any other strobe you put it on, but as an added bonus the light quality is also very nice. For a while I was looking for a good grid for the Maxilight and could not find one, so I decided to buy a standard Mola grid and use duck tape to fit it to the maxilight….. well it worked (and I loved the results) but let’s be honest, it’s not the way to work.