Tag Archive for: light

Many different looks from one setup

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Often I’m asked what kind of setups I use and what kind of modifiers.
What people often don’t realize is that with only one modifier you can chance a lot just by playing with the angles and controlling the contrast/lightfall off. In fact placing a light closer or further away also makes a huge impact on the image look, add to this the option to feather a light source (using the sides of the light) and you know that there is a lot possible with one modifier and light.

 

It gets even more interesting when you are combining two strobes and for example add a gel to one of them.
During the workshop this weekend I made a setup like this with our model Lennaa and decided it would be a cool thing to share on the blog.

 

I started out with one strobe with a red gel.

Lenaa Juli 25 20142025

To get a bit more “punch” in the image I added another strobe without gel under the same angle to mix the two.

Lenaa Juli 25 20142035 Read more

Light can be very simple

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As photographers we have to realize that light is our language, it’s the paint we work with to tell the story.
Now for most photographers light is something they can control as long as it’s something familiar and something that…. well has a label which states what it does.

 

Light however can be so many things, in my opinion (and I really mean this) there is no light source that can’t be used to create a nice image. So during a workshop I got some questions about different light sources and we did a part of the workshop with just one (well actually 3) light source, an old chandelier. The only thing we modified from this chandelier is that we use 100W light bulbs instead of the much lower in power bulbs you would normally use. This helps to keep the ISO a bit lower.
Oh and don’t worry if your camera shoots on ISO1600 or ISO2000, when you zoom in you indeed see some noise, but trust me… when you print or publish for the net you won’t see the noise anymore, or at least it won’t bother you.

 

Now the fun thing about shooting with these kind of light sources is that you really learn to control your light and see what light does, for example placing it closer to the model will give you totally different look than when you place it further away. Today I show you two sets we did with the chandelier. On the first one we had the lights really close to the model while on the last set my assistent actually swung the lights above the model (Manon). As you can see… the same light source but two totally different looks.

Manon Juli 5 2014 (82 of 153)_DxO

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Mixing strobes with tungsten

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There will be that moment where you have to mix two different light sources in a scene.
Now normally it’s common to gel the strobes to match the color temperature of the other light source, but sometimes it can be very interesting to keep the color temperature different.

 

In this shot (shot during a glamour workshop) I shot our model Lenaa on the chair and lit her with the 70cm deep octa and a custom grid from Honeycombgrids the tungsten lights on the back are in fact 100W bulbs. I made sure that the light sources didn’t really “overlap” but that the tungsten had free play on the background, this way the tungsten lights look really nice and warm and it gives a nice glow to the background. The suitcases gives the shot some extra dimension.

 

When shooting something like this, do make sure that you put the strobes on the LOWEST possible power setting, this way you can actually see the tungsten lights. If you meter everything on 1/125 you can still open up more to let in more of the tungsten bulbs (1/60 or even 1/30). Always remember that the aperture in these cases control the strobe and the shutter speed the tungsten lights.

Lenaa Juni 20 2014 38 1

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Aimed light

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One of the most difficult things to do is really aiming your light.
In a lot of workshops you will see big soft boxes aimed at the model from a moderate distance, this is of course very understandable for the simple reason that in fact you really can’t go wrong…. however the resulting image is often “a bit flat” and not that interesting lighting wise.

 

A next step is using smaller light sources like striplights or for example a beauty dish with grid.
For example in this shot I used a small striplight.

Roosmarijn Mei 22 2014 (73 of 155)-Edit

It can get way more interesting however when we start lighting our model from the back and creating a very dark front. Now normally one would let the model look upward to catch some light, but often that doesn’t really result in the image you want, a model looking towards the camera always has a little bit more….. connection, especially with glamour.

 

In the next shot I used a beauty dish from the back and lit the models face with a very small light source, in this case a snoot with grid.

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