Lessons

Lesson Info

Light Management

Alright, time to dive back into light. This time we're gonna start taking control of the situation. So in the pervious section we were talking about natural light and this is oftentimes when you don't have control of the light and you're shooting big subjects like cities and landscapes and so forth. And now when you want to take control of the light yourself, you're typically gonna be working with smaller subjects. Typically the size of a car or smaller, but usually it's about people photography and we have a lot of different things that we can do cause we have a lot of tools at our disposal. So let's talk about managing the light that we are working with. Alright so kind of going back, we had natural light, and then we have different types of lights that we can add ourselves. We have continuous lights, and these are lights that are on all the time. Sometimes referred to as hot lights. And then we have speedlites and strobes. Speedlites are usually designated as the ones that are mount...

ed on the top of our camera, and they're called speedlites because the flash fires very, very quickly in them. We'll talk a little bit about this towards the end of the section when we get to talk about some of the technical characteristics going on. And then there are these strobes which are types of lights that you would see at a studio that pop exactly when you are taking the photo. And so we're gonna be talking a little bit about all of these in this section. So, how can we diffuse the light? Well there's a number of tools out there, there are these gigantic scrims that light will come through. So it's about letting light through but dispersing the light so it's not as intense. You can diffuse artificial light with these soft boxes. And then you can bounce light with various reflectors and umbrellas. And so there's all different types of tools, whether a light's coming directly through it or we're bouncing the light off of it. And there are many steps, and we're gonna take baby steps and then we'll get more and more advanced in here. So it'll start easy and then a little bit more complicated. So first off, the easiest thing, is not using any sort of lighting system at all. No flash at all. So we have our subject illuminated by direct sunlight or otherwise. Now, if it is direct sunlight, we could add a diffuser and that diffuses the light, it makes it less direct and gonna soften the whole scene up. Basically puts it in the shadows so you have nice, even lighting. The other option is you could go with a reflector and fill in the shadows. Now which one works best? It depends on the type of subject, the size of the subject, and the tools that you have for controlling the light. If your camera has a built in flash, that is a little bit helpful. It's not the most powerful flash in the world, but there are some things that you can do with it and we'll talk about that as we go further into this section. The next step is to simply add a more powerful flash to the top of your camera and pretty much all cameras will have some sort of dedicated powerful flash that you can mount on it. The next step is to get that flash off the camera. And this is usually where you start getting into good quality lighting cause you often need to get the flash off and away from the camera. Now if the camera and flash are separated, you need to figure out a way to trigger the flash. And there's a number of different ways that you can trigger the flash. The traditional most basic way, is through a PC sync cord, but there are a number of other ways as well. The TTL cord will give you full communication so that the camera and lens can communicate about how much power that flash needs to have. Another system, well you could hook that up to a flash bracket which is another system that we'll talk about as well on here. Then we have wireless flash systems. A lot of the new cameras have a built in flash that will wirelessly communicate to the flash that you have somewhere else in the scene. And then we also have transmitters and receivers. Which will give a stronger signal so it can communicate over greater distances or through walls or umbrellas or other obstructions that might be in the way. So these are all the different steps that you can take to working with natural light, going into artificial lights. So what we're going to be doing in here is looking at these a little bit more closely. And I guess finally, you know, if you do have those transmitters, you're gonna be able to hook the lights up onto stands and they'll be able to be triggered anytime you shoot the photo. Once it's on a stand you can add an umbrella. And at that point you can maybe take off the regular speedlite, add on a real strobe light, which will give you more power and the more power you have, the larger the umbrella you can have, so that you can have a bigger light source. And hooking it up to a generator or a power pack allows you to put in even a bigger umbrella. And so this gets to be an arms race in escalation of equipment and tools when you start working in the studio. And just as a warning before we get into this class too far, this is not your full scale studio photography class. We are just kind of dipping our toes in to the world of controlling the light yourself. I'm really thinking about more of your average photographer who might have a few hundred bucks to spend on lighting equipment. If you want to outfit a full studio with 40 grand of gear and working all of it, I know Creative Life has a number of other classes that dive much further into running a full studio. And so this is gonna be more for people who are just getting into this and want to start taking certain small steps to improving their portrait photography and other photography where they're gonna use artificial light. Alright, let's go back to the beginning here. We got no flash. We're working with ambient light. We have the light coming in on our subject, it's really nice and this is what a lot of photographers work with because they don't need any extra gear. They just work with the light that they have, the problem is is that you are subject to what you are dealt with at that particular time of the day. And so you have to work around by the times of day that you shoot. And if you need to shoot something at a particular time, you're probably gonna need to start taking control of the situation. And there's a lot of good times where natural lighting works best. I don't want to use flash in a situation like this. What it is gonna do if I pop up the flash in my camera? It's probably gonna illuminate the column closest to me and that's it. With a really harsh light. So this would be a terrible time to use flash. Another time that it would be bad to use flash. This is just not the situation where I want to be disturbing people. I want to be very subdued, quiet, I don't want people looking at me in this situation. A flash is gonna be a little bit harsh and not the correct tool to be using in this environment. A lot of times you're not allowed to use flash in many situations. And so the first option is can you get away without using flash? Can you use a slow shutter speed or different technique? Where you are not going to need flash. And so I'm often looking for the natural solution to the problem. Sometimes that doesn't work so we have to start adding light to it. Alright, so when we have direct sunny light on our subject, front lit situation, when we have a lot of light, it's an easy shutter speed, it's an easy aperture to set because we have so much light. But when we have harsh light like this, we're gonna get some shadows under the eye sockets, under the nose, and under the chin, which makes the face a little less easy to see. And so if we are working out in bright sunlight, we have some options. We can turn a little bit to the side light. Now this is pretty harsh, we're blowing out the whole side of her face where the light is so bright, we can't see any detail in there. So this is still too harsh of light. Cause we have it right in between the bright and the dark. By going with back light, we can now see the face much more easily. The face is all evenly illuminated at this point. Now we do have some blown out highlights around the hair, that's much more acceptable than having blown out highlights on the specific face. And so if I wanted to capture just a simple portrait and I had nothing other than my ability to turn around, a back lit situation would probably be the best on a bright sunny day in a case like this. Alright how about on a cloudy day? So now we have more even lighting. So we don't have these harsh, really bright lights, a very good time for doing portrait photography because we can see the details, there's no blocked up shadows, there's no blown out highlights. Very good time for doing portraits, as I say. Alright so let's go back to the sunny day situation but let's add just the simplest device, a diffuser. And so this is gonna be a big white piece of fabric that allows some light through it. You could use a bed sheet. Alright? There's a lot of different things that you could use that's gonna diffuse the light. And so I'm having the diffuser up above the subject so I'm basically having the subject stand in the shadow. And this is very much just like standing in the shadow of a tree. And so it's diffusing that direct sunlight coming in. And you compare the difference with no diffuser versus using a diffuser, there's a huge difference there. Alright, let's go over and try side light again. Side light, coming from the side, but we're gonna be using a diffuser in this case. And so in this case we're having a diffuser off on the left hand side. You can tell just by the brightness of the skin along her forehead that we are having light coming from the left hand side. And so compare that with the shot without the diffuser. You can tell how much difference there is. Putting her in the shadows essentially in that situation. Alright, the other option is to use a reflector. So rather than blocking the light directly, the reflector is a little bit easier to use because on the diffuser you're gonna have to usually get it up above your subject and that's something that maybe two people are gonna have to hold or you're gonna have to have a couple of light stands. The reflectors are a little bit smaller. These are available through all good camera outlets. And they come in different sizes. And what size should you get depends on how big your subject is. If you want to shoot head to toe, you're gonna need a really big, maybe a six foot, size reflector. If you're just doing head shots, you can do maybe with a three foot reflector if you get it close enough to that subject. And so we're just gonna have a reflector off to the side of our subject. And this is a really simple system. You don't need batteries for these things. These things work all the time. The downside is, is that it's got to be held or mounted or put in place by some sort of stand, which can be a hassle to get this thing, cause it blows around in the wind, and so forth. And you do need a lot of light. You need direct sunlight coming in and hitting this thing. And so working with in different situations you get the side light coming in, you can bounce it in, and you can really fill in the shadows over here. And so in this particular case, if this was real world right here, there's like a person holding a reflector right here so that sunlight's coming in and filling in those shadows. You can still see the bright sunlight on the head, but if you look in her eyes, off to the side, you can actually see that white reflector right in her eyes. And without using that reflector, you can see how much those shadows go dark. And how much light we can fill in those shadows. Looks very, very natural. So if you do want that feeling of bright sunshine, the reflector is a great tool to have. You can work out in the bright sunshine and still have that atmosphere of being out in the sun, but just without those harsh shadows. In a back lit situation, this works out very well. You can look in her eyes again, and you can see there is a reflector right out in front. And so I was actually holding this reflector right out in front like this, just below her, about at her waist level. Bouncing the light back up. And I'm basically looking at the sun and I'm moving the reflector around to see where I get the right type of light on her face. And you'll see it, it's very, very clear, if you point it off wrong, you're not getting the light on there. But I will tell you, from the model's perspective, this can be kind of hard. Because there is this very bright light that is pointing in their eyes and so you have to be careful about how long you're leaving them in their situation. So you got to make sure that they are comfortable as well. Without that reflector, you can see how dark the face goes, we've lost that highlight in the eyes. Alright, we're not using flash yet. Out on a cloudy day. Cloudy day's gonna be more difficult to use a reflector because there is not as much light on that reflector to bounce back. But it still does help. You can see in her eyes too, I've got the reflector but I've got it really close, I think she might actually be holding it right by her stomach here because I need to get it just out of frame, because there's not as much light bouncing on it. But if you look at the light in her eyes, it's much easier to see with that reflector. And as I said, it needs to be really close to your subject in a cloudy situation. But it does improve it. Definitely, in my opinion. Alright, so if it's inside and it's dark, and you're regulated to slow shutter speeds, you're gonna get horrible photographs. Okay, because your shutter speed is not fast enough. And so what you can do is you can go in and you can change your camera to a higher ISO number. Now it depends on what camera you have, and how new it is, and how good the sensor is, but if you're using a really high ISO, you're gonna be getting a really grainy image that shows a lot of noise that is not going to look good and so adding artificial light is the way around this. And so now, we need to really get in and start adding our own light.