November 1st Means Fire Sales on Fog Machines

It's that time of year again -- Halloween is almost in the books and anyone who sells those cheapo novelty fog machines will be pretty much giving them away tomorrow morning.

They only start out at about $30, were in the low $20's by today and soon will be about ten bucks. The fog juice will be cheap, too.

They don't work too great (they tend to gum up eventually) but at $10, if they smoke up good for even one shoot it is pretty hard to lose on that deal.


How to Make This Photo

Pictured above is one of about 20 decorations at the home of our next-door neighbors, Mark and Prissy. (Our block really gets into Halloween. The kids come from far and wide to check out the creepiness and gorge themselves on candy.)

The only added light for this was one small flash—a Nikon SB-800—placed at her feet. The ambient light, a sodium vapor street light, was coming from behind. The haze from the cheap Halloween fogger helped to spread and refract the light in the area around the ghoul. (Which is what makes them awesome for standard portraiture, too. Here are two examples.)

I exposed for the fogged backlight (about 1/4 second) and the flash on the ground lit our calendar ghoul from the front. The streaks were caused by zooming during the exposure. You'll get better results if you (a) zoom from wide to tele, and (b) start zooming just before you press the shutter.

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On Assignment: Reluctant Poet

I spent the morning recently with poet Linda Joy Burke, doing photos which were to be used for publicity and marketing. We chose as our location Ellicott City, MD, a neat little historic town that was convenient for both of us.

Linda Joy is a free spirit and a very creative person. So I knew I would be able to play a little with the lighting. But, like many people, she loathes having her photo taken. And that always adds another wrinkle to the shoot.

Keep reading to see how we approached the issues, both lighting and psychological.


"I Hate Having My Picture Taken."

That was the first bit of instruction I got from Linda Joy. And if I had a dollar for every time I had heard that from a subject, I could probably retire. In fact, if someone came up to me and said, "I really love having my picture taken," my first thought might be that they were a tad off-center, if you know what I mean.

So, from square one I know that the lighting, setting and compositional considerations will all take a back seat to Linda Joy's primary concern. And my most important job is to make sure she can relax and to let her know that my primary goal is to make a nice photo of her.

Someone who does not like to be photographed tends to see the camera as a bit of an enemy, and that can easily transfer to the photographer. It's something you should be aware of, and you can work proactively to let the subject know that you are on the same side.

My approach is, as much as possible, to have gear pre-set when they arrive so you can just walk and talk them through the settings before they really have a chance to worry too much. At the same time, I want to pay close attention to whatever happens to be working well during the shoot and to make a point to reinforce those aspects in conversation.


Get There Early

Having chosen a location, my first job is to scout it for good angles. Our light is pretty diffuse here (open shade on a sunny day) so in this case it is about background and environment.


What backgrounds and graphic elements can I use to frame a portrait? That is what I am asking as I walk around and make notes.

There are lots of choices here, and I tend to make notes with the camera as seen at left. I like looking at the location in "picture notes" as they look much closer to how they will look in the final product.

I also will play with my ambient exposures at this point to see what the environment will look like if I walk the ambient down a bit.


In this case, here is the ambient exposed dead-on in the top frame and the dropped nearly two stops in the bottom photo. (If that is confusing, see this post.)

We have talked before in the On Assignment section about the fact that shade is your friend. And as you can see here, it is -- for more than one reason.

First, obviously, the exposure is easier to tame so we can bring the subject back up with flash. Figure three stops -- a big difference -- from the nearby full sun. It is dim enough so that you do not necessarily have to shoot at a 250th, too. Which gives you a little more control over the levers.

I keep a personal catalog of nearby settings and backdrops in my location notes folder, and each backdrop has a cardinal direction attached to it, too.

I live in the northern hemisphere, so the north side of a building will always be in shade. These are my prime backdrops -- they are good 24/7, in terms of controlling the sun.

In this case, my backdrop was on the west side of the building. So that meant a morning shoot. FWIW, this is why west-wall locations are lowest in my personal pecking order. Not a morning guy.

Second, I like the shade because it is cool. Literally, in the summer, but here I mean color temperature. And that coolness is enhanced even more when you drop the exposure a stop or two.


Working Together

When Linda Joy arrives, I am ready to shoot quickly if need be, or to keep going if things work well. For the first setup, I used an older White Lightning Ultra 600 in a Photoflex soft box. The WL's flash tube is UV balanced, and old. This makes it warm enough to forego the usual Rosco 1/4 CTO or Rosco "08" warming filter I normally use on my key light.


You can see the setup here. I have dropped the ambient by about a stop and a half. Where the flash lights, everything is warm. Where the ambient is the primary part of the exposure, things cool down. I always like that as a starting point for people. I'll break that rule on occasion, but usually only for effect.

I brought the WL because I did not know how big of an area I would want to light. In this open shade, I could have done the same thing with an SB-800 (or two, at max) in a shoot-through umbrella.

If you look up the stairs, you'll see a second flash (an SB-800) backlighting them. In my setup I went with this light, but in the end I chose to leave the stairs dark. They were very near the edge of the frame and provided an easy exit point for the view. (Hello -- lit stairs, heading out of my frame. Talk about an engraved invitation to leave the photo...)


So, I sat Linda Joy on the steps to the next building, after placing a soft case from a flex fill under her so her hand-made, vintage dress would not get dirty. Time to make photos.

I kept Linda Joy talking, finding out as much as possible about who she was and what she did, creatively, as we shot. This kept her thinking about things other than the photographer with the digital Uzi pointed at her.

I also used one of my favorite tricks -- coming out from behind the camera. Even though I normally do not shoot with a tripod unless I am bringing up a really dark ambient, I can usually frame a photo and then move my face out from behind the camera as I shoot. Your aim will shift a little bit, but if you zoom out a tad you can fix this easily in post.

The eye contact usually relaxes people a bit, and helps to create a stronger interpersonal exchange. Sounds silly, but it helps.


Before we moved onto the next setup, I walked around to camera left in the previous frame and did some tight headshots. I tried them with the soft box, but now I needed shallow depth of field. So I turned off the strobe and shot natural light at a wide aperture. I love her hair, and wanted to do something close that highlighted its texture. If only all of my subjects had layered frames like Linda Joy's hair.

The open sunlight to the camera right side of the frame made a nice light source and I could grab a series of head shots in just a couple minutes.

Don't ignore what the ambient is offering you just because you trucked in the flashes. Being able to light is an additive skill, not a death sentence to available light shooting.

Next, over to the tree, where I wanted to do another setup.

Remembering the exposure test seen above, I dropped my ambient about two stops and then set up an SB-800 in a Lumiquest SB-III as a key light.


Here is the setup. As you can see, I am almost exposing for full sun (at left) even though I am in deep shade for the shot.Then, I'll build back the light on the subject with flash.

My key (the LumiQuest SB-III) is a pretty hard light source at that distance. But that's okay because I am going to fill with ring to be able to see into the shadows while still keeping that background ambient muted and blue.

Against the blue, I gelled my SB-800 key light with a 1/4 CTO. One of my SB-800's has a 1/4 CTO pretty much permanently attached. I just use it as my key all the time, which saves me any gel swapping.

What can I say? I am lazy.

So, the ambient sets the exposure -- dropped for color and tonal contrast. To that I add in my key, until the tree looks right. (Linda Joy approximates the tree on a tonal basis, so that will be an easy adjustment if needed when she steps in.)

To that, I add some ring fill (hey, I been practicin'...) which will bring up her shadow side exactly as much as I want. Controlling the drop-off amount to shadow allows me to use a smaller key light source and get away with it. If the shadow does not drop off too far, it can be harder with no ill effects.


When I bring Linda Joy in, we are still deep in conversation. It's just that now, she is standing in front of the tree while we are yakking.

Sure, she knows she is getting her photo taken. But by now the edge has worn off a little. Also, I have showed her some of the results of the shoot up until now, and the thought has occurred to her that I just might not be out to make her look terrible. Imagine that.

About five minutes later we were done. And we still had our entire day ahead of us, as we would normally both have been just rolling out of bed about now.
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NEXT: On Assignment: WiMAX

UK Readers, Save the Date: London Lighting Seminars Coming December 6th and 7th

Just a quick note to the UK folks: I am in London in early December, so I have booked a classroom at ULU for two full-day lighting seminars. We'll be doing the regular format (see here for example). The current exchange rate means the price will be £129,00.

Registration opens Monday, Nov 3rd, at 8:00 p.m. (2000 hours) London time. Full info and links to register via PayPal will be posted at that time.

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OT, But Critical and Time Sensitive: Digital Railroad Implosion Info

Please pardon the OT post. It's a bit of an emergency for many shooters. Thanks.
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If your stuff is on Digital Railroad, which is shutting down in such an abrupt way as to hose its photographers, you have until midnight on Oct 31st (PST/GMT-8) to migrate your stuff to someplace safe. Even this short time frame was won of hard negotiation.

This is way off topic for this site, and I have thus far resisted the urge to go off-niche to cover this story. But I am sure that many readers are affected, and DRR simply is not giving its shooters time to migrate in an orderly way.

If you are were a client, act fast -- as in now.


For more info and in-depth coverage:

• Photo Business Forum, shows exactly how to migrate via FTP (Thanks much for that info, John)
• Vincent Laforet, expressing the anger felt by many shooters
• PhotoShelter, just off of a closure of their own, tries to pick up the DRR pieces with help (they negotiated the extension) info, offer
• PDN Online story , with ongoing coverage at PDNPulse

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Nick Turpin Ditches his SB-800s for a Cell Phone

(RSS and email subscribers may have to click on the post title to see the video.)

Remember Nick Turpin, who did those beautiful SB-800-lit street portraits of thriller writers for Arena Magazine?

Now, he has ditched even those and is shooting his current month-long campaign for Samsung using only a cell phone. No DSLRs, no flashes, no female assistants holding long poles. And he is not even in control of what he is shooting -- you are.

Your clicks on each new photo in the the evolving site decide where he is going next. It is live now, at The Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin. You can follow his cell-phone video diary from his trek via his YouTube Channel, too.

(Via What's the Jackanory)

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FYI: DIY PVC CSB

I finally got a chance to meet Peter Geller, of California Sunbounce, at PDN's Photo East shindig up in NYC last week. He had all of CSB's toys strewn out in a way that is very unfair to those of us looking to escape the show with our wallets intact.

Their system is totally comprehensive and can create just about any light-modifying setup you could possible imagine -- if you have the moolah. But if you are a dirt-broke college puke (or perhaps a former Lehman brothers executive) you may have more time than money at this particular point in your life.

If that is your situation, you might want to take a look at this DIY version of the CSB Micro Mini, which is proving to be popular enough to be in a backorder situation on the accompanying flash mounts.

(And check out "we-knew-him-when-he-wasn't-famous" Bert Stephani starring on the Micro Mini webpage, too...)

Back to the DIY. Thanks to reader John Gibney, if you have a little patience and know your way around a sewing machine you can try out a DIY version to see if all this bouncing stuff is right for you. He gives pretty detailed instructions on his blog -- even how to include a 5/8" stud for mounting a flash or sticking the bounce in an umbrella swivel.


(Thanks much, John!)

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On-Axis Fill: Ring Fill Against Restricted Light

Having begun to explore fill with a ring flash, I knew there would be other ways to push light from on or near the lens axis. But before I tried them out, I wanted to learn how a ring light fill would work in combination with a more restricted key light.

Hard key light leaves hard shadows. And if you are not taking into account the ambient light (maybe the ambient light quality sucks, for instance) on-axis fill can reach into shadows and open them up in a highly controllable way.

Keep reading for two quick set-ups, and a refresher on ratio control without a flashmeter.


Swamp Thing

This summer as I was looking for any excuse to experiment with ring-as-fill, my son Ben returned from a day at camp wearing the shoes you see pictured at the top of this post.


My wife: "Do NOT come inside with those shoes. Clean them off with the hose outside."

Me: "Don't clean 'em yet! I want to shoot them. (... on your mother's great-grandma's antique cutting board, I did not say out loud...)"


Hey, we don't use the board for cooking. It is mostly used as decor against the counter backsplash. And it covers up the mess and tangled wires around the phone pretty well, too.

We only have a few minutes before dinner, so this will have to be quick. No problem, as I already have my background (secretly) picked out. I love shooting details like this for the family album, and these shoes say a lot about a well-spent summer day for a seven year-old boy.

Having seen what the ring would do against an umbrella, I wanted to play with some hard light. My thinking was, this combo will let me dial in however much texture I wanted by filling against a hard shaft of light.

But before I could make the hard key, I needed my ring flash as fill. I cranked my lens down to a very small aperture to hold focus and dropped the shutter speed to 1/250th to kill the ambient. Then, I adjusted the power output on the (manual) ring flash until I got the proper exposure.

(I was using a Ray Flash adapter fitted onto a Nikon SB-800 speedlight for the ring light.)

Now, since I was already way down on the aperture, I dropped the ISO a couple of stops to take the ring flash from being properly exposed down to a nice fill. I looked at the histogram and rear display and it looked like a nice "baseline exposure" for what would become my shadows in a moment.

This is no different than dialing down your ambient before you add in your key light, except that it was all being done with flash.

Now, for the hard fill.

Using a set of ten-dollar barn doors designed for small flashes, I closed off the spill of the key light until just a small beam was getting through from hard camera left. I used a 1/2-strength CTO gel to warm up the key somewhat to accentuate the color of the mud.

Given that my shooting aperture is set, as is the number of stops I have already dialed down my fill, the only thing left to do is to adjust the key light until the direction and exposure looks best.

No meters -- just eyeballing the relationship between the tones on the rear screen and making sure my histogram is not out of whack.

Quick and easy, and I notch another quick experience in my goal to get more comfy with on-axis fill. Honestly, the hardest thing about the shoot was smuggling the cutting board out of the kitchen (and back in) without Susan noticing.

I really like the ring-against-raking-light look on the muddy shoes. The highlights are crisp, but you can see right into the shadows -- exactly as much as I want, thanks to the lighting ratio on the fill. The ring also gives that characteristic wraparound shadow -- which looks kinda cool against the highlights, too.


Ring Against Grid

A few days before Ben's shoes, I had done a little more experimenting with ring fill and hard light, and I found myself growing more and more comfortable both with the technique itself and the key-to-fill ratios.

This portrait of Em, done in the last days of single digits before her tenth birthday, was the first time I had worked with ring and grid light. But I already had a good idea what to expect, thanks to experimenting earlier with on-axis fill and umbrella key in Dubai.

There are two ratios to consider here, and if you are into reverse engineering should be able to spot them by looking closely at the photo.

The first is the ratio of the ring (which will end up being the fill) over the ambient. You can see how far the ambient drops off by looking at the depth of the ring flash shadow (around Em) compared to the surrounding bricks in the areas of the photo not lit by the gridded key light.

The second ratio is that of the gridded key light over the ring fill light. This you can see in the shadows on Em's neck and under her nose. (These shadows are left by the key light, but are lit by the ring fill.)

Which means that in this setting, we have two control levers to adjust the contrast range of the photo. The ring flash was about a stop and a half over the ambient and the gridded key (coming from upper camera right) was another stop and a half over the ring light.

(If this shorthand exposure information doesn't make sense, take a look at this post.)

I have to say, I immediately loved the look of the ring fill against the gridded key. It was crisp and open all at the same time, and every portion of the photo was tonally legible in a controllable way.


Baseline Exposure Cheat Sheet

I was starting to get familiar with the Ray Flash, and was finding that it knocked off a little more than the one stop (vs. direct flash) advertised by the manufacturer. To be fair, after testing I found it to knock off about 1.2 stops -- if you used the 24mm throw as a bare-flash comparison.

Real-world (50mm throw) I would call it close to two stops. But that is still plenty powerful to use as a beautiful fill light at portrait distances outside.

Having experimented in a darkened room, I tested it to see how much light it would throw in a given ISO and power setting. To help me learn get faster at future setups, I stuck my standard cheat sheet on the Ray Flash:


The numbers:

1/2 power -- ISO 400 -- 10 Feet -- f/8


From there, I could quickly interpolate differences in any future setups to get a starting point for my power setting in manual.

Comfortable with the tests, I was ready to try ring light as fill on an assignment -- confident that I probably would not screw it up completely.