If you were around for last summer's Lighting Boot Camp, you will find this a completely different experience. Boot Camp went for the instant gratification of a quickie series of assignments. L102 is designed to be a comprehensive course that starts from square one and is designed to build a broader and organic understanding of how to control light. There will be full assignments and small exercises. But where Boot Camp skipped straight to dessert, this time we'll eat our veggies first. We will start by exploring the different ways in which light can be controlled. Along the way we will be doing exercises to build a strong understanding of each of those variables. As we start to get some of the control factors under out belt, there will be assignments that make use of what we have learned so far. With each new subject, exercise and assignment, there will be discussion threads created on Flickr so you can easily ask and answer questions. Photo classes typically have class review sessions, where the students just stick their assignments up on the wall and learn from each other. This one will be no different, except for the class size and the far-flung nature of the students. And the more people participate, the more valuable the experience will be. And if you are reading this post sometime much later than June 4th, 2007, no worries. All of the above will be archived it in such a way as to make it easy to start whenever you want and work at your own pace. You may catch up to us, or you may not. Makes no difference. You'll still have access to the course material and the students' photos will be archived. Like most courses, you will get out of this exactly what you put into it. You are not required to do anything. There are no grades. There will be no tests. I will only make you one promise: If you study the lessons, do the exercises and complete the assignments, you will build a stronger understanding of how to control light. Some of you are already doing some fantastic lighting work. You guys may find the beginnings of this class a little boring and/or remedial. But I am not structuring this course to make a few Rock Stars that much better. This class is designed so anyone, at any experience level, will be able to learn to light better. Okay, let me back up on that just a bit. You'll want to already be comfy with exposure, as in f-stops and shutter speeds and such. Because we will be leaving your TTL flash comfort zone behind in search of more creative control. That said, let's get started. First Things First: Be Willing to Change Your Thinking The first goal is for you to be open to thinking about light in a different way. Depending on whether you are experienced at using flash or a rank beginner, this will mean one of two things. If you are an old hand at this stuff, be willing to learn to approach it from another different direction. No one is asking you to forget what you know, or to abandon your tried-and-true techniques. But looking at a well-known task from a different angle can serve to strengthen

your understanding of it. If you are a total newb, your job is a little more difficult: You'll need to put aside any fears you have of learning about a subject as nebulous and intimidating as lighting. We will be breaking this down into little chunks that are easily digestible. And you'll have many, many people who will be able to answer your questions. All I ask is that you go into this process with the confidence that you can absolutely learn this stuff. Because you can. Here's a little secret: There are only a few things you can do to control light. Once you learn those - and learn them well - you are off to the races. Conversely, I find it to be an amazing thing that so few controls can yield such an huge variety of visual styles for lighting. When I wrote Lighting 101, it was pretty much created on the fly. I was a newspaper shooter with a decent grasp of a few lighting principles and tricks, and I wanted to share them. Fast forward a year or so, and I am a completely changed photographer. That's the biggest advantage of being in the position of running a lighting blog: It tends to make you to think about light pretty much non-stop. And you also find yourself at a vortex of a continuous stream of ideas being flung at you by readers. Every day I get new threads and emails pointing me to neat photos, ideas and tecchniques. That rocks. And any long-time pro will tell you that ideas are the valuable commodity in this business. I can easily teach you lighting techniques. But what do you do with them after you learn them? That's the real trick. The goal is to get you to the point where your only limitation is your imagination. If you can visualize a look that can be created with light, you can almost certainly achieve it. But that assumes that you can visualize it to begin with. Once you learn the techniques, some of you will be limited by them - or to merely reproducing them and other techniques that are demonstrated by other photographers. But some among you will find that having the techniques under your belt will free you so that you are capable of doing just about anything you want to do with light. I do not spend a lot of time dissecting technique when I shoot. I don't think of light in terms of f-stops and shutter speeds any more. Lighting ratios are gone, too. Inverse square rule - never much fun to begin with - is history. Now, I think of light in the same way that I think about music: Genre. Style. Volume. Ensemble. Mood. Or sometimes I think of light in terms more like food: Flavor, spice. complexity, simplicity. Do I follow the recipe, or do I ditch it and improvise? Food, actually, is a very good analogy to light. Science tells us that we can only taste five things: Sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Don't believe me? Check out the Wikipedia pagefor more info. (And I didn't know what "umami" was, either.) Yet, even with only those five tastes, the possibilities are endless. And the concept of food and cooking still captivates millions - billions - of us. How many magazines, books, TV shows, etc., are devoted to food? How many restaurants are there? How many years are spent in

search of the perfect Bar-B-Que? The perfect red wine? Here's the analogy: Try as I might, I cannot come up with more than seven things you can do to light. Seven simple little controls. Each with its own effect. Each with associated advantages and disadvantages. Each infinitely variable. You learn those seven controls, and you have the Rosetta Stone. You speak the language. You get so comfortable with them as to be able to manipulate them effortlessly, and lighting becomes merely another method of creative expression. And that's the real goal. Each of the seven controls is very simple in both concept and execution. We will discuss each one at length, discuss them in Flickr threads and do exercises to drive the concepts home. We'll do assignments throughout the process that incorporate what we have learned so far. By the time we get through all seven controls, they'll seem like old friends. Do you drive a car? Or maybe ride a bike? Can you walk? If so, you are clearly capable of calculating and controlling a simultaneous stream of variables. Lighting is way easier than any of those activities when you think about it. So for today, your only assignment is to clear your mind of any fear you may have associated with learning to light. You can get this stuff. Only a jerk would assign homework on the first day of class. But if you do want to learn more (or review) I have moved all of the L101 posts and the On Assignments to drop-down menus on the sidebar. They will be good references throughout the course, and now you can get to any individual post in one click. As we get to concepts that also are covered in the book Light: Science & Magic, I will be referencing sections you may wish to review. So if you are stuck on a point, this should help you to get past it. And if that doesn't work, there's always those couple of thousand other photogs in the Flickr threads to ask. Today, we'll run through the various lighting controls to give you some context for later. If these are all old hat, you may be in for more than you think. While they may sound simple to some of the more seasoned readers, I am discovering new techniques all of the time simply by studying these controls on a one-by-one basis. And I expect to learn a lot just by going through this process myself. Each control has a range of possibilities, and offers both advantages and disadvantages that can be exploited or avoided for a given subject. Lighting Controls Overview 1. Varying the Position Changing the angle of your light position is what will allow your flash to define the three-dimensional shape of your subject. This is where on-camera flash fails us. It illuminates, but does not reveal shape. Getting your light off of the camera is the most basic control, so it is our first of the seven.

In addition to varying the angle of your light source, you can also dramatically change the effect of your light by varying the distance to the subject. In particular, altering the distance of the light to the subject as it relates to the distance from the light to the background. 2. Varying the Apparent Size of the Light Source Note that I said "apparent." In photography, size does not matter. Apparent size matters. How a subject sees your light source will determine many things. Size of light source can be altered by reflection off of a diffuse surface, or transmission through a translucent material. In addition to changing the apparent size of the light source, this will lower the intensity per square inch. This, in turn, will alter the way your light interacts with your subject. We also will spend some time in this section talking about how the various surface properties of your subject come into play with your light source, and how to exploit those variables. 3. Altering the Relative Intensity This is about balancing light - with the ambient, other strobes, lightning, glowing swamp gases, whatever. It is not about the light level. That is easily compensated for by your exposure settings. The magic is in the relative light levels, and where you place your exposure settings with respect to your various light intensities. This is a sticking point for a lot of people, so we are gonna hit it hard. 4. Restricting Light Even more important than where your light goes is where it does not go. We'll be using various light restricting tools and exploring their effects in a methodical way. Snoots, grids, gobos, cookies, (man-made and natural, oatmeal and chocolate chip) beam-width adjustment, feathering - it's all good. And we'll be hitting each one in turn. 5. Refraction and Reflection You do it without thinking about it every time you zoom your flash. That little fresnel lens in the front bends your light to suit your mood. Or at least your lens. But there are other ways to bend light, and we will be exploring them. Water, glass, mirrors, the extreme gravity around a black hole - whatever it takes. 6. Altering the Color We're talking gels, gels, gels and more gels. Sure, white light is clean and predictable, but you have a whole color spectrum to play with. We'll make sure we get the basic color correction stuff in. But we'll also be looking at altering light color to develop a theme in a photo. There are subtle things you can do, and not-so-subtle things. Most people are about as subtle as a ball-peen hammer when they start out with gels. But, just as the vinophiles will tell you, the real fun is in the slight variations.

Layering colors from a given family, complimentary color cross lighting, deliberate in-camera color balance shifting and more. If you do not have a Rosco or Lee sample pack, beg borrow or steal one. And if you have a good source for said sample packs, please sound off in the comments. Especially out-of-US sources. I never, ever turn down a sample pack. Ever. Go ahead. Offer me one and try me. 7. Time Flash is impossibly brief, but continuous light is variable with respect to time duration. This gives us another creative lever to exploit. Yes, light is light. But elapsed time adds a fourth dimension to a three-dimensional world, and offers results that simply cannot happen in a single instant. _________________________________________ So, there you go. Seven straightforward concepts that together yield a world of possibilities. We will explore them, dissect them, discuss them, occasionally curse them and finally get to know them on an instinctive level. That accomplished, the goal will be to control them without letting them distract us from more creative thoughts. When you tie your shoes, you do not consume mindshare by remembering that the little bunny has to go around both trees before it hops into its hole. (Can you tell I have kids?) You just tie your shoes while you are thinking about more important things. That's how you want to be when you position your lights, for example. I have noticed a lot of questions popping up in the comments and theL102 thread on Flickr. So before we dive into "position," I will answer as many questions as is practical in the next L102 post, to minimize confusion going forward. If you have a question, try to stick it in the L102 thread in the next few days. I'll go through and answer as many as I can, assuming they have not been answered by someone else. FYI, I am teaching for the rest of the week at the Defense Information School at Ft. Meade in Maryland. It is put on by the US Department of Defense and Nikon. I have three days with a hand-picked class of six military photographers to teach an intensive course on location lighting. With such a luxurious amount off time and such a small class, I am chomping at the bit to get started. That's right folks, join the Army and learn to light. ("Just sign on the dotted line, son, and those SB-800's are yours...") Lighting 102: Unit 1.1 - Position (Angle)

Summary: Lighting angle reveals form in a three-dimensional object. To see how light from a particular angle will affect your subject, view the subject from the position of the light. _______________________ We live in a world of off-axis light. The sun does not stay right behind us. Our lighting fixtures at home illuminate us from above and other various angles. And we are constantly exposed to imagery - both still and moving - that makes use of very sophisticated off-camera lighting techniques. Yet so many photographers, when they take the time to compose and illuminate their photos, settle for the bland, flat, on-axis (i.e., on-camera) light. Because that is the path of least resistance. The biggest failing of on-camera flash is that the light, which comes from a point very near to the camera's optical axis, does not have the ability to reveal the three-dimensional quality of the subject. Granted, most flashes can be tilted to bounce the light off of walls or ceilings while still attached to the camera. But those are very limited choices out of a wide variety of lighting angles available to the off-camera lighting designer. For the purposes of this discussion we'll think in terms of only hard, bare light from a typical electronic flash. (No worries, we'll be softening it up soon.) But the idea at this point is not to create flattering light for a subject, but to explore the way off-axis light reveals and defines an object. The first thing that you have to consider when visualizing (or pre-visualizing) the effects of off-axis light is to remember that there are two points of view in play. The first is that of your camera, which defines what you will be able to see in the photograph. But just as important is the second, which is the point of view of your primary light source. What your light can see will define what is lit in your photo. If your light cannot see it, it will not be directly lit. The ability to visualize the difference between these two points of view is the key to understanding how changing your light position will alter the way your subject appears. Look, You Already Know This Stuff. As we start this process, it is important to begin to merge the way you think about continuous light and the way you think about flash. I really cannot overstate the importance of learning to think of strobe the same way you think of continuous light. Why? Because you are already a seasoned pro at dealing with continuous light. You experience it and react to it all of the time. You see a shadow and instinctively know where the light came from. You know by the edges of the shadow whether the light was hard or

soft. If you can learn to think about flash as a very bright, continuous light source, you will be able to make use of all of your experience with light that you have been subconsciously building for your entire life. Thinking of a flash as a very bright continuous light source is not so easy for some people. But it will get you past the math-anxiety-type fears you may have about learning how to light. Heck, even a little mouse munching on lunch in a field knows it had better haul butt when it is suddenly darkened by a shadow. It very well could be an approaching hawk. And the mouse likely knows which way to run when the shadow appears if it has a situational awareness of the lighting environment it is in. Here is simple exercise that will improve your light visualization skills. Stand in front of a mirror, holding a (lit) table lamp in one hand. Move the light around so that it falls on your face from a series of angles and observe the results. Yeah, you might feel (and look) a little goofy doing this. Oh, and you might want to have a good response ready for when your significant other pops in and gives you one off those "What the...?" looks, too. But I can vouch for the fact that it works very efficiently to train your eye to light. Reverse Engineer Photos to Sharpen Your Perception of Light Let's see what we can tell about the light in this photo just from studying the shadow:

1. Well, right off of the bat we know that the light is coming from camera right, because the shadow goes to camera left. (Don't get cocky. The mouse could have figured that out.) 2. We know the light is hard because the shadow edge is hard. (We're not there yet, but you know that info all the same.) 3. We know the light is slightly higher than the subject because the shadow goes slightly down. 4. We know the light is fairly close to side light (i.e., close to the wall) because of the length of the shadow. (Note that there is a very dim secondary shadow at camera right. This is coming from the ambient light, which is not totally overpowered.) It's just a dumb, quick little exercise. But the more you make it a habit to look at photos with an eye toward analyzing the light, the easier it becomes to create any effect you are looking for with your own light. Here's a little home experiment to try without even making a photo. Position a household lamp so that it illuminates an object. Look at the object from the position of the lamp. See what the lamp sees. Now move away from the lamp and study the changes in your subject as the lamp reveals the object in relief while you move your point of reference further away from the axis of the light source.

Compare the lit portion of the object (as you move away from the lamp) with what you were able to see of the object from the position of the lamp. That's the first step to pre-visualizing light. Do this kind of exercise enough, and you'll be able to know exactly how a subject will look when lit from any direction before you ever position your light. Better yet, when you pre-visualize a photo you'll know at what angle to position your light to get the effect that you want. There are actually two variables to consider when deciding where to position a light. The first is at what angle to light your object. The second is at what distance to light your subject. Each variable offers a different form of control for a photographer to exploit. Let's Try it with Some Live Ammo For the first little shooting exercise, we'll be dealing only with angular position of the light. This experiment is going to be so simple that many of you will not even want to do it. But I really hope that you do.

Take a person or object (in my case, Combat Camera photog Jason Robertson, from the DINFOS workshop earlier this month) and shoot it/him/her with the light very near the camera axis. You can even stick the flash directly fired on camera for the first shot. You should have a wall behind the subject (with a few feet of separation between the two) as a reference for any shadows. As for exposure, try this method as a way to start to learn to light without a flash meter. Shoot in a normally lit, indoor room. Set your ASA on 200 and your camera at your normal max synch speed. For most of you, this will be somewhere between 1/125th and 1/500th. Set your aperture on f/5.6. Start with your flash on manual at, say, 1/16th power, about five feet away from your subject. (If you keep the flash-to-subject distance the same as you change the angle, your exposure will not change.) Now do a test shot. You subject will likely be a little too light or too dark. Adjust the aperture on your lens until the exposure looks right. If this seems clunky, understand that working this way will soon turn your brain into a built-in flash meter. With a little experience, your first tries will get closer and closer and exposure adjustments will be more and more minor. Back to the exercise. After adjusting for a good exposure for your on-camera light, move the flash around the subject and shoot it from a variety of lighting angles. For the example above, I just put up a straight-on and a 45-degree lit shot. But you'll want to play with it more than that. Experiment with some hard angles, in addition to the normal stuff. Look at the different ways in which your light reveals the subject. Again, keeping the distance constant will help keep your exposure constant, too.

Try a shot with the light at about 45 degrees to one side. Have your subject look directly into the camera. (Or have your inanimate object continue to be inanimate.) Now, keeping the subject looking in the same direction, walk over to your light and shoot the subject from the perspective of the light. Compare the two photos, noting what you see from the position of the light with what portion of the subject was lit in the straight-on photo when the light was hitting it at a 45-degree angle. This may seem like rote, boring stuff. But the goal is to learn to light in a more intuitive manner. And observing your subject from the position of your light source is a great first step in that direction. There is no need to stick these in the Strobist Flickr pool, but you are welcome to do so if you want. The important thing is to start actually doing this stuff and to learn to use the tagging process. Then we can easily tag, group and view the more challenging assignments later. Lighting 102: 1.2 - Position | Distance Summary: By the end of this discussion, you should completely understand the following two statements: 1. Light has depth of field. 2. With enough light, you can turn a white wall black. ________________________________ Leading Off: (1.1) Angle Exercise Discussion

Okay, the 1.1 section had what was admittedly a pretty rudimentary exercise. Which maybe explains why many of you didn't uh, actually do it. This stuff is the equivalent of "wax on, wax off" in the beginning of Karate Kid, and you really want to explore these things in an environment where you are not also trying to make a real photo at the same time. The point of this exercise is not so much to stretch yourself, but to just go and do it. Walk before you run. Start building an easy comfort zone and then stretch it. For those who want to check out the results, you can see the tagged and posted results here. And it is good to see that most of you are navigating the Flickr posting and tagging issues just fine. The thing that should strike you from this exercise is just how different a three-dimensional form can look when lit from different angles. I didn't mention it at the time, but some of you made the leap to considering angles above and below the object, too. The above composite is basically a matrix of horizontal and vertical light source changes. Click the pic for a big version. (Thanks for the extra effort, Chris!) Experience tells me that many more of you guys will be showing up for the "real assignments," but that is the dessert. You folks who are eating your veggies and doing the supposedly boring stuff are going to be much more intuitive when the more complex stuff

gets thrown at you. I'm just saying. _________________________________ Light Position: Distance

My experience in learning to light (actually, in learning just about anything) is that I do not learn in a linear, sequential way. I tend to learn in fits and starts. That is to say that I will plod my way through without making much progress, and then something clicks and I move to the next level. Take snow skiing, for instance. When you start out, your only means of controlling your speed is by forming a wedge with your skis. It's called "snow plowing," and it ain't pretty. You form a wedge with your skis and use the friction of the inner edges to control your speed. The first transition to real skiing is when you learn how to do ahockey stop, which is nothing more than lifting your skis up and planting them down perpendicular to the fall line with the uphill edges biting hard. It looks so cool. And you think you are pretty hot stuff the first time you pull one off, with that awesome little spray of snow. (The sounds of screeching brakes actually played in my head.) But what you do not realize at that moment is that the hockey stop is also the key to nearly everything that follows in intermediate skiing. It is all incremental from there. In other words, that little progression is the key to moving to the next level - and opens up many doors later on. That is how I have come to feel about learning to understand flash distance as a lighting control variable. So, pull out those slide rules, folks, 'cause this is where we introduce the concept of the Inverse Square Law No, no, no. Not gonna do that to you. Geez Louise, I have an engineering background. I worry about inverted yield curves in the bond market. I build cool stereo equipment from scratch for relaxation. I would eat math flakes for breakfast if I could. But the Inverse Square Law still makes my eyes glaze over. Not that it is necessarily so hard to understand. (Although it is for many.) But because it just sucks all of the life and soul out of lighting. Kinda like showing up at the hotel on your honeymoon night with one of those biological/plumbing textbooks from high school to make sure you can exactly figure out the precise plan for the evening's activities. Yeah, it may be accurate. But where's the creativity? Where's the experimentation? Where's the fun? You gotta lose the math. Here is what you need to know about the inverse square law: The

closer you are to the light source, the more powerful the light. Get real close and it gets really powerful. Get far away, and it gets weaker. And here's the other thing: The closer you get to the light source, the quicker the lighting values change as you move in. When you get farther away, small differences in distance (from the light) become meaningless. So, let's think about this in the context of a lighting scenario. Let's say that we have a subject about 6 feet from a light grey wall. Like, say, Jason, from last week:

In this case, the light was about five feet from him, and the wall was another ~6 feet behind Jason. As we moved the light around him for the first exercise, neither the light-to-Jason or light-to-wall distance changed much. So our wall is pretty consistently medium grey. Now take two more shots of Jason, from the same setup:

In the first, we moved the light way back. This, of course made it less powerful. But we adjusted the aperture (opened up) to compensate for that. So Jason is properly exposed. But look at the wall: It is lighter. Why? Because the flash-to-Jason distance is about 25 feet, and the flash-to-wall distance is about 31 feet. Relatively, those two distances are not very different. So the light does not fall off much between Jason and the wall. But for the second pic, we brought the flash in close. Like about one foot from Jason. But the wall is ~7 feet from the flash. Relatively, that's huge difference between the flash-to-Jason distance and the flash-to-wall distance. We close down the aperture to compensate for the brighter, closer light. So Jason is exposed correctly. But our light grey wall is now about 7 times further away from the light than is Jason. So it goes dark. Jason is very close, where the light is powerful. The wall is at an intermediate distance, where the light is less powerful. As I move the light close to Jason - without even gobo'ing the flash to block light from the wall, I could easily make that wall go the rest of the way to black. So, with my subject a few feet away from a light grey background, I can make the background black simply by moving my light in close to the subject. NOTE: If little bells aren't going off in your head as to some of the doors that this light-distance variable opens up, keep knocking it around. This is a major thing.

Extra bennies? More power, (Argh, argh, argh.) Apparent size of the light source gets bigger, too. But that comes later. So, moving in gives control and power. The light, in effect, has very shallow "depth of field," which is to say that the exposure that is correct for the close-in subject drops off very quickly behind him. Jason may be at f/11 or f/16. But just a few feet behind his head, you are already down to f/5.6 or f/4. You gain the ability to light one plane without contaminating the other one. Sort of like selective focus, but with light. Expressed differently: Shallow lighting depth of field. I could stick another flash on the background and light the two areas independently. That is control. But sometimes you want a lot of depth of field to your light. Group shots, for instance. You want the front row and the back row to be in the same neighborhood, exposure-wise. Even though they may be a few feet away from each other. So you give up power in favor of even lighting.

That is the secret to this side-lit (but still evenly lit) basketball gym in this shot. The speedlight (main light, camera left) is about 75 feet away in the top row of seats. It is firing at 1/2 power, and I got f/2.8 at ASA 800. But it is lighting a huge area. And pretty evenly, to boot. (More info on the shot is here.) So, here is the first of our actual lighting control sliders, for lack of a better term: • Light Placed Closer = more powerful, and control of the depth of the correct exposure. • Light Placed Further = less powerful, and a broader zone of even lighting exposure. In other words, lighting has depth of field if you know how to exploit it. And with enough light - and adjusting the exposure to compensate for the increased power - you can drop the exposure on a nearby white wall to black. _________________________ Trust Me, You Want to Actually Do This One

Who wants to guess this week's exercise? It is similar to last weeks, except you will keep the lighting angle the same and vary the distance. Try to find a place with a clean background and some space to work with. I am thinking living room. You'll be shooting a person or object in such a way as to use various lighting distances to control the relative tone of the background: 1. Find a nice lighting angle. Set the light a modest distance away - 5 or 6 feet. Shoot at max sync speed with your flash at say, at 1/8 power on manual. Adjust the aperture to get a good subject exposure with the light at the moderate distance. 2. Move the light back. Way back if you can. You may need to pump up the power to get a decent exposure. Maybe to 1/4 or 1/2 power. Adjust the aperture until the subject looks good, then note the background. It should be getting lighter. 3. Now move the light in tight. Real tight. As in one or two feet away. You'll probably have to dial your flash way down to compensate for the distance. Adjust your aperture for a good subject exposure. Note what happens to the background. It should get darker. What you should find is that you have a surprising amount of control of the depth of field of the light. And this is before restricting or feathering the light in any way. And we will get to that later. You should also start to be getting more intuitive about where you need to set you flash power to get a good working aperture from a given distance. Keep this up. You are growing a free flash meter in your brain. You would not believe how many shooters out there have a "standard" light-to-subject distance and just give up this wonderful means of control. Don't be one of them. Lighting 102 - Position | Review

This week we are wrapping up control number one, lighting position. Other than getting the exposure correct, this is the most basic control. But it is also the foundation for just about any light that you will design.

As you spend more time observing and creating various lighting angles, you'll find that this process will begin to get intuitive. You'll know exactly where to put your light(s) based on the look you have preconceived. And you'll be able to look at an existing photo and understand where the various light sources are coming from. Even if you can't see them.

A good understanding of light-to-subject distance as a control will allow you to more effectively light on multiple planes. This will be especially important when you are creating a photo with two or more sources, whether it is multiple strobes or a combination of strobe foreground and ambient background. In our next control, apparent light size, we'll learn how the light-to-subject distance will affect not only the quantity but the quality of the light. So being comfy with the distance/intensity thing will make the apparent light size control more intuitive. As an analogy, being comfy with algebra really helps when you get to calculus. Put differently, if you are not really comfy with algebra, you are a train wreck waiting to happen when you get to calculus. At Least Remember This The important takeaways for Control #1: • The difference between light position and camera position reveal the three-dimensional shape of the subject. • You can visualize what portion of your subject will be lit by viewing it from the flash's position. • Lights are extremely powerful when placed close to the subject. • Lights can illuminate broad subjects more evenly when placed far from the subject, at the expense of power. • Light-to-subject distance vs. light-to-background distance can be used as a lighting control. • Varying these ratios can alter a light's useful range. This can be thought of as lighting depth of field. • This, in turn, can allow a photographer complete control over a background's relative brightness. This is especially important when you are trying to light on two separate planes. Nice, quiet, easy week. There is no shooting exercise this time. But going forward, your exercise is a continuous one: Try to be more aware of lighting position in your daily life. Note the way that natural light sculpts the objects around you. Pay special attention to the light that you really like. You'll probably find that it is very different than the light that we tend to create when you get a flash and stick it onto a light stand. At first, we tend to think of lighting in terms of softened, and placed at a 45-degree angle to the subject. Nice and safe. But a little boring, if you ask me.

Environmentally speaking, I am more likely to react to hard light. Or back light. Or rim light. Or partially obscured light. Or light transmitted through a translucent background. Light that is more unexpected and edgy. So while the standard, go-to stuff can always be done, I am always looking for an opportunity to create the kind of light that wows me when I see it in real life. And to be honest, it probably makes sense to learn the standard stuff first anyway. It's a good foundation. And depending on what you are shooting, it can really pay the bills. But do not limit yourself to that. Heck, you're driving, right? Don't always go for the path of least (creative) resistance. Take the curvy, secondary roads. Or go off-road altogether. This section has been about light quantity and the foundation for light quality. Next week, we'll be hitting apparent light size. And there's a whole lot more going on there than meets the eye. Controls one and two comprise so many different possibilities that you could spend a career exploring these two alone. (Don't worry, We won't.) Lighting 102: Unit 2.1 - Apparent Light Size Summary: Light size is not what matters in determining softness. Apparent light size is what matters. _____________________________

Would you use a bare speedlight to illuminate a shiny, metal car? That's what I did in this photo. To be fair, it is a Hot Wheels car. I have a six-year-old boy, which means we have about 3 billion Hot Wheels cars in the house. You work with what you got. (Hey, we can't all have access to a classic car museum.) But a bare speedlight? Even with a piece of paper taped to it -- the same size as the fresnel head of the flash -- to knock down the intensity, isn't that a pretty hard light source? Depends on who you ask. I think of it is a hard source. You probably do, too. But the car sees it as a huge softbox when the flash is about an inch above the car's roof. And what the car sees is all that really matters.

Take a look at the setup photo for the shot. One small speedlight head lighting the car. Another on the wall (with a blue gel) to create the background. I made this photo to prove a point. A tiny light source can look big and soft. Conversely, a huge light source can look tiny and harsh. Take the noon sun on a cloudless day, for instance. It is a huge sphere of light -- far bigger than our own planet. But it is 93,000,000 miles away. So it looks tiny. And harsh. (But, from control number one, distance, we know that it has the ability to light large objects evenly...) Back to light softness. We tend to equate umbrellas with soft light and bare flashes with hard light. But that is not necessarily the case. It is all about how a light looks to the subject, not the light's actual size. Why is this?

To explain, let's make the subject you. Here is a 43" Westcott Doublefold umbrella, from about 10 feet away. Not bad. Looks like a reasonably pleasing light source.

Now, here is the same umbrella from about 5 feet away. Looks bigger, right? Softer. What makes a bigger looking light softer? To understand that you have to learn to think about your subject in terms of four different lighting zones. And we will be talking about three of them today. The first is what you normally think of as the lit area. This is the area of your subject that receives the light and scatters -- or diffuses -- the light back at the camera. The term for this area is the "diffused highlight." The unlit area has a very technical name that I hope all of you will be able to understand: We call it the... shadow area. But what about the boundary between the two? That is called the "diffused highlight-to-shadow transfer area." Big term, but it should make sense. That border zone, more than any other area, is what defines a subject as being lit by hard or soft light. Think of yourself as the subject again. The lit portion of you can "see" all of the light source. The shadow portion cannot see any of it. The border zone - the diffused highlight-to-shadow transfer area -- can see part of it. Like this:

That is why larger-looking sources make for broad, smooth transfer zones. They disappear more slowly as you wrap your way around the subject away from the light source. Hard sources are more of a "now-you-see-them, now-you-don't" kind of thing as you rotate away from them. Thus, very abrupt transfer zones. Now think for a second about the differences between a silver umbrella and a shoot-through umbrella. You might think that the silver would always be more efficient. Not so. Remembering our distance discussion, not only does our light get softer as we get closer, but

it gets far more powerful. The actual light source of a shoot-through umbrella can be placed very close to your subject, making a huge, soft, powerful light source. Not so with a reflector umbrella. Unless you want to skewer your subject's well-lit eyeball on that shaft. I used to shoot with mostly silver umbrellas, but I have come to think of the shoot-throughs as more versatile for the above reasons. Take a look at this shot (and the setup) of my daughter, for example. As you can see, I can bring that sucker right down close to her and make a beautiful light source. But umbrellas are not the only way to make a hard light softer. You can use walls and ceilings for that, too. Your flash most likely zooms its head to compensate for different lens focal lengths. But that can also be used to control the size of the light hitting a bounce wall or ceiling. Which will alter the softness of the light, all other things being equal. Here is a flash, about five feet from a wall and set on 85mm beam spread:

Here is the same setup with the flash on 24mm:

And just for good measure, the same flash with a diffuser, which approximates a bare-bulb flash:

(It is hard to tell because of the decreased intensity, but the whole wall is being lit by the flash.) You can see how easy it is to alter the softness of your light source by using either an umbrella or a bounce surface in this way.

By zooming a flash out to ultra-wide and bouncing it off of a wall, for instance, you can make a huge light source to get results like this wonderful portrait by reader San Ramon (oops) Jason Lee. Why just bounce your flash off of a wall or ceiling, when you can put a little thought into it and get exactly the size and shape of light source that you want? You can point a flash at a wall right behind you and get an almost softbox/ringlight look, for instance. ___________________________ Size and distance are relative. But remember that the size/intensity/fall-off thing is always in play, too. More complex, more control. As for the size/distance thing, I tend to think of a light source as reasonably soft if it's size is at least half of the measurement of the light-to-subject distance. That is to say that a 3-foot umbrella will be reasonably soft at up to, say, 6 feet from the subject. But that is just a rule of thumb. Your opinion may differ. ____________________________ We have two more exercises and then we will do a series of full-blown assignments working with the material we have covered so far. Learning just these two controls -- position and apparent size -- offers a wealth of possibilities. And we are gonna play some before going on to the other controls.

For this week, the exercise is a simple one. You'll be varying the apparent light source size and seeing the effects on your subject. Our subject will be a piece of fruit. Your choice, but just a single piece. Use just one light source to shoot it. You may wish to position the source in a way to also light the background to separate the shadow side of the fruit. But that's old hat to you now, right? Soften the light source however you like -- bounce off of a wall, use an umbrella, shoot it through a piece of wax paper -- whatever. But the important thing is to do a series of photos with the light source differing in apparent size. This will mean moving the light source in some cases. Or altering the flash beam spread and/or distance if you are reflecting off of a wall. (Be sure to adjust your aperture to compensate for any different distances.) For this exercise, try to keep the direction of the light source reasonably consistent. The idea is to see the differences caused by apparent size changes, not angular ones. We already did that in exercise 1.1. Please leave caption info on each photo that will help others to understand exactly what they are looking at. Especially changes made with respect to the light source. When looking at others' photos, study the highlight-to-shadow transfer areas carefully. They will tell the tale of the light source. Lighting 102: Unit 2.2 - Specular Highlight Control Summary: The fourth lighting zone on a given photographic subject is the specular highlight, or reflection of the light source. This can be manipulated in both size and intensity to allow total control over the tonal range of a portion of your subject. _______________________________

Last week we talked about the diffused highlight, the shadow and the diffused highlight to shadow transfer area. But there is a fourth area, which is usually brighter than the diffused highlight. The specular highlight is nothing more than the reflection of the light source in the object you are lighting. This reflection is an often overlooked control in lighting design. In it's most basic form, it is simple to grasp and to predict. Explored more fully, it allows you to completely manipulate the tonal structure of your subject. Take a look at the ball up above, lit with a single soft box. It's a frame grab from the excellent lighting DVD's compiled from the 1980's Finelight tapes by Dean Collins. What tones do you see? You see the true tonality of the ball, which is your mind's visual anchor for judging color and tonal density in the photo. This is noted by the blue circle, and is called the diffused highlight. You see a dark shadow, in the unlit area of the ball. And you see a soft, transitional area between highlight and shadow.

And you see the reflection of the soft box -- or the specular highlight -- inside the diffused highlight area of the ball. (This soft box has been broken into fourths, probably by the use of gaffer's tape strips, to better simulate a window light source. Neat trick.) Your brain processes all of these relative tonal densities to tell you much about the ball and its environment. You know the color, of course. You know the shape, as revealed by your off-camera light source. You know the approximate size of the light source by the nature of the highlight-to-shadow transition area. How would your brain discern the surface quality of the ball, without your touching it, just by looking at the photo? By processing the quality of the specular highlight. The specular highlight reveals not only the size and shape of the light source, but the surface quality of the object. What if the ball were lit by a point-source light, and not a soft box? How would it look different? Well, the specular would be much smaller. And much brighter. All of that lighting energy would be coming from a small source, so it would have a lot of intensity per square inch. It would be a point-source specular that would almost certainly blow out in term of the brightness. But the soft box specular is well-contained on the tonal scale because all of that lighting power is spread out over a larger area. As the size of the light source decreases, the intensity of the specular highlight increases. And vice versa.

Light sources can be manipulated to gain control of the specular highlight. I placed my glasses on a pillow and bounced a speedlight off of the ceiling for a light source. With the zoom head set on tele, you can see a decent-sized light source (the partially lit ceiling) reflected in the glasses. But the reflection is distracting in its size and too bright in its intensity.

Now look what happens when I zoom the flash head out to 17mm and light the whole ceiling area above the glasses. First, the specular fills the whole lens area, making for a far less distracting tone. But on further examination, you can see that the intensity of the specular has been lowered to the point where you can easily see through it. Now it reveals both the surface texture of the glass and detail underneath it. You can see a couple of really good examples of using specular highlights selectively in these watch photos. So, when is a glasses reflection not a bad thing? When the intensity of the light is spread out (from a very large light source) such that you can see right through the reflection. The

surface texture of the lenses are defined, but detail is still visible through them.

To prove the point I flew in a supermodel at great personal expense and photographed him wearing his (purely cosmetic) glasses in my living room. The illumination was from a speedlight fired into a nearby wall and zoomed to make a huge light source. See how you can see the surface quality of the glasses, and yet still lose yourself in those devastatingly handsome eyes? You get the point: Light, spread out over a large enough area, becomes less intense per square inch. So much so, that it can both illuminate and offer partial transparency in the reflections.

Here is a shot from one of the London seminars which featured a student against a darkish room divider. We used the light (in an umbrella) to illuminate Ray. But we get double duty out of it by lining the specular highlight off of the background in such a way as to separate Ray's shadow side (tonally) from the background. You can see another version of this technique here, where the specular is used to form a halo, of sorts. (From the Rhode Island seminars, scroll down the page.) This is one of my favorite one-light portrait techniques. Such an elegant result from such a simple setup. Executives in dark-paneled boardrooms or offices look like a million bucks with this soution. If you are still with me, let's go this one better. (And this was another one of those "Aha!" moments for me when I first learned it.) Let's try a little mental exercise. What if you could use the specular highlight of a large light source to introduce a new, artificial tonal area in a very dark-skinned subject? Here's a scenario: You have for a subject a Caribbean islander. And to say that his skin is dark is an understatement. The man looks like blued steel. He shows up in a white shirt just to piss you off. And you need to reproduce him in your paper (as in, printing on Charmin) and hold detail everywhere. What do you do? You light him with a soft source from the front is what you do. This creates a three-tone structure for his face.

First, is his true tonality, which your paper can probably not even reproduce if he is properly exposed. And you have to properly expose him to keep the white shirt from blowing out anyway. Second is the shadow area -- even darker -- which you can only define by separating it from a light background. But third is a tone that you can totally control by varying the angular position (and the distance) of your big light source. You are lighting him, but fat lot of good that does for you with a very dark diffused highlight. But you are also creating a nice, much lighter tone -- where you want it -- on his face by exploiting the specular highlight from your light source. This is what will reveal your detail and create a beautiful tonal structure which could even reproduce on a old photocopier. You are not shooting his skin. You are shooting the reflection of your light source on his skin. When shooting a dark object, form is revealed by specular highlights. When shooting a very light object, form is revealed by the shadows. And when shooting a highly reflective object, you are basically shooting a reflection of your light source. The stainless steel and cookies On Assignment was a good example of this. The double-diffusion technique described there allows you to define the light source and its edges separately. The Light Science and Magic book has a tremendous amount of info on specular highlights in chapters four, six and seven. There is so much you can do with this layer of control. Lighting 102: 2.2 - Specular Discussion You guys have really started to hit your stride with this exercise. I deliberately made it a little looser than the others, as the point was to explore the specular control technique. There's a great discussion going on in the Flickr thread, and some really cool photos have been submitted. Even right out of the blocks many of you are kicking butt, lighting highly reflective objects with much more control over your highlights. On a semi-reflective subject, specular highlight size and intensity are defined by the apparent size of the light source. To control specular highlights on a highly reflective object, you are not lighting the object. Rather you are lighting the area that the object is reflecting back at you. And the portion of your subject that does not reflect can be lit on an entirely different plane, yielding yet more lighting control. All of the position and apparent size rules apply to each plane. Which either will make your head explode make you realize that you have even more control than you have when lighting a subject on just one plane. Of course, if your subject is not adjacent to the background, you can have yet another plane of light to work with. Let's look at a couple of your shots as examples.

First off, this clock photo shows what James Rubio picked up from Ming Thein's watch photos, and his set-up shots. (Thanks again, Ming.) Again, you are shooting reflections of light sources. So whatever you design into those sources is going to define the tonality and shape of your specular highlights. James is using partially backlit typing paper as his light sources. Simple? Yep. Cheap? Uh-huh. But very effective for shooting small objects.

Here's the setup. You can see here that the key is the edges of the lit area on the pieces of paper. That smooth fall-off defines the edges of his clock highlights. For small scale stuff, you can get away with using typing paper way more often than you'd think. And the relative inefficiency of the paper (at transmitting light) is no problem, because we know that light is far more powerful when it is close.

This progression of a photo of a disc drive reveals a very clean approach, by Ron Nabity. He is lighting the subject on two planes. In the first photo, he's only using one light, through a small umbrella and lighting from the left. This lights the scene (including the background) and creates a baseline for the true tonality of the subject, absent the large specular highlights that will define its texture.

Needing a large clean light source, he aims a strobe at the ceiling and uses that as his reflection in the drive platter and other reflective areas. Note that the spindle in the center is already reflecting the left-hand light source, revealing more of the shape of the complex subject. Mind you, this is happening on completely different planes. So he has complete control over the relative levels of the specular highlight by adjusting the light level on the ceiling. This looks very nice, actually. Granted, he could have improved the photo by spray painting "Strobist.com," in reverse on his ceiling, of course. Or he could have reflected a product logo, for instance. They point is that you can play with that other lighting plane.

Which is exactly what he did here. Note that the addition of a color gel on the ceiling strobe does not alter the areas of the photo that are not reflecting the ceiling light source. Again, it is because you are lighting on two totally different planes. Specular highlights are a playground for photographers who know how to control them. (Ron talks about the process behind his photos here, in the discussion thread.) Lighting 102: Cooking Light Assignment | Discussion

We talked about this assignment in terms of shooting for a polished a simple look, as if for wall display, or a calendar. There is no question in my mind that we could pull several great calendars out of the pool of assignment photos. I had the impossible task of looking through all of the photos (whew, there were a lot) and picking out a selection to feature and discuss on the main site. This was not an easy thing to do, both in terms of quality and quantity. As a photo editor, this is exactly the kind of problem one wishes to have: Too many choices. But for one guy, it pretty much kills the day before you have the chance to write word one. Before I get to the photos, a couple of items: First, there were many, many great photos. I was floored by the breadth and depth of the submissions. You were clearly paying attention in the light control discussions. Many of the photos submitted could stand up to inclusion in just about anyone's portfolio. Second, such a constricted subject range, it was inevitable that there were many similar photos and even some near duplications. Don't be irked by that, if it affected you. We were working in a pretty tight sphere.

Third, some of my very favorite photos -- several of which which would have been included on this page -- were submitted in such a way that I could neither add a tag to them (to note it as a standout) nor grab a pic URL for the blog. If someone knows the exact reason behind this, please illuminate me in the comments so I can instruct people how to change their photos if they choose. On these particular photos, I was at least able to fave them. So, if you happen to see your Cooking Light shot in the first four or five pages my faves gallery, please add a tag saying "standout" to your photo. This is how I am ID'ing the ones that I thought went above and beyond. This way, it'll be included in the slideshow linked below. And, even though it is possible to do, please do not add the standout tag unless it appeared in my faves gallery. I want to make this set of photos searchable without having them drop off the top, as they will in my faves gallery. Much better to get there next time with your camera and lights than now, cheaply, with your keyboard. As for the photos below, please click on them to see a larger version and/or check to see who did it. There are some great photos here (heck, there were a hundred great photos in the batch) and your comments on the ones you liked best are much appreciated by the photogs. If you would like to ask lighting questions of the photographers, do so in the comments of the actual photos. And if they left little or no lighting info, please rag them mercilessly. Links to the whole slideshow and other sets follow after the photos. ____________________________ The Dirty Dozen

The quality of the specular highlight on this one is just gorgeous. There were many photos similar to this one in composition and I did not want to duplicate too much. But it is clear that many of you get the idea of softly (or partially) illuminating an off-camera object (fill card, ceiling, etc.) whose sole purpose is to be reflected in the shiny surface of your subject. The actual lighting of the scene is done (typically) with another source. Varying the relative intensity of the two sources gives you total control of the two zones. You should note that the source that reflects typically takes very little light to accomplish the job. Nice textural contrast, too, with the cut-up surface. Click on the pic to see setup shots in his stream, too.

This wine capper, one of a few similar versions, was a very nice example of lighting on two completely separate planes. The photographer was nice enough to include shots done with each light individually, which is great for learning purposes. (The setup shots were done with a red gel instead of a blue one, but you get the idea. Click through the photo for a link to the setup.

Lewis Hine gets reincarnated in this photo of a garlic press. Those broad light sources, not far off axis, are great for photographing matte, semi-reflective objects. This photo had an industrial quality to it that I just loved. The textural contrast in the background really works, too.

This is certainly the most sensual rendition of an ice cream scoop that I have ever seen. My favorite part? The warm vs. cool specular reflections. You'll have to click through to see the ingenious method the photog used to get them.

The contrasting textures and chiarascura-stylebackground arrangement on this one totally work. The effect is not so much done with light (normally that's the whole idea) but with a dark-to-light transition that is hidden by the subject. A simple idea, executed very well.

I love the repetition of textures in this photo. This is not an easy thing to accomplish, as the reflectance values of the spoon and the brown eggs are quite different. The photographer was kind enough to include a lighting setup shot if you are interested in learning more. There are lots of setup photos incuded with this assignment, actually. You'll find a link near the end of the post to a search for them. (Extra thanks to those of you who shot and tagged setup pix.)

This is art. I am even at a little bit of a loss to reverse engineer it, too. The notes say a snoot from above, but I do not know how that yields the creamy metal highlights up top.

The photog has several other versions which merit seeing in their stream, too. I am gonna have to stare at it a little more and figure it out.

As a group, the propensity to shoot knives bordered on fetish. Not that I can blame you, seeing some of the cutting instruments at your disposal. This shot (and the next two) really show off specular control in blade surfaces. Again, you are shooting a reflection. THis is the key to specular control in flat, metal surfaces.

This knife shot produced a great juxtaposition of tonal densities. Great highlight control, too. Double points for the setup shot (always appreciated) which you can see under the photo if you click on it. You will smack your forehead when you see how easy this was. If you know exactly what you are doing when you shoot it, of course.

Today, I learned a great idea for a macro backdrop: A laptop computer. Wonderful thinking, and always available. You could use your desktop, too, of course, if you sport a flat-screen monitor. The knife and plate pick up the tones of the backdrop in a lovely way, which the photog enhanced with a little blurring in post. I think you could get a similar result with aperture selection. Or focal-plane shifting, if you are so-equipped. But the takeaway here is the creative thinking on the any-way-you-want-it-to-look backdrop.

Last, and certainly not least, I cannot stop looking at this photo. Less is more, here. Way more. I love everything about it - the composition, the tones, the highlight control, the feel - everything. Triple aces. I was surprised by so many photos from the whole group, actually. You have set the bar pretty high right out of the blocks. I don't know what you are going to do to follow this up. Just a wonderful selection of kitchen photos, with far too many good pictures to do the whole group justice on one page. You can see all of the assignment-tagged photos (over 1,000) here. You can see the final entries here. Photos that people tagged as setup shots appear here. You can see the slideshow of some of the other ones I really likedhere. And be sure to check the first few pages of my faves gallery to see if you had something I could not access. Please add the 'standout' tag if it is in the gallery. And of course the discussion thread, with lots of interesting words and photos, is here. Which was your favorite? What did you love that I missed? (This is just one person's opinion, you know.) Are you guys impressed with yourselves as a group as much as I am with you? Lighting 102 - 3.1 Balancing Light: Twilight

For the available-light photographer, the idea of exposure is a fairly simple and static concept. There is a correct exposure for a given ambient light scene. Sure, you can tweak it, say, half a stop up or down. But go much beyond that, and you move beyond "artistic license" to "I screwed up." But what is the correct exposure when your photo can have as many different zones of varying light levels as you have flashes? The correct exposure is what you say it is. And you say it by establishing a zone of (traditionally) correct exposure on your main subject using the flash. If you are looking for a touchstone in this process, that's it. Establishing a correct exposure on your primary subject allows you to do whatever you want with the exposure levels in the rest of the frame. And you can go far beyond the "correct exposure" range of an ambient-only, evenly lit scene. And look like you knew what you were doing. In short, "screwed up" becomes "artistic license" when you have established an exposure reference point with your light on your main subject. (More after the jump.) To really understand the concept of balancing light, many of you will have to expand your concept of a so-called proper exposure. After all, you are creating a scene that has precisely the tonal range that you want it to. You can use this ability to compress the tonal range of a photo, or to expand it. It's up to you.

Take this scene photo which includes long-time Strobist reader Ryan Brenizer. Exposing for the model, the sky is washed out. Exposing for the sky, the model would be too dark. But with flash, you can expose correctly for both. By adjusting the shutter speed and aperture to get exactly the desired tone in the sky and then filling the model with flash sufficient to raise her exposure to the aperture you happen to be using, you get this:

In addition to turning the water into diamonds with his flash, Ryan has compressed the tonal range of this scene to where everything fits in the histogram rather nicely, thank you. So, is Ryan shooting at the correct exposure? Yes. Or no, depending on exactly how he wants the background to look. Ryan shot this photo at 1/250th at f/3.2 at ASA 160. He could easily open his shutter speed up to, say, 1/125 and lighten the background. Or, he could up the power on his flash by a stop, close his aperture down a stop (to f/5.0 - a partial stop between f/4.0 and f/5.6) and reset his shutter to 250th to darken the background. How does that work? Let's look more closely. The background is lit by ambient light. It is controlled by a combination of the aperture and the shutter speed. The model is exposed by the flash. (She would be significantly underexposed without the flash.) So as long as the model is receiving the correct amount of light from the flash, the background can be placed at whatever tone the photographer wants. What if Ryan cranked up the power on his flash 2 and 1/3 stops to where it lit the model to f/8? (He would then set his aperture to f/8 to correctly expose her.) But what about the shutter speed? The new shutter speed to get the same effect on the background would be 1/50th of a second. (We simply open up the shutter 2 1/3 stops to neutralize the fact that we closed down the aperture 2 1/3 stops.) Thus, the exposure on the background has not changed. We did this step to get away from our 1/250th of a second sync speed, and give us some "playing around" room with the shutter speed.

So now, imagine you are Ryan, wading in the water, shooting at 1/50th at f/8 and getting the same tones as we see above. Now, say you drop the shutter to 1/100th. What happens? Model lady does not change. She wants f/8 from the flash and that is what she is getting. But the background gets one stop darker. You have just increased the contrast range of the photo. Darker, moodier and looking completely different. And I'm thinking those water diamonds are really popping now. Drop the shutter down to 1/200th. Darker still -- but not black yet. Completely different feel to this photo than with the other two. Which is correct? They all are -- just different. "Correct" is determined by the exposure on the model -- and that is set by the flash (and choosing the corresponding aperture that makes her look well-exposed.) But the sky? That's up to you. Airy, normal, moody, black -- it's all good. And it is all available to you. What you have is two different photos -- each with its own exposure -- being compressed into one scene. There is a flash exposure, which happens instantaneously and is controlled with the aperture. Then you have an ambient exposure which happens over time and is controlled by a combination of the aperture and the shutter speed. _____________________ Now, You Do it Our first light balancing exercise will be very similar to Ryan's setup, except that you will probably stay dry and you probably won't have a beautiful model to work with. (If you want to stick a gorgeous model into the water to do this, knock yourself out.) Drag a partner out to an area where you have a fairly low horizon and a view of the western sky. Go out at about sunset and wait for the twilight sky to meter (continuous light level) at your sync speed (probably a 250th) at f/5.6 at a reasonable ASA (ASA 200 or 400.) Now shoot a photo of your model using the correctly exposed twilight sky as a backdrop. He/she will be too dark. Next, light your subject with a flash so that he/she is correctly exposed at f/5.6. You can do this with hard or soft light, on-camera or off-camera light -- I don't care. We are working on balancing light here. Shoot a few frames of your subject this way. Talk with them. Tell them how good they look. Show them the images on the back of the camera. You are doing this to (a) build rapport and (b) to keep them around for a few more minutes. Pretty soon the twilight background will drop to 1/125. Adjust your shutter and keep shooting. Next it'll go to 1/60th. Adjust your shutter and keep shooting.

But now, also shoot some frames at 1/125, to underexpose the background by a stop. And try a few at 1/250th to underexpose by two stops. You should see a very different feel in these photos, but they should all look okay, as does the underexposed sky in this photo, by Jonathan Shears. When the background drops to 1/30th instead of opening up the shutter to compensate, turn the power on your flash down by one stop. (If you were shooting at 1/4 power, move to 1/8.) Now, instead of opening up from 1/60th at f/5/6 to 1/30th at f/5.6, you're opening to 1/60 at f/4 and adjusting your flash to compensate. This buys you more shooting time before you get into the "Hail Mary" range of shutter speeds. The next time the sky drops another stop in exposure, power down your flash another stop and move to f/2.8. if this sounds difficult, it is not. Try it. As your light drops lower still, keep opening up your shutter. Play with different speeds to see the effect on the background. But remember to choose the correct aperture to expose your subject correctly with the flash. You will soon have too little light to focus. But before that happens, you'll have a lot of cool photos, with a range of background looks. If you want to post some, tag them: Strobist Lighting102 Balance Twilight You can see the tagged photos here. If you would like to talk about it, I have set up a thread here. There's lots more coming on the light balancing front, so no need to get fancy yet. Next week, we'll be looking at how to do this kind of thing in full daylight. Lighting 102: 3.2 - Balance | Flash/Sun Crosslighting

UPDATE: Some of you guys are already all over this one. There's a good discussion thread forming already, so there should beplenty of help for the newbs. Please ask technique questions in the Flickr threads rather than the comments. Last week we talked about creating great light with just one flash and a sunset. (Results here.) But what about those photos which can't be scheduled for the evening? This week I want to get into the idea of balancing and crosslighting sunlight, and take a look at a Strobist reader who is using this one technique as a calling card. (More after the jump.)

Before we learn how to tame the harsh sunlight, let's take a look at what TTL, on-camera fill flash does so we can have a basic understanding of the concept to better understand how we can expand it. I have nothing against TTL, mind you. There are situations for which it is clearly the best solution. But I cringe at the thought of all of that technology being brought to bear on what turns out to be a boring photo because the light was coming from on-axis. You have seen the photo before, in the back of your camera or flash manual. It's usually a very nonthreateningly beautiful female Japanese model, posing by a railing with a background of, say a nice lake or harbor scene and perhaps a sailboat or two. The before-and-after photos show the ugly, raccoon-eyes look of the model in harsh sunlight and the improved-but-still-sterile TTL-Matrix-Balanced-Computer-Assisted-Patented-Photographer-Brain-Softening fill light. Raccoon eyes are the problem, and the pat solution is to pop just enough light in there to fill them. The camera calculates the basic, ambient exposure and pops in a little fill at, say, 1.7 stops down. It fills the harsh shadows and leaves that little "fill flash twinkle" in the eyes. But geez Louise, with harsh sun and one flash you can do so much better. I mean, even keeping the flash hard (no umbrella) you can get some very cool looks by going off camera. And you only have three decisions to make: 1. At what angle do you want your strobe light and sunlight to hit your subject? 2. How bright to you want to set your ambient? 3. How bright do you want to set your flash? Boy, that there's some real rocket science right? No, it's not. It a simple series of choices that can leave you with some super cool-looking mid-day photos. Let's run through the thought process and take a look at some of the results you can get. Taming the Sun

Here's the basic setup. (Like those new, high-impact, 3-D graphics? Yeah, baby...) Click the pic for a bigger view. It's good to start with the sun coming from behind your subject, out of the frame, on the back/right or back/left side. You'll be throwing hard sunlight against hard strobe light, so lighting-wise you do not care which is coming from where. But your subject would probably rather not look right into the sun. (The choice to go back right or back left is going to be made by which background you prefer, given the differing sun positions.) Immediately, you will want to go to your max synch speed, giving you the most open aperture possible and allowing your flash to do the most work with the least output. (This is

where having a 500th of a sec synch -- or higher -- at your disposal pays real dividends.) But 1/250th will work fine, too. Below that, it starts getting tougher. We'll be playing with the ambient in a bit, but for right now let's just grab a decent background exposure and go with it. Remember, you're at your synch speed, so you will do this with the aperture on manual. This is not some compromise, namby-pamby, mama's boy, try-to-keep-everything-in-range exposure, either. Expose for the sky and environment and let your subject's foreground exposure fall where it may. Make the environment look good. You'll be fixing the foreground in a minute. This is also the background/separation light for your subject. So do pay a little attention to how that light looks skimming off of your subject, too. You'll be surprised at how good that back/rim looks coming of of the sun side of your subject when you do not have to worry about the shadows in the foreground. Now, bring your flash in from the opposite side (a little high and at about a 45-degree angle to start) and set it on, say, 1/2 power, with no light mods attached. (You do not have enough power for an umbrella unless you are in very close or you are rocking some serious watt-seconds.) You can warm it with a gel a little if you want. Maybe a 1/4 CTO. I would start with my flash at about six feet away, on 1/2 power. Pop a frame and chimp. Too dark on the flash-lit side? Move your light in. Too light? Drop it to 1/4 power to get some faster recycle time for a better shooting rhythm. When you balance it right, it'll look like this:

Now, seriously, does this not look better thananything an on-camera fill flash could accomplish? This is by New Zealand shooter Brent Williamson, who uses this light all of the time and does not even appear to own a proper light stand. It's not an equipment thing. It's a brain thing. Of course, synch-wise, Nikon and Canon do the wireless thing very well at close range. And this is a situation where your synch connection is gonna be pretty much bullet proof. So definitely use this as a way to amp those family pix if you are so-equipped. You do not even need a stand, either -- just a bystander to hold the flash and point at your subjects.

Here's a setup shot of a different lighting angle situation, also by Brent, which shows the flash acting as more of a backlight. He is crosslighting almost on the 90's (flash a little behind) but the idea is the same. Looks so obvious when the light is in the photo, but click through on the photo and cover the flash/tripod with your hand and see

the lighting look without the setup context. Cool huh? Exposure-wise, your flash has to be pretty close to correct. But you have a half-stop range either way, so don't get too anal retentive about it. Also, after you nail the exposure, move the strobe around a little to find the best lighting angle/height to make your subject look the way you want. But the exposure on the ambient/background -- that's another story.

Take a look at this third shot by Brent, which is clearly underexposing the background a little. Totally different feel. To get this, you are going to underexpose the background by staying a the synch speed and closing down the aperture -- and cranking up and/or moving in the flash to compensate or the tighter aperture. It looks so 3-D because the sun and the flash are painting the subject from opposite sides, and you can play with the ambient exposure to let your subject pop as much as you want. The flash exposure still needs to be on target, but play a little with the ambient portion. It's the concept of straight crosslighting (instead of straight, on-camera fill) that gives you the look. As long as you shoot on the 3/4 (or 1/4) angles to the lights, you are gonna get a really nice, 3-D effect with this light. The ambient light level, which defines the feel of the photo, is up to you. Lighting 102: 3.3 - Balancing Flash/Ambient Indoors

UPDATE: [ Completed exercises |Discussion ] When last we met, we talked about moving from the idea of balancing a nice, even, back-curtain of sunset light to dealing with a highly directional light source (and learning to use it rather than just fill it.) This week, we are taking it indoors to apply the same principles to light that is less directional, less intense and more diffuse. The common thread you should be starting to see is that there are two simultaneous exposures going on every time you use flash. This is true whether you make use of the second exposure or not. In fact, even if you are shooting with a disposable point-and-shoot and nuking your drunken frat brother with the flash at about, say, twelve beers into the party, you still have two exposures happening every time you push the button. The difference between neanderthal and nuanced is learning how to finesse the ambient portion of your exposure. I mean, it's always there anyway, so why not use it? In fact, the more you understand it, the more you realize that it is at least as useful as another flash. And sometimes even more so. (More after the jump.) Typical indoor ambient light, for instance, might be about 1/60th at 4/f at ISO 400. So If I shoot you in that light, available only, you are going to be properly exposed. You'll still probably look pretty bad -- we nailed the quantity, but the quality of the light is likely ugly as

it comes from overhead fixtures. So, I decide to stick an umbrella'd flash up near you and light you that way. After all, I think we have established that you need all of the lighting help you can get, right? I put my camera at the max synch speed (1/250th) and put my flash on 1/4 power and light you up to f/8. As my umbrella is very close to you (yeesh - look at those wrinkles - I can fix that with soft light) we remember that the light is going to fall off very quickly and go pretty dark by the time it gets back to the wall, right? So now you look great (all things considered) but the wall on the other side of the room is way too dark. The problem is, the only thing that is lighting the wall is my flash. That's because my ambient exposure is set to 1/250th at f/8, which is underexposing the non-flash-lit portion of the room by four stops. So let's move from the hypothetical to the practical and do a little exercise in walking the ambient exposure up a little bit to see the effect of various shutter speed on the flash/ambient combo. Rather than use photos of you, dear reader, (we don't want to scare the small children, now do we) I'll use a camera as a stand-in. In this room (my living room) the daytime ambient exposure is about 1/4th of a sec at f/4 at ISO 200 with the lights out. I have the blinds open so the back part of the room is receiving some light. The camera, in the foreground on a coffee table, is receiving much less. The first thing I want to do is to establish that, at our starting exposure with no flash, the room would be black:

Here we are, at 1/250th at f/4 with no flash. This stunning exercise in minimalism is, in fact for sale. But only a true art lover would appreciate the beauty and meaning of a photograph like this, so please do not be offended if it appears overpriced. At a 250th at f/4, the ambient light in the room is 5 stops underexposed. Darn near black, I'd say.

Next we'll add a little flash, in the form of anSB-26 in a shoot-through umbrella. Please forgive the umbrella ribs reflection in the front filter. I was working fast today. Besides, I had already made my artistic statement for the day and I was too bushed to be creative again. But wait, what's that light on the back wall? Well, we already know that it isn't ambient, so it must be flash. Which is exactly what it is -- spill light from the umbrella.

So, let's open the shutter speed up two thirds of a stop to a 1/160th of a second. Hmm. The background doesn't get any brighter. Same thing for 1/100thand 1/60th. (Okay, maybe a tiny bit at 1/60th.) This is simply because we are working so far from the ambient exposure of the room. If the flash is much more powerful than a given, combined ambient setting, I call that "working above the ambient," as in, "I was shooting flash at f/4, working 4 stops above the ambient." That tells you that at f/4, my chosen shutter speed was four stops too high for the ambient exposure.

It's not until we get to 1/40th of a second that the ambient starts to creep in, albeit barely. This is the threshold of the shutter settings at f/4 (and ISO 200) that will allow the ambient to burn into the flash's shadow areas in the photo. So here is where you'd start paying close attention to the TFT screen and adjusting your shutter to get the best effect.

At a shutter speed of 1/25th of a second, things are starting to happen. Clearly the ambient is starting to make a more pronounced appearance here. Mind you, the camera is staying consistent because it is lit solely by the flash at this point. The background isn't really usable at this point, exposure-wise. But the light is coming up and I am confident that I can fine-tune it to whatever tone I want.

At a 15th of a second, the background is getting usable. From here on out (or up, actually) the tone of the background becomes a personal choice. There is no "wrong," as it is now a matter of how much separation I want between the subject and the background. Remember when we told you to throw the concept of "proper exposure" out of the window? This is what I am talking about: The the exposure reference point is set by how you choose to expose the light falling on the camera. The background can be anywhere in a wide range of tones, with the choice being yours.

At a tenth of a second, my off-white wall is a rich tone, influenced as much by the color of the green-filtered shady light coming through the north-facing window as it is by the ambient portion of the exposure. Doing an exercise like this (hint, hint) will show you just how much control you have over a situation once you start to understand the concept of balancing strobe and ambient.

At a 6th of a second, we are still below medium grey on the tonal level of the background. But now we are starting to get into a background range that, say, a newspaper might be able to reproduce. The ultimate medium in which the photo is going to be reproduced will be your guide as to the limits of your chosen ambient fill level. But again, the choice within that range is yours.

One quarter of a sec. This is my personal choice, as I like the "invisible" quality of the light and ambient combo for this picture. It's a subjective call, but for something like this the light can be made to disappear (not too obvious) and the photo just has a quality edge to it that does not look lit, but just looks nice.

At 0.4 secs (1/2.5) the room starts getting airy. Remember, the walls are well above medium grey, so the camera considers this an overexposure of the ambient. Again, that "proper exposure" thing is a very fudgeable concept. You might like this frame better. There really is no right or wrong here.

At 0.6 secs, the background looks airier still. I could go up more on he ambient, but the highlights in the center right portion of the background would start to blow out, which would be distracting (but still not "wrong," IMO.) There is more leeway here than in a Composition 101 paper in 9th grade. The first concept that you have to learn is that there is a base exposure that will render any scene as black. Indoors, this is frequently an easy exposure to achieve while still being at or below your synch speed. From there, merely opening up the shutter will allow progressively more ambient light into your photo until you get exactly the balance that you want. Here's something else to think about: Your tripod is another flash unit, but with near-infinite power. Say you are shooting in a huge, cavernous, dimly lit, windowless room. You could umbrella-light someone with a flash in the foreground, and just hold that shutter open until the room was raised exactly to the supporting exposure that you wished. Just lock your camera down on a tripod and leave the shutter open until the whole, "unlit" portion of the room burns in. I have done it (on a tripod) for 30 seconds at f/2.8. The person swayed just a tad during the exposure. But honestly, that made it look even better. And speaking of movement, one last

shot:

Given a quarter second of shutter with which to play, of course I am gonna try a little flash-blur. But that's not until Part 7, so let's save that for later. ____________________________________ We still haven't finished the balance unit. So this week's exercise is just that, rather than an assignment. I did these demo shots in ten minutes, literally, from light setup to final frame. It's really no big deal to try something like this in your living room. The important thing to remember (as it always is when "burning in" ambient against flash) is to have your flash-lit subject in a part of the scene that is receiving less ambient light than the ambient-lit part of the scene. In practice, this usually means shooting into a brighter background and lighting your subject with flash in the foreground. Remember, the whole distance thing still applies. So keep that flash in close, lest it contaminate your background.

FYI, here is a shot which shows the incredibly difficult and complex setup that was used to make this series of shots. (That's "Ginger" sniffing the umbrella, by the way. She's not the brightest bulb in a three-pack, but she's very sweet.) One final note on the umbrella: I "choked up" on the shaft a little but, which means that I did not make full use of the full umbrella as a light source. Reason is (other than that I did not need the full light source at this small distance for the light to be soft) is that I did not want any raw light to spill past the edges of my umbrella and further light the background. Lighting 102: 4.1 - Restricting Light

Soft light is... nice. Soft light is safe. It is flattering. It is, well, expected, for lack of a better word. And don't get me wrong -- nice, safe, flattering and expected are good things. They put bread

on the table every single day for pro shooters around the world. But the people who are doing edgy, risk-taking stuff -- fun stuff -- tend to not be the typical, umbrella-toting photographers. Hard light -- especially hard light that has been restricted in some way or another -- can really get you out of a rut if you are looking for a way to amp your photos. Remember, using light balancing techniques, you can still control the ratio of the lit-to-unlit sections of a photo. This is true whether you are transitioning from a strobe-lit area to an ambient-lit one, or from an area lit by one strobe to an area lit by another strobe. So, while apparent light size controls the abruptness of the transition to shadow, your various light balance levels will control how far you fall into the shadow. These two variables, used in tandem, give a wide range of control. But the beam of the light source itself -- usually a hard light source in this context -- can be controlled via various light restricting devices. More after the jump. _______________________ Gobos

A gobo is basically any type of a light shield. "Gobo" is a slang abbreviation for "go between." It can be either attached to the side of the light, or placed between the light and any place you do not want the light to reach. This can be to solve a flare problem with a light that is aimed back toward the camera, or to shield light from falling onto the background, or any number of things. Gobos are extremely useful items that do not take up much room in a lighting kit. You should always have a few around.

For example, here is a group shot at one of the London seminars, in which we had just placed a warmed-up separation light in the background, aimed directly the group. As you can see, the light is also spilling onto the ceiling pretty badly.

We can solve that problem by placing a gobo on top of the flash, blocking the light from heading straight up.

The light now does what we want it to do, but not what we don't want it to do. There is no reason you could not put a gobo on the bottom, too, for instance. In fact, you can have just about any beam pattern you want through the use of gobos, snoots, and/or grid spots. (You can see a full On Assignment write-up on this photo here.) Any good mechanic will tell you that it is important that your car be able to go, but it is more important that your car be able to stop. This is also how I feel about light. Put the light where you want it, and keep it from going where you don't. For instance, I could have a hard light that travels as a vertical strip by placing a gobo on each side of the flash. Snoots A snoot is essentially a four-sided gobo -- just a tunnel for your flash to restrict the light to a tight beam. The longer the snoot, the tighter the beam. Simple as that. But there are more controls to be had with a snoot. You'll get fast fall-off on the edge of your beam if the inside of your snoot is black. This is because there is very little light bouncing around the inside of the snoot, contaminating the edges of the beam. You'll get softer edges to the beam if the insides are light grey, or white. And softer yet edges if the inside is silver. You can see more on snoots and gobos in the original L101 post. I am a cardboard snoot and gobo kinda guy, but you can get ready-made(i.e., non cheapskate-looking) versions if you do not want your clients to catch a cereal box vibe from your gear. A good example of problem-solving (including the why and the how-to) with a snoot is in this biz portrait On Assignment post. You can also make snoots out of black foil to have teeny-tiny openings, as in this example. This gives exception light beam control, which is especially helpful with light painting. Even with close-up photography, the ability to direct strobe light right where you want it can give you the control to light on complete different planes, even if the two planes are literally inches away from each other. Grid Spots

Grid spots are essentially a patterned group of snoot built into one device. They offer much more beam control over the light. I have grids that will throw about an eight- by six-inch pattern at six feet. That's tight. The longer the grid is (and the smaller the individual channels) the tighter the beam. The best two ways to make grid spots are out ofblack straws or coroplast, (a plastic version of corrugated cardboard.) As an example of the level of light control with a grip spot, I bounced a light around the inside of a missing slice of cake in this photo. The light does not hit the white icing right next door. That's control. That's a grid spot. Cookies In addition to simple objects that are designed to block the light, you can shoot through complex objects to partially block the light, or to create a neat pattern of interest in your photos. Typically, these are colled "cookies," if they are 2-D and man-made, which is short for "cookaloris." It's an old movie lighting term.

They are usually a sheet of black cardboard, with a seemingly random pattern of holes. But my preference is to use found objects, such as potted plants, to create patterns as in the photo at left, which is explained in detail here. I cannot tell you how many times this technique has helped to elevate an otherwise boring photo. Time to Play So, those are my Four Horsemen of light restricting. But you'll never get feel for using them if you just read about them. So, for this session's exercise, we'll be making some light restrictors and test-driving them. This is easy, sit-around-and-digest-the-Thanksgiving-turkey stuff. Your exercise is to make some various light restrictors and shoot some consistent photos, swapping out and/or moving the light mods. For example, you might do something as simple as make a couple of gobo's and a few snoots of dfferent lengths and set a flash on a stand and shoot pic of the wall. By placing the different light mods on your flash, you should gain a good understanding of what it is that they do. You'll want to be putting together a grid spot, too. It's a tad more complicated to build than

the gobo and snoot, but it turns your flash's output into an amazing little beam of light. We are gonna play with that more later. Lighting 102: 4.2 -- Ultra-Hard Light / Film Noir

Results form last week's exercise, in which you were asked to experiment with restricted light. Also this week, an easy way to create a unique light source and a new assignment, all after the jump. _________________________

Looking at the photos that came in from last lesson's exercise, we start off with none other than a self-portrait by Eke, who is also the guy in Yesterday's On Assignment post. (Apparently, it's Eke Week here at Strobist.) This is a classic film noir look, shooting a strobe through a gobo to throw some patterned tones on the background wall of a hard-lit portrait. It is especially appropriate to this week's discussion, but we will get to that in a few minutes.

Swilton's chess shot is also a nice example of using restricted light to zone-light a small subject. Without the grid spot he would have had to deal with flash spill on the backdrop. This way, he could leave it black, as he chose to do, or light it with a second flash knowing that the first flash would not have contaminated it. This multi-plane lighting technique can give you total control over various sections of the photo, and is one thing for which grids are especially well-suited.

Next, we have a nekkid self portrait by Jonathan Roberts, after seeing which I will never look at one of those tiny racing saddles the same way again. He used three strobes, and explains the process in his caption. (Can't wait to see the comments on this one.) Jonathan, if you are confident enough to stick that photo up in the Strobist Flickr Pool, the least we can do is Full Monte you right up to the main blog. May I be the first to stick a folded dollar bill into your brake cable. _________________________ Seriously Hard Light Back to this week, Eke's photo got me to thinking about something I have yet to talk about in the 800+ posts on this site: Further restricting a bare speedlight to create an even harder light source. You may think of a bare speedlight as being a pretty hard source already. But that depends entirely on what you are trying to do with it. A typical speedlight is actually a focused light source (via the fresnel on front) that is about 1"x2" in size, give or take. This is, granted, a very hard light. But if you think about it, it is harder in one direction than the other, by a factor of 2x. In practical application, this does not matter very often. But it can come into play of you are trying to throw a hard shadow from something like, say, a set of Venetian blinds. Assuming you are shooting through a horizontal set of blinds and will be throwing a horizontal pattern of light onto a wall, you would get a sharper pattern if you oriented your flash horizontally than if you shot it rotated 90 degrees to create a vertical light source. Reason being, the horizontally-oriented light is harder in the direction that matters when hitting the blinds. If you experiment, you'll see that this does make a difference. For an even sharper shadow, then, you might choose to use an even smaller light source than the horizontal dimension of your speedlight. Here's how you do it.

As you can see, we have just slipped a little box head with a slit cut out over a flash. But what we have made is a light source that has the same width, and about half the height, of the bare speedlight. If you are trying to create an edge on some sort of shadow, paying attention to the orientation of your light and further restricting its size in the chosen dimension can make a big difference -- especially when you are working in close. Also, if you are trying to skim a light past a gobo in a very precise way, a restricted light size can give you the ability to better control what a light sees and what it doesn't.

Doesn't cost anything, money-wise. Just come cardboard and some tape. But this model, for instance, does cost you about one stop of light from the flash's output. That's because we are covering up about half the surface area of the flash head. You can make a light source very tiny this way, but it will cost you more output. If you are working in close -- where even a speedlight can look more light a soft light source -- you can create a darn-near point source light. If you are shooting past an object - blinds, ficus tree, whatever -- a tiny light source will give you control not possible with a bare flash. Lighting 102: 5.1 -- Refract and Reflect

Okay, show of hands: How many people have been trying to do this Lighting 102 stuff with just one flash? Don't feel so bad. Back in the day, lighting guru Dean Collins was only allowed to use one light source for his first year of studying his craft at school. And he did just fine, thank you. Whether you have one light or twelve, the trick is making them look like more is knowing how to stretch them into doing double-, triple- and even quadruple-duty for you. Or you can just take that one light and give it some texture -- a little more interestingness.

By reflecting and refracting light, you can pimp it up like a college student making a gourmet meal out of ramen noodles and a few Taco Bell fire sauce packets. Hit the jump for more. ________________________ For the most part, light from your flash starts out looking pretty yucky. We have learned how to move it around, soften it up andrestrict it, but you can also bend it, or shoot it right back at itself. In fact, before the light ever leaves your speedlight, it has already been refracted. The fresnel lens on the front of your strobe bends the rays to make them spread out wide or zoom in tight. But who's to say that you can't do a little more of that kind of stuff after the fact?

At left is a photo of photographer Ant Upton, who did this cool guest On Assignment of a soccer player in Paris a ways back. I shot him during a lighting seminar in London last year. Before we lit it, the backdrop for this photo was an speckled grey room divider. A gelled flash took care of the drab color. But the subtle pattern was created by shooting our background flash through a water pitcher to bend the light around in a funky way. This is the kind of thing that can turn a plain-jane background into something with a little texture to it. I do these lighting gigs in typical, boring hotel conference rooms, and I often have to scrounge for something to make the light a little more interesting. I have to go with what I have on hand, and frequently, that means a stack of water glasses or a pitcher. In this instance, the trick is to back the flash up a little from the pitcher to make the light point-source enough to create a good pattern as it shoots through. (This also means you are probably gonna get a lot of spill around the pitcher, so I tend to snoot or grid the light to keep the beam tight.) If you are looking for an even cooler thing to shoot light through, those (cheap) translucent, wavy-glass blocks at Home Depot look even nicer for a light bender. Use your imagination -- light modifiers are everywhere. ________________________

Or, you can easily make one light do the work of two. For this quickie headshot-in-a-corner of actor Bruce Vilanch (in drag for a role in the musical "Hairspray," I stuck a speedlight into an umbrella and used one wall of the corner setting for a backdrop and the other wall as a reflector. Bingo: One light becomes main and fill. (Full how-to on the quickie corner headhot setup here.) This is simple stuff, and you should always think of a neutral-colored wall as a second light source, waiting to help you fill those shadows. But refracting light can make it more interesting, and reflecting light can multiply it into something that looks far more complex than it is.

For instance, you can shoot light through something translucent and use the resulting modulated shadow as a compositional element. A good example is this shot of a pair of glasses, byEkistoflarex. All it takes is a little imagination. ________________________ But especially nifty, IMO, is what you can do with mirrors. And rather than throw an example up for this, I want you to take a moment to previsualize it. This way, you start to build a photo in your mind before you pull out the first (and sometimes only) light. You want to get to where you can see the light in your mind before you ever start to create it. You want a process you can depend on, not a string of lucky accidents. (Although we'll certainly take lucky accidents when we can get them.) Imagine a table-top product shot, lit with a single, bare light, say, from directly above. You'd obviously get that "suspect-getting-the-third-degree" kind of light. Which can be cool,

depending on the reflective quality of the surface the object it is sitting on. But say, for the sake of argument, that you happened to drop by Ikea or a home store and bought a pack of four mirror tiles for $5.99. Now, say you placed two mirrors front camera left and right of the subject, and the other two back camera left and right, too. If you angled them properly, you would turn that one, top-spotlight into a full, five-sided wrap-light setup for just $5.99. You seeing it? In fact, you can do a lot of seemingly complex table-top photography with just one real light source, if you bounce that thing around some. That mirror-wrap thing is just an example. You might decide to build your lighting scheme on one (real) rim light with reflector cards and mirrors stretching it into a near-endless set of apparent light sources. If you are into gelling your light, you could control the color of each of those mirrored light sources individually. You just have to remember that you'll get double the strength out of your gels, because the light gets gelled on the way in and on the way back out when reflecting from the mirror. (It's an easy fix. You just use half of what you need -- a 1/2 CTO becomes a full CTO, etc.) If $5.99 is beyond your disposable income limit this week, consider making some foil reflectors. Just a little cardboard covered with aluminum foil can do winders for a small product shot. Remember to crinkle the foil up, then spread it back out, for a nice, even reflector surface. Lighting 102: 6.1 - Gelling for Fluorescent

On their face, gels are a pretty simple concept. You stick a colored piece of plastic in front of your flash and it alters the color of the light accordingly. But so much is possible from just this simple trick. In this, the first of a four-part section on using gels, we'll be looking at their most common use -- converting the color of your flash's light to the color of the ambient light in which you are shooting. This is called color balancing. We first visited the idea of color balancing in Lighting 101 where the two most important gels were discussed. The "window green," (or "plus green") gel converts the light from a flash to nominally match that of a fluorescent light. A "CTO" gel similarly converts your flash's light to match the light from an incandescent (i.e., tungsten) bulb. But for today, we'll be talking about just the little green gel. It's certainly complicated enough to merit its own post, as you'll soon see. While the fluorescent conversion used to be a simple process, this is no longer the case. But for the sake of discussion, let's assume that it still is. At least for the moment. Traditional fluorescent light is green. About 30 color correction (CC) units of green, to be exact. By placing a 30cc window green gel on our flash, you make the flash's light match that of a traditional fluorescent environment. If our ambient is green, and your flash is green, you're okay. Because you can correct for all of this similarly green light by setting your camera on the fluorescent light balance, and all is white again. This is because the FL white balance setting just shifts everything over 33 units of magenta. This is what balances out the green. Take, for example, this shot I made a couple of weeks ago at Western Kentucky University,

while teaching the PJ students there.

(Sorry, Jeanie. You were my most recent example...) This is a fluorescent-lit studio. In this shot I lit Jeanie with an SB-800 in an umbrella and the flash was gelled with a window green gel. My shutter speed was opened up to let the background of the photo burn in to make a decent exposure. But in addition, the green gel, combined with the camera on fluorescent setting, brings the colors up pretty close to correct. None of that sickly-green cast that happens when you forget to gel your flash and the fluorescents just come in the ugly green way they really look. Pretty simple technique, right? But in practice, there are two little gremlins that usually come into play. First, rooms can often have a mix of fluorescent and daylight. Maybe even a little tungsten thrown in for good measure. In addition to that, fluorescent lights are now all over the map, color-wise. In reality, they can now actually be warmer than tungsten. Let's take these problems one-by one. First, on the multi light sources, sorry to say that you have to choose a source color and go with it. But this can be better than it sounds. My first trick, if there is a lot of daylight bouncing around in a fluorescent room, is to ask if I can turn off the overhead lights while I shoot. If the daylight is enough to cause light balancing issues, there is usually more than enough to work by with the fluorescents turned off. Then you do not balance at all -- just shoot in the daylight with normal flash. If that solution is not available, I will close the blinds or drapes to minimize the encroaching daylight. (This daylight comes through as magenta when you are set on fluorescent white balance.) One other thing you can do to help are to work on the opposite side of the room as the windows, to minimize the daylight contamination. If you have a mix of fluorescent, daylight and tungsten, do everything you can to lose the fluorescent light. Then shoot on daylight with no color correction gel on your flash. The daylight and tungsten will mix a lot prettier than any green/other combo will. (And if all else fails, hope it runs in black and white...) ____________ And as we said earlier, fluorescents are no longer just 30cc's of green. And for us photogs, that really sucks. There is no good solution here. The important thing is that you have to be able to counteract

your conversion gel with a white balance camera setting. That is to say that, even if your fluorescent light is not a perfect green, you pretty much have to live with the difference. Just green your flash and neutralize it (the flash) with the FL white balance setting. Sometimes the ambient will go a little weird. But it is better than not gelling at all. For those super warm fluorescents, the ones close to tungsten, I will usually just treat them as tungstens. I'll CTO the flash, and set the white balance on the camera to tungsten. Again, not perfect. But better than nothing. And the flash-lit part will look good. How can you tell where the fluorescents are, color-wise? The easiest was is to shoot an ambient-only shot and chimp your screen. If it looks more green, gel and balance for fluorescent. If it looks more orange, treat it as a tungsten. This is also a good approach for working in vapor-based light (sodium, mercury, etc.). Your flash-lit subject (usually the most important part of your frame) will be okay. The ambient burn-in part may be a little off. But that's the price we now have to pay for having 57 varieties of fluorescent bulb colors. And as for dealing with tungsten lights, we'll be hitting that in the next installment of Lighting 102. Lighting 102: 6.2 - Gelling for Tungsten

In the last L102 post, we talked about some of the problems we have to face when gelling to work under fluorescent light. Gelling for tungsten yields similar, but different problems. Fortunately, tungsten is easier -- and more forgiving. First of all, when we gel for tungsten, we use an "CTO" gel, which is orange and converts our daylight-balanced flash to tungsten (or incandescent). This means that our little flash has basically been turned into a normal light bulb, as far as light color is concerned. As you can imagine, this is gonna be pretty orange. But when you are shooting in a tungsten environment, you need to get your light consistent. And CTO'ing the flash makes the flash orange, so your flash and ambient now match. Setting the camera to the tungsten white balance setting (usually denoted by a little "light bulb" symbol) corrects for all of this and brings all of the lights back to daylight. Except when it doesn't. And there is the rub. Like fluorescents, tungstens are not always the "correct" color. In fact, a bulb's color can change radically - even moment to moment. How? By being dimmed. If you do not believe me, dim down a tungsten light in an otherwise darkened room. Watch as it gets redder and redder. They go almost pure red right before the dim to "off". TIP: If shooting in a dimmed tungsten room, try to get the lights cranked all the way up. You will get a higher ambient level -- easier for balancing. And you'll get truer tungsten colors -- easier for gelling to balance. Knowing this, you should now realize that you cannot perfectly balance for all tungsten lights with just a CTO gel. And even if you could balance for everything, you probably would not want to.

First of all, as with our fluorescents, when color converting we can only gel our flashes for something we can reliably correct with white balance settings. And custom white balance is not very useful, because you would have to match the flash's gel pack with the custom color to complete the process. If you do shoot regularly in, say, the same room with the same whacked-out color, it might be worth it to test a build a gel pack that matches the room light for your flash. Then you could cancel it all out with a custom white balance. But on a daily basis, this is impractical when shooting flash. Fortunately, flash and tungsten get along pretty well when not perfectly balanced. The main thing is to get your flash correctly CTO'd and balance that at the camera. Then let the ambient tungsten do what it is gonna do. It frequently will not be perfect, but it will be much better than if you had not gelled at all. And you can also vary the background color effect by how much ambient you choose to include, remembering that the ambient component is controlled with the shutter speed. Balancing down lower with ambient (more stops underexposed) intensifies the color. So bring it up a little so smooth it out. Long story short, the bad news is that with tungsten, you have a color problem you might not have previously considered. But the good news is that you do not need to be as exacting with tungsten light, so missing it a little is not a tragedy. CTO and Window Greens explained, we will jump into some fun stuff next -- color key shifting. Lighting 102: 7.0 - Time-Based Variables

Way back when, we talked about the idea that you could balanceyour flash and ambient light levels by leaving the shutter open long enough for the ambient light to burn in. But during that "burning in" time, there are also lots of things you can do to add layers of interest to your photos. And that is exactly what we will be covering in the last unit of Lighting 102... The beauty of altering your camera's settings, focus, focal length or position during a flash/ambient exposure is that you can merge two completely different sets of circumstances into one single frame. It's a little like in-camera Photoshop -- with a nice, creative randomness attached to it. Today, I want to go through a few of the ways in which you can manipulate your photo during burn-in and show some examples of the end results. Flash and Pan

For this shot of a soldier in the woods near Ft. Meade in Maryland I based my exposure on the ambient light level. The first value chosen was the

shutter speed, which was chosen to create the best pan effect. Having chosen the shutter, that also gave us the aperture for the proper exposure. Then, it is just a matter of adjusting the flash to the correct power to light Robert's face. So, why even use flash at all? First of all, because the flash adds a nice margin of error to a pan shot. Since the flash happens instantaneously, it will freeze your subject. This works best if the background is brighter than your subject. If you expose for the background, your subject will be dark -- and ready to be frozen by the flash without any ghosting. Second, it gives you control over the relative exposure level between the subject and background. I could have raised or lowered the background level, for instance, without changing the tonal values on Robert's face. (More on how this photo was made here.)

For this shot of an up-and-coming local hip hop artist, I spent a few frames grabbing a flash/pan look even though he was not moving during the exposure. It was an assignment that appeared to be doomed form the start, so I was grasping at straws. (Perversely, I kinda enjoy the challenge of situations like that. As long as they do not happen all of the time.)

The top frame is a static shot, and this is the panned version. The rapper (who performs as "Bossman") had just been signed by a record label and his ego was in overdrive. I am sure he thought he deserved to be surrounded, nonstop, by a dozen of those dancing hotties from MTV and BET. And as such, was far too cool to waste his time on a lead photo in the Features section in the local metro daily. So (once I pried him out of his living room) anything I wanted to try for variety had to be done without changing the setup. But even when pinched for time I am always looking to burn a few seconds trying something different just to see what it looks like. And even if this one did not work out very well (we went with the still version) the point is that a quick change of the shutter speed and moving the camera could give me a second look -- without wasting any more of His Majesty's precious time.

(You can read more about this blood-from-a-turnip shoot here.) Will it Go 'Round in Circles

Another way to add an abstract layer is to rotate the camera during a flash exposure. When I am shooting with just a point-and-shoot and built-in flash, this is sometimes the only way I have to amp a flash-lit photo. In this shot of Danny Ngan owning Chase Jarvis on Guitar Hero, rotating the camera during a flash exposure helped to make the background a little more abstract. ________ Whether you are panning, or panning or rotating, you want to begin the action before you press the shutter. This will give you a smooth effect, without the jerkiness that happens if you wait until you start the exposure to start the movement. As before, it also helps if you are working against a brighter background. Diffuse the Situation

Using time as a variable during a flash exposure does not necessarily mean moving the camera, either. You can shoot one portion straight and the other portion heavily diffused, for instance. Or filtered. Or both. In the "Winter Book Club" assignment show at left, I started the exposure by firing blue-gelled flash from the back while there were about eight layers of plastic wrap over my lens. Then I removed the diffusion and finished the exposure painting with the modeling light on a second SB-800 with a CTO gel attached. All of this has to be done in a darkened room, of course, or you will get (unwanted) burn-in from the ambient light. You can see more detailed look at how this photo was made here. By now, you should be starting to get other ideas on how you can use time to manipulate your images while they are still being formed. You might, for instance, choose to light someone against a sunset and the defocus the camera during the ambient portion of the exposure. If you need for the image to stay in register during the process, a tripod is obviously a big help.

Lighting 102: 7.1 - Flash Zoom and Stone Soup

Remembering back to our last post in Lighting 102, we talked about panning, rotating and selective diffusion as a means of altering your photo after the flash has popped but before the shutter has closed. The fourth time-based manipulation I frequently use is zooming through the exposure. And last month we pulled that technique out of our as.. bag of tricks during the "stone soup" shoot in NYC. Having thrown down the gauntlet for a local shooter to come up with a subject and venue, I was at first a little underwhelmed with the response. I mean, this was NYC, fer Pete's sake. There had to be something interesting going on. Then Tim Herzog popped up, with not one but four separate ideas. His strategy: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. What stuck was an invite up onto the roof of one of those amazing apartment buildings on the Upper West Side overlooking central park. Not a bad location, you know, if you have to slum it... Here's the view, looking northeast, right after sunset. It is a five-shot stitch shot on a D300 and assembled in CS3. (Thanks for the easy pano tip,Ben!)

If you are not the jealous type, click on the pic to see it bigger. Michael (who granted us access to his rooftop) just stood there enjoying the view with us, with the serenity of a man who has chosen a kickass place to live. Timothy, ever the gracious host, had also brought along puppeteerPatrick Zung as our subject. And Patrick is not one of those "sock puppet" makers, either. He builds these cool puppets used for stop-motion animation. The joints were made out if pool balls -- genius. It was cool and creepy, all at the same time. Like something out of the movie, "A.I.," if you ask me. The view was amazing. But logistically, I knew the photo was gonna be tough. The park pretty much went to black after the sun went down. And the Midtown buildings, along with the rooftop's layout forced us to shoot in a way that was tough to get the good lights in the frame unless we crammed up against the edge. Also, we had no way to light him from the far side. Unless you had a 300-foot light stand. Or Spiderman.

So, as our light started waning, I lit Patrick and friend with an umbrella'd SB-800, ( front camera right) secretly wishing I had invited Peter Parker along to assist. We really needed that light out on the far side for separation.

As our ambient started to drop further, I added a couple of accent lights to add some shape to our subjects.

As you can see, one came from back camera right and another from underneath the puppet. These gave a more 3-D look to our guys. Also, I gelled those flashes with a 1/2 CTO and a fluorescent green combo, which gets you a neat, sodium vapor feel without going all of the way there. Sort of the way sodium vapor looks to the eye, rather than to the camera. It is more logical. Straight white light would look weird and contrived in this environment. Shooting handheld with a 70-200/2.8, our ambient light was dropping fast. Patrick's black top was not going to separate without some light from the left, and things were getting darker by the minute. As my shutter speed inched toward the Hail Mary range (~1/4 sec) I started pulling the zoom as I shot. This gave me another look to the lights -- and a more abstract look to the photo. Suddenly the environment was not necessarily a New York rooftop. It was a weird, swooshy thing that really started to fit well with the creepy futuristic puppet vibe.

So we decided to let the black top go dark and just hint at the separation with the swooshed city lights. (I could vary the background light by opening up the shutter.) I really liked the effect that zooming gave the background. And the up-light on the puppet (and Patrick) added some nice form. FWIW, the form on the shirt comes from the back/right light. It is important that the ambient light level on Patrick was lower than that in the background. Otherwise he would ghost badly during the burn-in time. We had scads of sodium vapor up there, so we knocked it down some with a piece of black foam core that is always with me in my bag. We simply "A-clamped" it to the light fixture. I would have used Tim as a gobo, but he was already working as my voice-activated back-right light stand. There is still some ghosting on Patrick, but I think that little bit works okay within the abstract feel of the photo. Another thing on the zoom -- start the zooming (wide-to-tele in this case) before you hit the shutter. This makes for a smoother effect without the jerky looks you'll get otherwise. We finished it out at about the one-second at f/2.8 (ISO 400) light level. When it gets that

dark, it is time to call it a night. Plus, there was to be food involved at this point. In NYC, you are never more than a few minutes walk from some good food -- and Tim delivered there, too. Lighting 102 - 7.2: Time in a Bottle

Before we get to the assignment for this last unit in Lighting 102, I have one more technique for you to consider when using time as a variable for your flash photos. It's very useful, because it acts as a gear multiplier for those of you who may not have as many strobes as you'd like. Given that a flash can record it's subject in an instant -- even if the exposure is spread out over a long time -- there are several ways to stretch a flash into looking several light sources when shooting a static object.

You'll remember Jonathan Boeke's cool shot from Julyin which he ran around during a time exposure popping his green-gelled flash from behind several trees to create this photo. It's a great idea, and you can easily see how it can make one flash look like a whole bag full of lights. But you'll need a very dark environment and a long shutter to have time to make all of your locations for popping the flash. And if you screw up one pop, your whole photo is shot. Another way to approach this is to use your camera's multi-exposure setting, if it has one. Some do, some don't. If your camera is so equipped, this gives you great flexibility and time to spare when you are lining up your various light locations. If you do not have three PW's (one to manually trigger, one on the camera in relay mode and one on the flash) you'll want to wrangle a button-pushing friend to help. The camera, obviously, should be on a tripod. If you'll remember, we set up a tag cloud for others who wanted to try this technique. You can see their resulting photos here.

For my take on Jonathan's night woods shot, I chose the multiple exposure route because it allowed me to control the ambient light. There was still plenty of twilight when this photo was taken, but since I shot each multi-exposure pop at a 250th of a sec, I could totally control my ambient. I could even have chosen to lay down a, say, three-stop-underexposed ambient frame to

flesh out the rest of the photo if I wanted. But I liked it better on black. I tried the straight multiple exposure method about ten times (all pretty time consuming, too) and never got one I liked. So I decided to cheat. I use that term loosely, as there are no real "rules" for this kind of shot. As far as I am concerned, any tool you have is fair game. So I decided to do this multi-exposure on separate frames and combine them in Photoshop. I shot each frame separately, and added each new photo a layer at a time, and combined them using the lighten mode. This simply compares the two layers, pixel by pixel, and the lightest pixel in a given location wins. Which means it pretty much works like a multi-exposure -- except you can tweak each layer / flash pop before you add it to the final photo. You can shift the color, exposure, etc. It's a fantastic trick for shooting large scenes with one speedlight. I used my single loaner SB-900 for this one. (It turned back into a pumpkin last week and had to go back to Nikon.) Thanks much to Photoshop Honcho Ben Willmore for the heads-up on the lighten technique.

The best way I can explain the advantage of being able to build this exposure around the totally controlled ambient is to say that I shot the photo at left almost an hour after the multi-pop photo. I think that kind of control is pretty cool, when you consider you are getting it with just one speedlight. The soft look in this photo came from the fact that I used a plastic Holga lens (more on that here) on my D3. Kind of ironic, really - a $50 Holga lens on a D3. But I love the look, when combined with hard strobe. And that's exactly what I did here -- camera on tripod, ambient underexposed a stop or two and a 30-second exposure. Just tripped the shutter and walked up to the side of the tree (out of the frame, tho) and popped the flash manually. My choice of shutter for the multi-exposure shot above turned day into night, and the long shutter for this one turned night into day. Understanding flash / ambient control lets you do some cool stuff.