Field Lighting #3: Alison Church on location.
Some time ago, I wrote about photographing with big light sources, such as large soft boxes. One nice thing about soft boxes is that they provide a large, soft light source that’s not stark and brutally intense like a bare-bulb speedlight or strobe. Before recently (ah, within the past several years, since the popularity of the Strobist movement), you couldn’t find manufactured soft boxes small enough for most speedlights. However, they were commonly found for larger, more traditional lighting rigs. Even today, the really large softboxes are manufactured for studio-grade kits (even though, technically, there’s nothing stopping you from sticking a speedlight inside an 84″ octa, but that’s a discussion for another time). While the speedlights are nice, especially when in the field, there is still something nice about knowing you have enough power to over power the sun during the middle of the day with more than a few watt-seconds of power.
Each spring, I teach a photography lighting course at Texas Tech University, and while teaching in the studio is fundamental and necessary for a good deal of this course, that’s not what this lighting series is all about. At least two weeks out of the semester, we’ll drag the lights out of the studio, and commence throwing photons around outside, in an attempt to learn how to work with the ambient light, shoot in a variety of environments, and lug equipment around in the heat (essential for all field photographers)! Since the class is composed of 10 plus students each spring, we are never short of models. Alison Church (@SwinginSquirrel) put her camera down for this particular setting, allowing the rest of the class to work around her and the light.
As I was saying, more powerful lights allow you to override the ambient light, even at 1:00 p.m. on a clear day in April. As long as you are controlling the aperture, a soft box with enough light pushed through it creates a nice, focused (yet soft) source of light that will start to fall off quickly (tip: shoot at the maximum shutter speed the kit will allow you to knock out the ambient; if it’s still not enough, close your aperture down and control the light exposure from the power pack/lights). If it’s an extremely bright day, shutting the ambient light out may create more depth of field in your shot than you wanted, so be aware of your aperture.
Using one light is fairly popular today, and the only source for these shots is a 16″X24″ softbox, running through an 1100 watt-second pack, dialed down about half way. By reverse-engineering the shots, you can tell the top image has the light placed slightly to the left of the camera, and the center of the light source (the soft box) just barely above her head, creating that small shadow dropping down from her nose (a small butterfly lighting effect). The second shot is obviously more dramatic, with the same soft box to the extreme left of the model, slightly above her head again. This allows the shadow side to sink in to the darker levels of the histogram, and by stopping down the aperture and shutter speed, the fall off of light becomes more evident, and in this case, more leading and intriguing. The final shot is actually a movement made on my part, moving in front of Alison. Now, the shadow side doesn’t see so mysterious.
Keep in mind the environment. This corrugated tin background worked well for us, and if you can knock out the ambient all the way, you’ve just created yourself an outside studio…in the middle of the day!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Lynch, Jerod Foster and Jerod Foster, Alison Church. Alison Church said: RT @jerodfoster: @SwinginSquirrel models for this week's Field Lighting Post: http://bit.ly/c8dyzH [...]