I’ve come to appreciate how little light it actually takes to make some field/environmental portraits work. Take for example the setup above. I shot this for a magazine cover a little over a month ago, and it did not take much light from one Elinchrom Quadra head to punch in just enough light.

I love early morning shoots, even though I’m sure the talent and art directors don’t like them as much as I do. The assignment was for a fitness-themed issue of the magazine, and we found a great little park with a nice running path to do the shoot. Early in the morning in these locations can be hit and miss…that is with the amount of people on the track. We had to move out of the way several times, lest we be run over with drooling muts and their owners. I’m happy to say no drool befell the lighting equipment!

I digress. Anyways, one of the nice things about the Quadra is you can get the power down nearly as well as an off-camera flash. Almost. I was having this discussion with fellow Texas photographer, Jeff Lynch, just the other day, and if you need to get much lower power, you’re still always going to have to go with a smaller flash unit. That or throw on a ND filter, but I was already open enough on my depth of field and I felt good about my shutter for that. Just to be fair to the strobists out there, I would just as happily done this shoot with a Canon 580EX flash and Pocket Wizards if I had one of those nifty Lastolite EzyBoxes.

Morning light, before it pops over the horizon, is particularly subdued, and the ambient light it does create falls on your subject in an almost angelic way. I faced the model away from the rising sun, which although it wasn’t quite up yet, still provided that nice back light (not over-the-top back light, nice, soft, light that is easy to control with exposure). She’s lit using an Elinchrom Rotalux Octa, which helps focus the light more toward the subject than a shoot-through umbrella, decreasing the amount of spill on the ground around the model. This helps simply blend her in with her surroundings without looking too “extreme football light-o-mania!” This is a casual runner. No need to make her look like she’s about to run around the world fast enough to turn back time.

Back to what I was talking about earlier. When the conditions are right, lighting with low power is more effective than over-powering the light and knocking the ambient light down. Note I said when the conditions are right. This includes the time of day, the contextual environment, as well as the subject (refer to light-o-mania statement) and the mood you are trying to create. We write with light, but we don’t always have to write the same way. This shot actually could easily have been pulled off with no lights, not even a reflector. The dynamic range of the camera was broad enough to capture plenty of detail in the shadows, but that touch of light provided a little more color, contrast, and style. I didn’t want to sacrifice exposure for the model’s surroundings, so I knew getting out there early would give me this dynamic range to work with, and keeping the Quadra powered all the way down on channel B (the lowest of the low to be non-technical) and backed out a bit from the model knocks the artificial light down to where you know it’s there, it’s just not too intrusive. Just enough!