A 9 Minute Lighting Problem.

I tend to follow a set workflow when I’m location-lighting and it often saves me quite a bit of headache and guessing.  I was recently asked to rattle off a quick portrait of University of Lethbridge Curatorial staff member Jane Edmundson. This shot was snuck in-between three other shoots I had to complete in the same space, and this was a bit of a last-minute addition.  I had about 10 minutes to do it. Here’s how I worked through lighting it. Hopefully my decisions, openly-shared mistakes, and trouble-shooting can help.  All of these frames are straight out-of-camera.

First, the paintings behind Jane were lit very well by the ambient tungsten lights, so I figured (with the time-limit in mind) that I would match the ambient with my strobes.  First step- Check how much ambient there is.

I guessed quickly at the exposure in the room. Bumped my ISO to 400, went wide-open at 2.8, and dragged the shutter to an 80th. An acceptable amount of ambient light for sure, and I know I can get at least a few sharp frames at an 80th. Next step, power my flashes all the way down, and see what we have.

OK.  Lights on and we have a few problems. Jane is too hot by a couple stops, and the lights meant to expose Jane are leaking into the background, and making it flat. We also have dueling color temps, and I didn’t have any CTO with me to Gel my flashes. So In my mind I’m thinking let’s get LESS light on Jane, and see if we can make the ambient-shot work.

Killed the fill-light, and moved the Key back 10 feet. This is looking better, but it’s still too hot on Jane, and I can’t move the light back any farther. The color temp-difference is really bugging me now, and I’m trying to avoid a layer-mask in post.  So, now that we know ambient isn’t an option, I decided to abandon the ambient-light option and we’re going to light the entire thing.  First step- Reset my settings.  I move back to ISO 200, and up to F4.5 and a 250th.

I added a third light to light up the background.  I bounced a AB800 with regular reflector off the roof at 1/2 power from back camera right, turned off the key and fill, and fired a frame to check the brightness and got the above frame. Background is too hot now but that’s OK.  I know it’s going to look good.  Instead of turning my light down, I just stopped down to 6.3 to darken the background with the intention to adjust my key and fill to match. They’re off anyway from the ambient-matching experiment. At 6.3 here’s what we get for the background-

Perfect. Now we’ve got the background dialed and we’ve got a great aperture to work with in terms of sharpness and depth.  Next, guess the settings for my sources to light up Jane, and we’re close!

The ratio between key and fill/kicker is now correct, but they’re too hot. Two options here- Turn up the background light and stop down again, or adjust the key and fill down.  I chose to put the key and fill DOWN because I wanted to stay at 6.3 to keep a bit of depth between subject and background. On to the final frame- I stopped up another 1/3 of a stop, got my composition-on, and got a great smile out of Jane-

9 Minutes and we solved NUMEROUS problems reasoning slowly and methodically.