Alien Bees
New Modifer
I set out to create something similar to the Profoto ProGlobe for my Alien Bees. Here’s what I came up with:
So, with that done, it was time for a camera-test. I asked a good friend, Jocelyn, to work with me on a conceptual advertising/editorial shoot that I could use for my portfolio. We figured out a dark concept and got the props together.
In this setup, the ProGlobe would be used as a general fill-source for the room up high, and I’d have it down about 3 stops from a regular exposure. Here’s what it looked like. (My hand is masking the key so it didn’t flare out)
Great. Lets Add Jocelyn.
COOL. You can see that the globe overhead is giving a surreal, wrapped backlight/toplight and lighting up the scene just enough for it to read as a bedroom scene. I also added a speedlight to accent the mirror and her hand. In this frame it’s too hot, but we fixed that. Next- Add the key. I had the idea to hide a light behind the mirror and it worked. I put a 10 degree grid on an AB head and aimed it at the mirror to bounce into her face and BOOM:
Here is the setup shot for the non-globe lights- You can see the boom for the globe overhead:
I had to drape a scarf over the back of the globe to mask it from spilling harshly on to the wall behind, but it worked!
After post-processing we got a frame that I’m SUPER STOKED on. BOOM!
More to come!
White Seamless for Versatility.
A good friend of mine, and former ULSU President, Adam Vossepoel is all finished up his degree and hired me to shoot some updated photos for him for Resume, Profile, and Social Media Use. We decided to shoot on white seamless to maximize the type of shots we should get from one shoot. White seamless is EXTREMELY versatile if you know how to use it right. Zack Arias has some really, really good tutorials on how to maximize and nail white seamless on his blog here. Make sure to check out parts 1, 3, 4, and 5, too. With versatility in mind, we started out formal (resume use) and moved to full goofy (social media). David Hobby shot some recent portraits for social media use that are a bit more fun, and I drew some inspiration from that for the last set.
Here’s the full shoot (around 90 minutes) in 52 seconds:
We actually got a LOT done in that time. We started with a simple Key-Fill-Hair-Background 4-light setup for the easy “regular white seamless” shot. I began like I usually do, by Building my exposure light by light-
Turned on the Key (Large Octa, Camera Left) and checked the shape and output:
Looks Good. Let’s add the fill light (in this case, a Large Softbox)
I was guessing at the ratio, and this is too much fill, we still want some texture. I think I put it down 2/3 of a stop from 1/8th to just above 1/16th.
That’s better. We’ve gotten rid of that harsh shadow-line, but kept a good ratio for separation. Let’s add the kicker/hair light (A Speedlite Boomed, and CTOed back-camera-right)
Great! Just a little splash of extra color, and a nice highlight to add something “extra” to an otherwise pretty straightforward portrait. Lastly, we’ll light up the seamless with another AB800 to blow it out for the look we wanted from the start:
Looks good to me! We’re bleeding into grey a bit at the corners, but I’ll be pretty tight, and I know I’m 255-255-255 in the middle, so I can edit the edges out easily if I need. This is the constraint of only working with a single light to light up a seamless- Two are always preferable, Or, you can use a softbox with no diffusion like when I shot Nola Aitken. In this case, my softbox was tied-up as a fill-light. Here’s one of the final shots we got from the first set, straight out-of-camera:
Great. Got that one done, Lets show off the versatility of the seamless a bit. We wanted a different look for a couple of them, so we did a small wardrobe-modification, and I threw a 10-degree grid in the light that was lighting the whole seamless. Got this:
Very Cool. We got quite a different look from a quick 30-second gear swap. Here’s what the setup for these looked Like:
Next we moved on to some less-conventional looks for non-resume purposes like social media. I wanted to go a “gear exposed” shot ala Chase Jarvis, but a bit darker (and not nearly as good 
), so I set up a couple lights behind Adam bare, and a diffused beauty dish overhead (which works well because it’s a bit more contrasty and moody as a source) and we got this:
COOL! It’s not a work of fine-art, but I really like the mood. Next up, we wanted to get some more “juicy” or “fun” shots going, so I set up a Speedlite on a chair to wash the Seamless blue, and set up the kickers/sidelights as I normally would, and got Adam to get a bit more animated and add in some props, as well as ditch the vest and purple shirt. Yet another look in the same place with the same backdrop! Here are a few highlights (again, straight out of camera):
Here’s what the setup was for the blue-lit-and-beauty-dish setup:
We were both really happy with the results, and we got a whole bunch of looks in one place, in a short amount of time. <3 White Seamless!
More to come!
-Rod
Light Control and Lighting for Shadows.
Had a REALLY technical shoot a couple weeks ago. Wanted to explain (mostly through pictures and short explanations) how I did it! Hold on tight this one is going to be fun!
Our subject is U of L History Prof Janay Nugent who was awesome in front of the camera and had great patience for the time it took to dial things in!
Dr. Nugent works with some pretty cool old scripture so the plan was to put some of it up on the projector and shoot her through some students as if she was teaching. Sounds simple enough right?? Nope!
First thing is the projector. Not a lot of light, so lets see where we’re at, cause I know I’ll have to match that. (Protip- Double check in the projector menus that the bulb brightness is cranked – can be worth 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop sometimes!)
OK so I guessed at the exposure – This is 200/2.8/60th. Not bad, but I’d like to be dragging the shutter a little less because we’ll have Dr. Nugent gesturing and moving. I also blew the screen a BIT here, so I’m going to go down a third of a stop, and bump my shutter speed at the same time. 1 Stop up in ISO.
Looks Good. Thats 400/2.8/100th. Thats a good place to start. Next we have to light our subject. Biggest problem is going to be preventing spill here. The minute we spill any light on to the screen, the whole thing falls apart. There’s going to be a LOT of gridding going on! I was planning gridded octa camera left for the key, and a gridded, un-modified head for the fill. I set them both up farther to the side of the subject than I normally do. Janay was also a bit too short for the composition I wanted. Easy Fix:
You can see I also feathered the key even farther away from her and toward the camera a bit to make sure we didn’t hit the screen! So we got the key dialed. Lets make sure we get the ratio right for the fill. I always tend to shoot on-axis frames checking ratios-
Looks pretty good to me! It’ll be a bit flat, but we can’t afford to spill onto the screen. Lastly, we had to get a couple “students” in the shot. I didn’t want them to be the focus, but I wanted them to be noticeable. Whenever you want to light something to appear dark, the way to do it is not to underexpose in a normal lighting setup, but to light the opposite side of the subject you want to look dark. I placed a third light up at the front of the classroom, and Fired it back towards the “students.”
Works on the chair, should work on people! We have just enough of a rim to bring the shape of the subject, but enough dark that we don’t draw too much attention to them. Perfect.
Yup! Perfect! Here’s how we got there:
Rim for the "students" and Janay's Fill-Light.
Key. See how the fill shadow is BESIDE the screen? Perfect. No Spill!
And the whole setup:
Final Frame Looked Like This!
STOKED!
More to come
Lighting 550 People!
Sometimes, you have to shoot in low light, sometimes you have to shoot in the DARK, and that means lights. I was recently asked to photograph the farewell dinner for former University of Lethbridge President Dr. Bill Cade. The dinner was to take place in the late evening, at the 1st Choice Savings Centre for Health and Wellness – Our Gym. The only problem? No house lights. None. Just candles. There was a tiny bit of ambient creeping in the upper windows, but it would have been about f/0.9 at 5 seconds and ISO 800million. Lights it is.
How do you light a giant room of 500 people? Use as much light as you can, shoot wide open or close to it, and “season-to-taste” with your ISO. Shutter speed doesn’t really factor in because we’re shooting in the dark, and not worried about picking up any ambient. I was lucky enough to have the running track above the gym-floor to use as a place for lights as it gives me a ton of height to work with, and some distance, so that I can utilize the inverse square law to ensure that front-to-back my light is relatively unchanging.
My first plan was to set up three lights about 40 feet apart each, and aim them at the stage (the most important part of the venue to be lit). Here’s what I set up:
(Two pictures to show all three lights, Underexposed so you can see what’s going on)
A key part of this whole setup is the use of my LPA Pocketwizard Plus II’s. When you’re roaming around hundreds of feet from your lights, you need reliable triggering, and once again my PW’s came through. After I had these set-up and pointed at the stage, I wanted to see what it would look like:
Looks pretty good, and I managed to pull out 640 f/4 at a 250th. Once we got some folks into the venue, I noticed a big problem:
If I was shooting off-axis from the lights, I was getting undesirable results. The ability to shoot off-axis was pretty important in this scenario, so I got to troubleshooting. Luckily, My first plan worked. I headed back up to the catwalk and pointed all lights at the (luckily white) metal roof, so I’m effectively setting up three giant bounce-flashes. It would mean more light spill, and a loss in light on my subjects, but I was only at ISO640, and still had another stop down to 2.8 if I needed. After getting all three lights off the roof, I got much better results:
Had to push up to IS0 800 and f/2.8 (1 1/3 stops of loss) but It was well worth it for the quality of light!
More to come!
-Rod
Light the Ground!
I really like trying to find unique angles to shoot photos from. I really try not to shoot at “5-foot-8″ as the slang goes. Sometimes, that means just taking a knee, other times, it means hanging by a rope backwards 40 feet off the ground . I had a recent portrait shoot of a new University of Lethbridge Student who is an active rock climber, and as I tend to do, I decided to light it instead of shooting (boring) available light. With a shoot like this, where I’ve got lights all over and concrete everywhere, I really rely on my Pocket Wizard Plus II’s to ensure that I trigger my lights every time, without fail.
Two-light setup for this one. First light is the key- Large Octa. One of the challenges I faced with this shoot is that I’m not able to move once I get set in position, and my key light is behind glass so I can’t adjust it. Simple solution there, have an assistant hang out with my key that I can call on my phone if I need to change it. This is the position of the key, just un-extended. I had it up at the top of the roofline for shooting:
Which gave us this:
Always good to check output and coverage before climbing up to a set shooting-post where I can’t get to my lights easily. Now, the key by itself isn’t enough here. If we JUST use the key, we get this (roughly):
Not Cool. We don’t want people to think she’s climbing out of a dark cave. Solution? Light the ground! on purpose! To do this, I set up another light on the floor of the climbing centre. It was an AB800 with a Large softbox, but no diffusion. We don’t need soft light when we’re just lighting the ground, and trying to make cool shadows!
As you can see, I have the softbox angled out because I don’t want it to spill onto the wall too badly- That’s what the key is for! Here’s what that gives us on the ground- We got those cool shadows from the ropes for some added bonus texture!
Now the light is a bit too hot way up by the source, but using Inverse Square Law I know that the light will tend to fall off much less quickly (for a more consistent tone) farther away from the source (and right under where I’ll be shooting) so we’re set there.
As for rigging, it’s pretty simple. I have one daisy-chain with locking carabiners on either end anchoring my camera strap to one of the gear loops on my harness:
And another daisy-chain that runs through both belay-loops out to my anchor point, which connects to itself with yet another locking carabiner.
Here are the two shooting positions that were most successful for the shots we ended up using: (iPhone Photos-Sorry!)
Why go to all the trouble to light this thing? Because I think that this looks terrible, and at 1600/2.8 It’s not exactly the most sharp frame ever:
BLEH. Here’s what we got doing it the “Rod Leland Way” for a final frame:
MUCH BETTER! That looks a bit more like my style doesn’t it? Don’t settle for crappy light just because of rigging and logistics challenges! Fun shoot!
More to come!
-Rod