University of Lethbridge
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
Lighting for an “unlit” look
Seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but sometimes, lighting is nothing more than solving simple exposure problems. For example, in this photo, if I expose for the background, the subject is too dark. We didn’t want an edgy look for this photo, just a dignified portrait. One problem I often run into when lighting outside is when the persons feet aren’t visible, it can look like the subject is “floating” in the picture, as if they were ‘shopped in. The solution I’ve found that often works is to omit a hair/kicker light, match color temperatures of the flash and ambient closely, and pay very close attention to the exposure of the background and foreground, making sure they’re within a believable ratio. To shoot U of L chancellor Richard Davidson, I threw up a single large Octa, put 60 pounds of counterweight on my stand (it was quite windy), and fired away. This is yet another reason why I strongly believe in spending money on lightstands. Sure, most lightstands will support the weight of what you’re going to put on them in terms of lights, but when you start adding weight for safety, that’s when you need a strong, wide-footprint stand.
AB800, PCB Large Octabox, Vagabond II, Manfrotto 14ft Stacker Stand, Manfrotto Sandbag, LPA Pocketwizard Plus II, Radioshack 1/8th to 1/8th mono trigger cord. Placed this up about 7.5 feet tall, off to camera left, and started working on fine-tuning my exposure of the scene.
As you can see, I was tweaking both my flash output, shutter speed, and aperture to find a sweet-spot that we got in the last frame tagged red in the above photo. (Photo Mechanic 3.6.4 Screenshot). The frame we ended up using was this one, straight of the camera:
VERY minor edit on this one- But the finished frame is below:
Final Settings – ISO 250, 5.6, 250th, Manual WB at 5560K.
White Seamless, Glass, Props, Reflections, Oh My!
Finished up a very cool portrait shoot last week, and wanted to show everyone how I did it. Nola Aitken is a University of Lethbridge staff member and her research focuses around testing methods and academic evaluation. We decided to make a super-sized “test” and shoot Nola “through” it. We sourced a piece of glass, created a couple test questions and had vinyl decals made to apply them to the glass. After we had our test created, I had to figure out how to make it all come together. I actually diagrammed my ideas because I was that worried about it!
SO. You can see what I have planned. We’re shooting on white seamless (so that we’ll be able to see the black letters). As for lighting, I’m using an AB800 in a gridded Octa overhead and on-axis. Two gridded Speedlights for hair/rim lights, and one AB800 to blow the seamless out. As for “grip” I realized I didn’t have the gear to suspend the pane of glass up where we needed it to be, so we went low-tech. We put it on two chairs, had Nola kneel, and I had an assistant hold the pane of glass upright. Since we’re cropping at waist level, the final image shouldn’t give it away that she was on her knees.
Now reality is always a bit different than planning, and I made a few changes when I got to the studio to shoot. I left lots of setup time to troubleshoot (I was SO worried about reflections). Here’s what we ended up with:
First Change- I hung the light for the seamless off of one of the motorized electrics, and built a large softbox, but didn’t put any diffusion panels in it. Just for generally shaping the light. That works better than the standard reflector because it better matches the shape of the background. Second- Didn’t need a flag for the key- the Octa ended up at a steep enough angle that I didn’t get any reflection off of the glass. Modeling lights can be really useful for checking for reflections for things like this. Kept everything else the same as what I drew, other than the lens. 70mm was enough, so I shot my 24-70 2.8. The setup up-top looked like this:
And from the side, so you can see the softbox/background light-
Straight out of the camera I got this:
And after a quick edit, we ended up with this final frame, which I’m quite proud of:
Final settings were ISO200, 200th, F9, 60mm. More to come!
Single-Source Light for Mood
I like big-deal 5 and 6 light setups just as much as the next guy, but sometimes I like to use fewer sources to invoke a certain mood. I was recently asked to photograph Logan Lavoratto, a University of Lethbridge Pronghorns hockey player. I wanted a moody in-the-moment kind of portrait. As much as hockey is a team sport, there is a lot of personal work and time put in to get to a competitive level. I set up a single Gridded Large Octa near the far wall, and angled it out a bit. Went wide, and had him lace his skates. Couple pops and I had the photo I wanted. This photo won’t stand alone well, but as part of a story or as secondary art, I think it works well.
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.
International Student Feature
I often shoot for the University of Lethbridge’s bi-weekly communications-run newspaper “The Legend.” This shoot was for the paper and I was asked to shoot an international student and her family that had successfully come across from Malaysia to work, learn, and live here. With the International theme in mind, we chose a location, and lit it.
Two-Light Setup for this one.
- 22″ Beauty Dish with Diffusion Sock overhead and on-axis with the wall.
- Large Softbox about 1 1/2 stops down in terms of output on the ground, angled up for fill. (The Beauty dish is a contrasty source- this helps with a warm feeling)
Thankfully for this shoot, I arrived WAY early and had a chance to really dial in the setup before the subjects arrived. One tip that David Hobby teaches his readers to do is use your hand at the estimated subject-to-source distance to check exposure for skin-tones so you can get in the ballpark before the talent arrives. I tend to do that a lot!
Dr. Kas Mazurek
This was a cool shoot. I was shooting University of Lethbridge Education faculty member Dr. Kas Mazurek for an upcoming publication, Legacy Magazine. His work focuses strongly on global learning and education across the world so we got our prop ideas from that concept. Heading into the studio, I didn’t know Dr. Mazurek would be showing up in a full suit-and-tie so I had to modify my lighting setup when he arrived. I set up a lighting plot to focus on importance and wisdom. Dr. Mazurek has one of those faces that has seen many things, and the lighting here helps.
Geeky Stuff- It’s a simple 3-light setup.
- Nikon D300, 24-70 2.8, Pocketwizards, Alien Bees B800′s.
- Gridded Octa camera right for the key, angled slightly back toward the camera. The grid here is very important as it prevents spill toward the camera. A flag would have worked if my light was un-gridded.
- Gridded Large Softbox camera left for a backlight. This insures separation from the background, and it helps the mood- The single key would have been a bit darker in mood. I set it down about 1 1/3 stops from the key.
- 30-degree gridded spot to light up the background. Use of modeling lights is important here so that we can make sure our subject is centered the the spot of light we created for him.
