my life, my thoughts, my world.

Gatorade and a few other sporting brands have taken to dramatic lighting in their ad campaigns for several years now. The number of times I’ve read questions about how to achieve such lighting answered simply with softbox has grown so large I’ve decided to go ahead and answer the question with an explanation I hope someone will find more useful than softbox.

First of all, you don’t need a softbox. Any spill-controlling light source you can get close to your subject will do. Zach Arias likes to use a collapsed bounce umbrella and a hotshoe flash like a small softbox. You can make a softbox out of a cardboard box lined with foil and covered with a white trashbag if you really want to. Do you have a large beauty dish with a diffuser? That will work too. Your options are only as limited as your imagination so long as you’ve got a means of providing a large apparent light source that controls spill and can be placed very close to your subject.

Why does the light source need to be close to your subject? If you take light intensity as a function of distance the value decreases rapidly as distance increases. Outside of my engineering courses I don’t know very many people who even remotely care about the science behind that fact, or the math used to describe it, so I won’t go there. If you want a quick practical example turn the lights off in your room and shine a flashlight at your hand, then shine it in the far corner of the room. It’s going to be significantly brighter against your hand. Your flashes emit light, and light is light. It all behaves the same way.

Now, let’s review some basics of flash photography. Aperture controls flash. Shutter speed controls ambient light. Shooting at your max sync speed (1/200s on my Canon 5D Mark II – ask Google if you don’t know your max sync speed) will kill the ambient light, leaving your flash to do all of the work. To make this work, go with a small aperture – say f/8 or smaller. Combine all of that with a light source very close to your subject and you’ll get light that goes from bright to dark in less distance than the width of my head.

Example #1 – ISO 250, 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, 2x Vivitar 285HV hotshoe flashes @ 1/4 power into collapsed Westcott 43″ Soft Silver umbrellas:

Two Lights

Lighting Diagram for Example #1:

Lighting Diagram

Example #2 – ISO 100, 1/200s, f/8, 50mm, 1x Einstein 640 @ 1/96 power (-6.5f) into a 28″ Fotodiox beauty dish with diffuser:

Beauty Dish

Lighting Diagram for Example #2:

Lighting Diagram

There you have it. Get in close with a large apparent light source, shoot at your max sync with an appropriate aperture. If you want more light to spread across your subject open the aperture up, if you want it to spread less close it down. Alternately, you can control how far the light travels across your subject by varying the power of your strobe. For reference sake, you don’t need a huge room with black walls to do this. Both shots above were taken in normal bedrooms. The first was taken during the day with a window open, and I forgot to reduce the ISO from the product photos I took moments earlier. Post-processing was limited to a preset that simulates Kodak Tri-X black and white film. Honestly, the preset overdrives the highlights far more than it kills the shadows. Control the spill, and get in close – you can get this effect nearly anywhere.

A few weeks ago, Jennifer Litz asked if I would take some photos for her. Business, but fun. She covers the craft beer/food industry, so we already had more than a little in common.

I thought bookshelves with beer bottles on them would serve nicely as a beer-related backdrop, and happen to have entirely too many bottles of beer on hand. For a little added personality, why not add a goblet and swirl it to add a dash of motion to the equation? I couldn’t think of a reason not to do that either, so we did.

Shooting inside on a nasty day means controlling the light myself. Starting point? No ambient at all. Final state? Slightly warm light on the bookshelf, clean and soft light on the subject. See below.

This is my starting point: ISO 200, f/8, 1/125s. That would leave me with enough shutter to freeze motion, and kill any ambient light. Stopping down to f/8 would make sure the window of acceptably sharp focus would tend to include my entire subject. If you pay attention to my other photos, which are generally outside using my friend the sun as a light source, I usually shoot around two stops wider (if not more).

No light. Black frame.

Now, a black frame isn’t much to look at unless you’re Spinal Tap and you’re trying to find the most blackest – something that can be none more black – black for an album cover. I usually start with the background, and work my way forward. That’s exactly what I did this time. A gridded 285HV with a 1/4 CTO gel in it nicely covered the bookshelf. Click the image to see where the actual light was placed, I added the setup shots as comments to the photos on Flickr.

Background lit.

Time to bring in the subject. One 285HV, snooted, into the wall to the camera-right of the subject to fill in the wall and bounce back a bit of side light brought in some more depth. The key light was my third 285HV bounced into a large Lastolite Tri-Grip reflector. It just so happens that my tripod doubles as pretty good reflector holder.

All lit up

The whole scene.

Lighting Setup

Finally, one of the photos with the goblet involved.

Jennifer Litz

A few photos from a wedding where I shot as the second photographer.

Usually, when I shoot paper I am not using a camera. That combination of words is not generally something with which I associate reproduction and cameras, but rather something I tend to associate with destruction and firearms. Today I took a different approach to help my Mom out with some products she’d just completed to put in scrapbook she made for a new Eagle Scout.

I thought back to one of the very first things I ever attempted once I discovered the Strobist blog and bought my very first hotshoe strobe with a coiled hotshoe to Vivitar sync cable. That attempt was not very successful, but was meant to show how shooting light across a piece of paper would reveal texture not typically seen by casting shadows with the imperfections of the page and depressions left by the writing process. Back in those days I lacked light stands, or any real understanding of how light works. Today, things would be a bit different.

Since I knew I wanted to capture the detail of any smaller text on these pages, I set my base exposure at around f/8 as my aperture. I did not want to have to turn the strobes to full blast for anything to save on recycle time as I’d be shooting many pages, so I ran my ISO up to 200. I also ran at full sync to kill the ambient light. Once that was all said and done, I built the exposure. I knew I wanted a good even exposure across the page, and without a light tent or a softbox I could hang over top I used the next best thing – the ceiling. I also knew I wanted to have depth, as a flat exposure from the top would be just that – flat. The next bit I just played with, but it worked well so I stuck with it. I put two lights on the same stand. One on top in the normal position, bounced into a white umbrella to give me some soft texture across the page, and another super clamped to the legs of the stand, gridded, and aimed right at paper level directly across the page for hard texture.

The setup looked a little something like this:

The lighting setup for shooting paper and maintaining texture.

With an end result of this:

The final result

Sometimes you run into a situation where you a) have very little space, and b) need very soft and even light. If you happen to have two lights, you can make your life very simple. Again this wonderful tidbit originated (for me anyway) with the Strobist blog, but I’ll share it again just in case you’re scared to dive into things there.

The short and skinny is simple. Get two light stands, and two shoot through umbrellas. Raise one of the umbrellas up high and angle it down towards your subjects. Make the bottom of that umbrellas a few inches above where the top of your lens will be. Take your bottom umbrella and put it under the top umbrella, leaving maybe a foot or two of free space, and angle it up some. To do this you’ll need to have the legs on one stand flat and wide, and the other raised up and narrow. Weighing down the top stand is wise if there’s going to be any potential for wind, or people moving about the area. Set your exposure as you normally would, leaving both lights at the same power will give you what almost looks like a giant light bank. You can mess with lighting ratios a bit for a more three dimensional effect, I usually just shoot both strobes at the same power.

The setup looks something like this:

Stack your umbrellas

The result looks a little like this:

Clamshell Lighting Result

For the benefit of anyone interested in off-camera lighting, but hesitant to dive into the greatness that is Strobist.com, I have taken a few photos to demonstrate very basic lighting in both a three light, and single light setup. Setting these shots up took less than 5 minutes, and can be done literally anywhere. If you are a photographer and you want to offer more, for less, I would strongly advise buying at least one of the wireless Strobist kits available at Midwest Photo Exchange.

This is straight out of the camera, and while the background is not completely white throughout, fixing the right edge is trivial at best. Even a tighter crop would fix the “problem” in an instant.

I'll break down this photo in this post.

The background:

First thing first, if you have access to a white (or grey) wall, you can do almost anything. Firing a strobe into said wall will give you a perfect background for headshots, and just about anything else. You can also gel the strobe for different color backgrounds, or do the same later in post. I like taking whichever approach requires the least work after the fact, so I go for gels whenever possible.

Strobe + Wall = Background!

Popping light into the background can also help add texture and help your subject pop out. In a single light situation, I am generally always inclined to use that light on a background surface for a different dynamic. Sure, you could bounce into the ceiling for a nice soft light – but that is not very exciting. Sometimes it is totally appropriate, but sometimes it just is not even possible (think of a black ceiling – your bouncing will not do much there). Examples of both techniques below.

Single light, into the background.

Single strobe, bounced into the ceiling.

Lighting the subject:

Back to the insta-studio setup. Once you have the background situated, you will need to get some light onto your subject. One of the easiest, and fastest solutions is to put two light sources at 45˚ to your subject’s left and right, and have one be providing about twice as much light as the other. You can get far more specific, but where lighting ratios are concerned, that will get you in the ball park.

If you are cramped for space, as is often the case, use a shoot-through umbrella for the main light and bounce into an umbrella for fill. The stands will be in roughly the same position, but the fill umbrella ends up roughly twice as far away as the main light. I do this often to keep both 285HVs at the same (and usually lowest) power setting so my refresh times are the same for both lights. If you are shooting AC monolights, this is not nearly as much of a problem.

Umbrellas setup as described above.

Now all of that is easy to see in the setup shot, but for some (myself included) it helps to see exactly what each light is doing. Pay attention to the captions below (series shot at ISO 200, f8, 1/200s):

No lights firing

Background light only - note that some fill has spilled in as it bounced back off the umbrellas

Main and Background Light

Fill and Background Light

Main and Fill Light

You have seen this already. All three lights firing.

That is about all there is to it. If you seek more information, I will again direct you to Strobist.com because there is far more information there. This is just the tip of the iceberg. When you dive below the surface, you will come to love light. You will also start to see everything in a different way. Pretty cool!