Photo Notes A place to talk about making images.

I’m going to continue puting the shameless plugs at the beginning of this blog again this week. My book Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers is on Amazon.com. It got as high as number 15 in photographic lighting books! And there was much rejoicing! But is is dropping now, so you need to buy a couple of copies for holiday presents. Here is a sample chapter. Of course I still hope that you will consider purchasing my fine art book B Four: pictures of beach, beauty, beings and buildings. Frankly purchases of this book mean a lot to me, and it is also a fine gift for the holidays.  I really hope that people will consider this work. And you know that I teach for BetterPhoto.com. I’ll leave those links to the end of the blog.
I think I must have had my first strobe back in high school. I had a couple of cameras that used flash bulbs before that, but I never had any bulbs. I can’t remember what it was. I got my first good strobe when I was in university, a Sunpak 411. I still have it. It is a terrific strobe. It works automatically at 4 f-tops, but it also had manual control. Full power down to 1/32 power and you could move the flash tube to face left and right and up and down. I also still have a Sunpak 611 that I use pretty frequently. The thing that I want to point out about these strobes is that there best features are not the automatic features, but the manual features. Most of the time, when I use any lights, especially strobes, I need to use manual control. This is because I am adding light to a shot. I am making an image that is different from the image I see. So I need to preview that shot and I need to control to have control over the light in the shot. When you use a strobe automatically you are asking the strobe to change the image, rather than record the image. Auto control of strobe works well with flash fill and sometimes for events, but it is not the best way to make other kinds of shots.

A 750 watt-second mono light.

I suppose the question I get most often in my lighting classes is what lights should I buy. The answer varies depending on the kind of work that someone wants to do, but there are some things I recommend a lot. If you’re going to shoot portraits or people in general or product or architecture you can probably do anything you want to with mono lights.These are strobes, generally with a significant amount of power, that use regular AC power. This makes them easy to use on location or in the studio. You can control the amount of light from these without significantly changing the color. You don’t have this kind of control with any continuous light source. A good mono light is bright enough to make daylight into a secondary light source, that is a considerable amount of power.

Light Panel with white cotton cover.

Here is a one light kit that I have often suggested. I would suggest that you start with one light. You will understand lights better if you do that. As soon as you add a second light you more that double the potential problems.
Alien Bee B1600
A 50º or 60º reflector. This is the standard reflector, often 6 to 8 inches. Usually a manufacturer has one or two metal bowl shaped reflector that control the spread of light to cover what a normal lens might capture.
A 45 inch white satin umbrella with a removable black back. An umbrella with covered ribs would be better.
2- light panels with 2-white cotton or nylon covers and a black cover and a sliver cover.
Light stand. At least 8 feet tall, 10 is better
Perhaps a background stand and a neutral or mottled gray muslin background. If you’re shooting product a couple of

rolls of seamless paper would be better.
Chinese Radio Slave.

Sync Connector, this connector is used on a lot of strobes, but not all.

You can get these from eBay, search digital radio slave. Look for one that has a plug like OLD headphones, .25 X 1.5 inch. For more on sync connections check out this article.
With a second light, which might be lower in power based on your work. So if you were shooting portraits you could probably get a second light that had lower power, but if you were shooting architecture you would want a light that had as much power as your first light. I would also get:
50º or 60º reflector
Barn doors and/or snoot
Light stand, similar to what you got with the first light.
2- umbrellas, one matching the one you got with the first light and the other a 60 inch umbrella.
Very short light stand, this can be used for a background or hidden in a shot.

A Snoot, this tool allows you to put light into a small area of a shot.

If you add a third light, and this would depend on what you needed to light, I would get
60º reflector
1 more light panel with a gold cover, if you are shooting portraits. Just a white cover if you are shooting product. You probably don’t use the light panels very often if you shoot architecture.
Light stand
Barn doors or snoot whichever one you don’t have.
45 inch umbrella.
I hope this helps.
Please consider taking one of my classes, or even recommending them. I have three classes at BetterPhoto:
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio
Getting Started in Commercial Photography

A few portraits made with strobe:

There is more information about this image in my book!

I used both hard and soft light on this subject.

So many people seem to think that filters are something in Photoshop, rather than something we use on a light or in front of a lens. Certainly Photoshop gives us many creative tools that offer wonderful ways to manipulate an image, but there are many reasons to use filters when you take a picture. The first one is that you preserve the idea you had for an image. If you think when you make a shot that it would be great if the left side was blue and the top of the frame was darker you will be disappointed when you see the image as a raw file. You may think, now why did I take that shot? Another consideration: if you are shooting a hundred shots of a model in the studio do you want to have to change the color of the background in every shot? Filters give you a way to control the light in a shot as you make the shot.

Used a warm filter to color the background

Used a warm light to create the background color

Here are a few ways I use filters: I like to filter the light on a background. I can add any color to a background with gels. I use a mottled gray background most of the time, but I can change the color all over the spectrum. When you do this try to reduce the amount of light from your subject that falls on the background. The less white light you have the more saturated your color will be.

Used a blue filter over the lights to warm up the background

You can also change the color of your lights then remove the color in Photoshop. Why would you want to? Well this allows you to change the color of the continuous lights in the shot. So add a 1/2 CTB to your strobes then filter the blue out in Photoshop. All the ambient light will be much warmer, really a simple way to filter ambient light.
Polarizers allow you to control reflections, especially with daylight. This is much easier than using the cloning tool to fix a shot.
I like to use warm filters over some of my strobes when I shoot a portrait. This give the hard light a feeling of being sunlight.

I used warm filters on several of the lights to give a sunlight feel to the shot

The kit I use for my lights includes several warm filters, and a couple cool filters. I also have color filters that I mostly use for backgrounds. I generally get filters from Rosco: they have a tremendous selection and their filters don’t burn. Filters are a great inexpensive way to bring more control to your images.

For more thoughts about photography please take one of my classes:
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio
Getting Started In Commercial Photography
Or buy my book: Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers(ok it won’t be out until November, but you can order it now).
Thanks John

This image was made with a snoot, so the light source is very small.

People are often confused by the difference between what happens when you use a diffuser and when you use a device to make a light source larger. The language of lighting doesn’t make a good separation between these ways of modifying light. A regular reflector on a strobe or even a clamp light acts to keep light in one direction. Various reflectors modify the spread of the light, so they are known by the degrees they cover: a 30º reflector throws a tighter beam than a 60º reflector. A diffuser takes the light from a reflector, or from the built in reflector in a strobe light like an SB900, and spreads it to cover a larger area, generally everything in front of the light, say 180º. This is what the booty light does. A large light source does do this, but it does something else that is more important. Whatever light source you use, each point on the light source, whether it is 12 inches across or 12 feet across, lights each and every point on the subject, unless that point is shadowed by something between the light and the subject. So if you have a face the nose will throw a shadow with a small light source since the nose will block all of the light coming from the small light source. If you have a large light source the nose will block some of the light source, but not all of it, because there will be part of the larger light source that isn’t blocked by the nose.  So

Made with a translucent cloth over a light pane to give the light a hard/soft quality

you get softer gradation, because only some of the light is blocked by anything between the subject and the light, and you have reduced, or no, shadowing. How soft the light is depends on the size of the light source. Other factors include the distance from the subject to the light source and how translucent the fabric in the large light source is. A very translucent fabric creates both a hard and softened effect, because you can see the effect of the small light source in the larger light source. In the same way a silver fabric doesn’t spread light in an umbrella as much as a white satin fabric. The basic tools to make large light sources are umbrellas, soft boxes and light panels. The key is the size of the source more than the shape. So a 60-inch umbrella and a 4X5 foot soft box will make very similar light, and a 1X1.5-foot soft box will give a very different quality of light. In my classes I stress using large light sources, because of the quality of light they create. For more information you might want to check out this article.

I have a new article on Architectural Lighting coming out in the May/June issue of Photo Technique Magazine . I hope you’ll check it out. I also hope you’ll check out my classes at BetterPhoto.
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

This image was made with both hard and soft light sources.

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio
Business to Business: Commercial Photography
Thanks, John Siskin