Photo Notes A place to talk about making images.

First I wanted to start with a picture from a recent shoot. This image is part of a fund raising. I used nine lights and about 3500 watt-seconds to make the image. The alpha channel was made at Deepetch. Since I’m writing this time about a subject I’ve discussed before I wanted to add a new picture, here, at the top of the blog.

I wanted to talk about talking about lighting. I really hope that at least a few of you will want to talk back about this. Here’s the basic problem: we need to use language that is actually descriptive of the photographs we make. By way of example, Adams often wrote about the “luminous quality of the light.” While this sounds great, I’ve never felt that it was really very definite. Would glow have been better?

The example that is the most trouble to me, as I teach lighting, is using ratios to describe lighting set-ups. When people first stated discussing lighting in terms of ratios they used hard lights, that is just the light in a reflector, no soft box, no umbrella, no light panel. If you think about the design of the lights as a clock face then the subject was in the center of the clock face, the camera and the fill light are at noon and the main light is at 3 or 9 o’clock. If you do this, then the right and left side of the face will have very different light values, and the transition will run down the center of the face. The difference between the brightness of light on the two sides of the face will be in direct proportion to the strength of your lights. If you make a light brighter, whether, by moving the light closer or raising the power there will be a direct result in the corresponding part of the portrait. I should measure the light falling on the subject; the ratio I am really interested in is the light reflected by the subject. However if I measure the light falling on subject, an incident reading, I get the same results. I am attaching an image made with hard lights. You can see how different the two sides of the face are.

3:1 ratio with hard light

All this is fine. The way the lighting is described, and the results of the light, are actually closely related. The problem comes in as soon as you start using large, or even medium sized, light sources. Now there is no relationship between the ratio and the way the subject looks. You’ll note that I said, NO relationship, not some kind of qualified relationship. First the two sides of the face are not lit differently, but the difference between the two sides is a softer gradation, perhaps there is no difference. So the light on the two sides of the face can not be described as a ratio. You could say that the power of the lights can be described by a ratio, and you can measure that. The problem is that this ratio, based on incident measurement of the light, has no direct relationship to the way the image looks. What describes soft light? The size and position of the light are descriptive. Please understand that I like soft light better than hard light, but I want to describe light accurately. Do the ratios tell you anything? Here is a soft light shot with the same 3:1 ratio as the hard light shot, but you can’t find that ratio in the face.

3:1 ratio with soft light. Where is the ratio?

So, here’s my problem, how can I get people to stop talking about ratios, with soft lights? These ratios don’t describe anything useful about how the shot was made. You could use the same ratio, and get an entirely different look. How can I get people to talk about the size of the light source, the position of the light source, and what the light does to the subject, this information is actually useful. If you want more on this subject you might check out this article: Hard Decisions and Soft Light (www.siskinphoto.com/magazine/zpdf/hard-softlight.pdf) and I have an article coming out in a special issue of Shutterbug that will also relate to lighting.

You can see most of my articles at this link

Please check out my classes:

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio

Business to Business: Commercial Photography

Thanks, John

Click for video about shooting this bike!

When I started taking photographs an automatic camera was one that stopped the lens down to a pre-selected aperture when you pressed the shutter button. This allowed you to view, and compose your image with the lens wide open. So it was an important and useful feature. It wasn’t until the mid seventies that built in meters that actually set the aperture of the shutter speed became common; of course this feature was called automatic exposure. At about the same time the first automatic strobes were introduced.

Automatic exposure worked pretty well back then, and it still does. I suppose the biggest reason is that people don’t usually choose to make pictures of the kind that will screw up a meter: say, white cows in the snow. Still, even with today’s cameras, if you want to make a picture that is supposed to be mostly dark, or mostly light, the meter will probably screw up. The meter can’t see the picture, it just tries to capture a pre-set amount of light, and then close the shutter. Since we now have digital cameras with instant feedback and raw capture, so that we can tweak images, almost all pictures can be properly exposed.

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio Class

Automatic strobe has not worked out nearly as well. The big reason is that we are looking at the light we want when we shoot ambient light, but with any kind of strobe we can’t see how the light will look. Consider this scenario: bride and groom’s first dance. The ballroom has twenty-five lights, including recessed lights, spots and a couple of chandeliers. You come in, with your strobe on the camera, and the camera set to the sync speed. Now the ballroom has one light, a little tiny light on top of your camera, you overpowered all the existing light in the room. Your shot looks terrible: hard shadows and glare spots on the bride. This is why so many people think that strobe light is bad. I have seen many pictures of parties in which the hosts must have handed out miners’ helmets, as the only illumination for the party. Everyone looks more or less like a deer caught in the headlights. The problem is not caused by strobe light: it’s caused by having all the light come from just above the camera and from a tiny light source.

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting Class

Light looks better when it comes from more angles; the shadows are softer. So a bigger light source looks better, the same way putting a lampshade over a bulb looks better. Strobe, even automatic strobe, will never be as effective as automatic exposure, simply because we aren’t taking a picture of what we see, but of the light we brought. The reason I teach lighting is to give photographers control of light through understanding how it works.

Business to Business: Commercial Photography Class

9 lights, strobes with orange filtration iside and quartz outside.

I often mentioned that there are two and a half important things about light, and the first is color. If you have any one quality light source: continuous spectrum and flicker free, you can get excellent color with a digital camera. You can even get decent color with fluorescent and mercury vapor lamps, at least some of the time. However, when you mix color, you can’t get good color. The reason is simple, the color isn’t really mixed, but bluer here and yellow here. The camera does an overall balance, not pixel by pixel.

I don’t bring this up in order to discuss the problems this causes but to discuss the process of solving the problem. Over the years I have acquired a lot of equipment and supplies that give me control over this problem. I have BCA bulbs, which have a color temperature of 4800ºK. These are 250 watt bulbs with a standard base. I also have BBA bulbs, same wattage and base but 3200ºK. Both these bulbs are useful if I am lighting a long room that has no place to hide a light on the far side. There are problems with heat with these bulbs, so you can’t run them for more than a few minutes. Another solution is a roll of half orange gel from Rosco. I can put this on the outside of a window; you don’t see the tape if you put it outside. This will make the sunlight warmer, closer to the interior color. I could also buy full orange and 1/4 orange, but at $93 for a 4’X25’ roll, I get by with the 1/2 orange. Generally I want the outdoor light to be a little cooler than the interior light, but only a little. Both the bulbs and the Rosco gel, don’t get used much, only when I think they might be needed.

Calumet Travelite and 5 Norman 200B strobes

I have a lot of strobes, and at least some of these go on most jobs. I have very powerful Norman series 900 strobes: 8 heads and three power packs. I use these much less with my digital camera than I did with large format film. I have one Calumet Travelite monolight that goes on a lot of jobs. I also have my Norman 200B units 7 heads and 5 power packs, at least some of these go on almost all jobs. Of course all the strobes have a color balance of about 5000ºK, daylight. In the cases with the strobes I have pieces of Rosco Gel, in full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 orange as well as the blue for cooler lights and the greens to make the light look more like fluorescent.

Of course I have stands, big one small ones and boom arms. I have many ways to attach lights, filters, modifiers and so on. I was just discussing with a student that I have 6 tripods. I even have a generator. Part of the reason that I have all of this is that I have been shooting professionally for a long time.

Norman 900 series light, with orange filters and existing light.

Another reason for having all this gear is that it all solves some problem. But it creates a problem as well; unless I rented a U-haul I couldn’t possibly take all of this stuff on location at any one time. So, when I am at my office, I have a huge number of ways to solve a problem. If I have enough time before a job I may even be able to buy a few new solutions. However, as soon as I pack to go on location I only have the solutions that I bring with me. One of the most important things you can do, before a job, is a site visit. That way your available solutions match the problems on the job.

Norman 900 series lights, 4X5 film

4 lights, 3 with warming filters

A few weeks ago I started this series of blogs about what sorts of controls transferred from film cameras to digital cameras, consequently I written about shutter speed and aperture quite a bit. There is another area I’d like to mention in connection with this theme: filters. Now I have over a hundred filters I used to use to do accurate color correction with film, this was particularly tricky with copy work. Most of those filters now sit unused, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t use filters. There is one area where filters are particularly important, balancing lights. It is sometimes confusing to a digital camera user why you need to do this; after all doesn’t the camera have white balance? The problem is that the camera can only accurately balance to one type of light. So if you are shooting a living room at night with existing tungsten lights and you fill with strobe light the colors will not match well. The result is either an accurately colored room with yellow lights or a blue room with accurate lights. If you use a gel designed to correct strobes to tungsten balance over your strobe you can bring all the light into the same general color, which is much more pleasing. The gel I would pick in this case is called a CTO or a full orange. There are several companies who make filters for lights including Rosco (www.rosco.com). One thing to be sure of is that the filters you buy won’t burn, the heat from modeling lights can cause poor quality filters to melt and burn. The heat from hot light can really fry a filter.

I used a blue filter and a cucoloris to create the blue light in the side of the face and the highlight in the eye.

You can also use filters to adjust the mood of a shot, mixing colored light with light that is accurately balanced. This can be a very effective tool in creating an image. I will use normally balanced light for a large light source, and use warm light, say a 1/2 orange for a hard light to define the side of the face. You can make a very effective portrait in this way. I will also use a filter to change the color of my background. In one of images I’m including with this blog I used one large light source and three hard light sources. The hard light sources were all lower power and all were filtered. I am also including an image where a filter was used to make more dramatic color and one image with a filtered background.

This shot was made in the studio with a gray background. I used a colored gel to make the blue in the background. It is easier to make a saturated background if you start with a darker background.

Purple Sax

This is basic stuff on lighting. I am going to send some of it out to refresh my students in my new Commercial Photography class at BetterPhoto.

I find that many people decide to avoid working with strobes because they do not understand them. In my experience most people cannot understand strobes until they work with some kind of a light. Even in live classes where there is demonstration in front of the students, many will not understand strobes. But when someone sets up the lights, for themselves, and does a shot, perfects the exposure, and creates a photograph all becomes clear. This is why I have students use cheap clamp lights in my class An Introduction To Photographic Lighting . So the best way to learn lighting, as with so many things is practice.

There are two and a half important things about any light source: Color; the size and distance of the light source relative to the size of the subject or the product; and, finally the direction of the light is half important. While a digital camera can control color it doesn’t have the ability to adjust two different colors of light in the same shot. If we want to work with a yellow light like tungsten and a blue light like daylight we have to use filters over one of the light sources to make it match. A filter over the camera won’t fix this. The size of the light source affects the transition from light to shadow. A big light will have softer shadowing than a small light. Consider the light on a sunny day where the light comes from a very small part of the sky and an overcast day where light comes from everywhere. There aren’t any shadows on an overcast day, are there? Finally the position of a small light source is critical since it defines where the highlights and shadows are, but with a big light source position is less important. It doesn’t matter, in terms of shadowing, where a subject stands on an overcast day.

One of the things that confuses people about large light modifiers is that they think the purpose is to spread the light over a larger area. Actually you can spread light over a large area just be changing the reflector or leaving it off. The reason we use these modifiers is to soften the quality of light. A large light modifier lights each point on the subject from each point on the modifier. This means that an area of the subject that wouldn’t be lit by a small light source is often lit by a part of a larger light source, so an area that would be in shadow is merely darker.

The reflections from a large light source are a bigger problem than the reflections from small sources. Of course this is because of the size. Before Photoshop controlling these reflections was very important, often it made the choice of which tool to use. Before Photoshop retouching a reflection was difficult and expensive. This is the biggest reason why soft boxes became popular. Now it is pretty easy to retouch. Reflections of the light source are much more of a problem in product photography than in portrait photography. The spherical shape of the eye tends to make reflections smaller, where a product will often show larger reflections.

Finally photography is both a craft and an art. In order to improve your craft you will need to practice. You will also take bad pictures in pursuit of good pictures. Something to keep in mind, even Eric Clapton and Luciano Pavarotti practiced.

I think that lighting is the most important skill I can teach a photographer, first because there are relatively few people who teach this skill. Also because it gives you control over your photographs that no other skill, even mastery of Photoshop, can give you. I approach teaching this skill from a flexible and technical point of view, if those two things are not incompatible. Flexible, because I don’t think that lighting formulas are the most effective way of approaching lighting. Technical, because I believe that lighting is a skill that is dependent on using tools effectively. While I have heard it said, “A workman is only as good as his tools,” the opposite is often said about photographers: he/she could make good pictures with any camera. I think that statement is basically stupid. I have enjoyed the work of many photographers over the years, and they have always been excellent at craft as well as people of great vision. I do try to show examples and explain how I did them. This seems like a reasonable way to approach teaching online to me. You may also want to check out my class Portrait Photography Lighting On Location And In The Studio .

Classes start on July 1, but you can join as late as July 6, and of course there is always next month!

Thanks, John Siskin