Lighting 103: Experience is what you get when you don't get what you wanted
I hear it over and over again and again.
Talk to any pro, amateur or film junkie and they will most likely always say the same thing.
LIGHTING IS EVERYTHING
I recently followed my kids and the rest of the neighborhood clan around this past Halloween and realized just how frustrating things can be in an environment where you have no control over the light.
I was excited at one point because I had a new toy. It was a simple blowup softbox diffuser for my onboard camera flash (Nikon SB600). I knew that I could not bounce light off of anything, unless the cloud cover was going to be hovering at 10' the entire night. In theory this would have worked well if I had figured out some settings ahead of time based on subject distances from the camera.
In a perfect world, I would have a full frame camera that I could jack up the ISO to 6400, keep a shutter speed of 160 or so (kids running around with big smiles and snickers crumbs falling out of their candy jaws) and a nice aperture of 4 or 5 for semi-sharp photos. Well, that was not the situation.
I realized very quickly how my forecast failed. Since I had 2 kids, I needed to stay streetside to keep an eye on both, so I shot from far away, and the flash can only be effective up to a certain distance before it drops off. I found myself taking the diffuser off when they were at houses, then placing it back on when they were close to me so I did not blow them out against the dark background.
Lesson learned? Sure. Plan ahead next time.
Follow them around more closely and not from the curb and leave the flash @ home. Maybe I'll bring a prime lens next time. Or maybe I'll have someone hold a king size sheet on a frame and have them hover over the kids so i can bounce the flash off of that? :-)
Below are a few examples of what I was able to come up with. Not too happy about them, but post processing the RAW files helped expose the backgrounds a little bit more and underexpose the blown out subjects.
Next blog post: Holiday photo tips
Talk to any pro, amateur or film junkie and they will most likely always say the same thing.
LIGHTING IS EVERYTHING
I recently followed my kids and the rest of the neighborhood clan around this past Halloween and realized just how frustrating things can be in an environment where you have no control over the light.
I was excited at one point because I had a new toy. It was a simple blowup softbox diffuser for my onboard camera flash (Nikon SB600). I knew that I could not bounce light off of anything, unless the cloud cover was going to be hovering at 10' the entire night. In theory this would have worked well if I had figured out some settings ahead of time based on subject distances from the camera.
In a perfect world, I would have a full frame camera that I could jack up the ISO to 6400, keep a shutter speed of 160 or so (kids running around with big smiles and snickers crumbs falling out of their candy jaws) and a nice aperture of 4 or 5 for semi-sharp photos. Well, that was not the situation.
I realized very quickly how my forecast failed. Since I had 2 kids, I needed to stay streetside to keep an eye on both, so I shot from far away, and the flash can only be effective up to a certain distance before it drops off. I found myself taking the diffuser off when they were at houses, then placing it back on when they were close to me so I did not blow them out against the dark background.
Lesson learned? Sure. Plan ahead next time.
Follow them around more closely and not from the curb and leave the flash @ home. Maybe I'll bring a prime lens next time. Or maybe I'll have someone hold a king size sheet on a frame and have them hover over the kids so i can bounce the flash off of that? :-)
Below are a few examples of what I was able to come up with. Not too happy about them, but post processing the RAW files helped expose the backgrounds a little bit more and underexpose the blown out subjects.
Next blog post: Holiday photo tips
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