Balancing Ambient Light

For the first exercise discussion, we will go over balancing flash with ambient light. Basically the concept is to pop a subject with the flash while at the same time preserving some of the pleasant ambient. So how do we do this? Well you know that a properly exposed photograph consists of the appropriate values of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. In a pure flash environment we usually set our shutter speed to the full sync speed, either 1/250th or 1/500th and adjust our aperture to allow the right amount of flash in. Why is flash only concerned with the aperture? Think of how a flash works. It is a pulse of light. No matter how fast you set your shutter speed this pulse of light will hit the camera sensor fully. So we adjust the aperture to determine how much of that light pulse gets to the sensor. As you can imagine, the larger the f-stop the more light hits the sensor.
So now we want to get some of the surrounding non flash constant light involved in our exposure. Well this is simple. Slow down the shutter speed to the point that the ambient light has time to affect the exposure. Let's take a look at a set of pictures I took of the venerable Buddha.



The first shot is without flash. Notice the room is completely dark. The next shot near full sync speed of 1/250th. Note that the subject is properly exposed and the background is dark. Only some of the flash spill can be seen on the back wall. We will learn how to control light spill in a later exercise. As I take the next few shots I slow down the shutter speed to gradually bring in the bright sunshine coming in though the windows. The exposure of the subject stays the same the whole time, no matter what the shutter speed value is. That's the key. The world changes but Buddha stays the same.
Now lets take a look at what we can do with this. This shot of Abbie(the wife, see, you remember) was taken on a very bright day with the Sun behind her.


The subject is normally exposed but I decided to underexpose the background a bit to separate her from it. Cool affect huh? For this I metered off the light behind her and increased the shutter speed to until the ambient was underexposed to my liking. This calls on the old adage that the correct exposure is up to you. Another great use of this feature is shooting a subject in front of a sunset. Sunsets are so beautiful, so of course you would want to include that in your shot.
Play with this a bit and you'll find the possibilities endless and inspiring.

Take care!
ML

Back for More

Whew, been away for a while. Let's catch up. So one of the reasons it has been difficult to update this blog is that we have put our house up for sale. This has moved the PC to the basement on a coffee table. This is about as un-ergonomic as you can get. It is a back killer so I have prioritized my time there to Photoshop and other post processing only. So why have we put the house up for sale? There are quite a few reasons. The first and most important was to lower our cost of living. At some point I will become a professional photographer and that will reduce my income significantly, for a while at least. Right now I have the cushy job in IT paying plenty. When you have been making plenty for a while, you start to acquire things that have a significant recurring cost. So in a sense, one is enslaved to things one has acquired. The challenge is to shed these financial responsibilities to allow for enough freedom in life to move about. For example, changing careers. I found it pretty easy to do so. I surprised my self. I guess once you have a goal in life or found something you really love to do, the superficial things you once held dear take on such less significance.
Ok so that’s one good reason. Another is a chance to move to a more interesting neighborhood. Our current location is a pseudo suburb just north of Atlanta. It’s not bad but it’s not exceptional either. Our neighbors are typically way older than us. We can relate on a person level but they are at such different point in their lives that it doesn’t go much further than quick pleasantries. These people could never be our good friends. So we look for a neighborhood of like minded individuals with great places to eat and especially drink. Nothing like a good neighborhood pub.
Unfortunately with all this great planning and effort comes the worst selling market in a long time. At least it gives up a chance to meditate on what we really want and what would be best for us. The discussion now is whether we want a bungalow or loft. Well for the photog career, loft wins. Abbie (the wife, so you know and I don’t have to say, “the wife” anymore) is quite the champion of the loft life. She has surprised me. As she always does. So we wait. We wait for the house to sell for less than we wanted so we can buy another dwelling for less than the seller wanted.
On to the photography career goals. Some really great stuff is happening. I’ve developed some direction in which I want my career to go. The idea is that you are to specialize in something in order to be successful and known for something. The problem with that is that I love to shoot everything. After some meditation on the subject, I determined that I love headshots and some kind of commercial photography. These seem to be the most dynamic. You get to meet tons of people and go to some great places, all the while the creativity is in your hands. I’m not trying to force anything yet but guide with a light hand in the direction that’s pulling me the most. Also, I love the Strobist stuff. That will definitely be a big part of the picture. So with that said, I had my first paying job last weekend. Whoo Hoo! I did a commercial headshot for a friend who is a local actor. It was fun and I learned a ton about some of the headshot variants like commercial and theatrical and how to get someone to smile big without looking insane. Even though every ad featuring a human has them smiling so large they look crazy. Advertisers sell happiness so I guess this is what it looks like. The other big news is that I have a legit website now at zazenphoto.com. My good friend Alex hooked it up and it looks great. It also links to this blog so we’ll see if we get some readers. Other than you of course. ; )

Ok that’s plenty for now. Hopefully my writing will improve with my photography. The following weeks will consist of the Strobist exercises that I’ve been messing with. Stay tuned!

ML

So now the Strobist has led us to lesson 1.2. Distance. This lesson leads us to explore the affects on the subject and background when the distance of the main flash is changed while the angle remains the same. Pretty interesting stuff. The closer I got the flash to Abbie's face the darker the background became. David(strobist) briefly explained how light falls off harder at close distances. The difference in the background was subtle moving the strobe from 20ft to 10 ft but 5ft to 1ft was a huge difference. At 1ft, the background was almost completely black. This is one of those things that with enough practice become second nature.

See how much darker the background is? And when you have the background dark you are free to develop it how you like. For example, I just received a sample gel pack from Lee filters with a million different colors. So now with the dark background, I can color it however I want. I can't wait to experiment with that.

Speaking of second nature, I made my second trip to a house here in Atlanta to take pictures of the progress to renovate this place. During the first visit, I felt a little awkward and wasn't really sure where to place strobes in each room. This most recent visit, I felt way more comfortable. And this is with some serious distractions. First of all I was friggin exhausted. I was up until 5am hosting a bachelor party for a very good friend of mine and then had to work the next morning for a few hours. I tried to squeeze in an hour nap before the shoot but no way. Too much on the mind as usual. Second thing was the heat. The house was pretty much gutted and of course no AC. It was a green house. I wish I had had a thermometer to see how hot it was. I would guess well over 100deg. I'm not one to sweat too much but it was poring off of me. You know its too hot when you go outside in the sunshine for relief. But with all this going on I really felt at home and with an innate sense of where I wanted the light. I was delighted to see that the picks came out great. I look to have a web developer friend create a flash slideshow soon.

More to come soon. I will be focusing more on the business side this week. I have some potential paid work coming up so I need to be ready.

Lighting 102 update. So the first shoot was way too hasty. I need to lose the line, " Can I have five minutes of your time?". It always last longer than that and I get rushed. Second shoot turned out great and my homework has been turned in. This time I used the bare green wall in the b'fast nook as a background and the marvelous 50mm 1.8 lens. Flash was set to 1/16th for proper exposure and placed at different angles to illustrate the affects light has on the subject(the wife) from those angles.

This is one of the better ones. See my photo stream at flickr.com

Wow! Ok, I find that keeping a blog up to date is a bit difficult. I guess it is just a matter of getting in the habit of setting time aside to keep it updated. I keep hearing about the benefit of keeping a blog for a developing photog, so focus and promises will be kept dammit!

I went pro on Smugmug and secured a domain name for my galleries. I will now be at zazenphoto.com. It feels so good having your own domain name. I was planning on doing this later but I noticed this month that my counters were showing quite a few views of original size photos. Later I read that this was most likely done so someone could download the photos. With a pro account I can now lock that stuff and enable right click protection.

I just got back from the USGP Formula 1 race. This was my 3rd visit to Indianapolis but the fist visit since my interest in photography. I took the trusty Nikkor 70-300 VR. Again this lens proved to be amazing. Even at the full 300mm (which I was at most of the time), it created stunning sharp pictures. The only difficulty I had was panning to shoot cars at 180mph. ; ) See the gallery at zazenphoto.com.

So Lighting 102 has begun at Strobist. The first assignment is to shoot a subject a many different angles to learn the affect the light has on the subject at each one of these angles. The wifey gets home at 2 so I'll get to buggin her as soon as she walks in the door. See more off camera lighting info at http://strobist.blogspot.com/

This is the begining of Zazen Photography. Zazen Photography is an effort to journal my experiences as I endevour to become a professional photographer and to record my thoughts on photograhy , life and zen.