Flash-lit Friday: Communion Portrait

A couple of evenings ago Jonathan, who was the subject of a documentary-style photoshoot on the morning of his communion day last weekend, paid a visit to have a formal portrait taken.  The shots I got on Saturday were mainly informal and candid, and taken with minimal equipment.  This photoshoot was to be a more structured affair, but with one important constraint – it had to be quick.  Read on for why and how – with a few setup shots thrown in for good measure.

Why it had to be quick wasn’t a constraint directly imposed by anyone involved, but more my interpretation of how long a 7 year old would be willing to stand in front of a camera wearing a blazer and holding a prayer book.  I didn’t think that would be for very long.  And I was right.  So my preparations for the shoot were focused on getting as many photos as possible in the shortest time possible.  If I managed to achieve that not only would I have a set of usable photographs, but the subject would be looking relaxed, which is always good.

So preparation took place the night before the shoot with my portable studio set up in my dining room and left in place over night.  The setup shots that follow were all taken on Tuesday night, with the shoot happening on Wednesday evening.

Having set up my white backdrop (a 3/4 width paper roll on a dedicated adjustable background support) I first checked that at my max sync speed and desired aperture and ISO that all the ambient light would be taken out of the equation.  This would allow me totally control the lighting of the scene.  My chosen aperture was f/8 which I find gives me good depth of field for a portrait, and tends to allow me to kill all but the brightest ambient light indoors.

In fact, because I was setting up later in the evening that I would be shooting, I made sure I had a stop to spare before hitting my max sync speed.  If a shot at 1/125s killed the ambient light on Tuesday, a shot at 1/250s would probably kill the earlier evening ambient light during the shoot.

f/8 @ 1/125s, ISO 200 looked like this:

So that’s the ambient light pretty much taken out of the equation.  What little of it there is won’t really impact on my final shot, which won’t be as wide as this shot.

Next I set up lights to light the backdrop.  Getting an even illumination of a white backdrop is always a challenge with speedlights (as opposed to big studio lights) in my experience, and my initial approach, which is my usual approach, was to cross light it with two bare speedlights – the flash on the left pointing across towards the right of the backdrop and vice versa.  These flashes were positioned behind where the subject would be, either side of the backdrop.  I settled, via a few test shots, on 1/8th power (keeping my camera at f/8, ISO 200 – the shutter speed, having killed the ambient, is now irrelevant).  That looked like this:

The problem with this, and the issue I seem to always have to overcome with this setup in post production, is that while parts of the backdrop are evenly lit, not all of it is.  The primary source of this problem is that my lights, again due to the limited space, are just too close to the backdrop to give even illumination across the entire surface.

So it was time to try an alternative approach.

The alternative, which I never tried before, was to bounce each flash off an large sheet of white card, folded into an L shape, with the flash firing at a 45 degree angle into the corner, and this bounce surface set up so that it reflected all the light back at the backdrop.  It’s probably easier to explain with a picture.

Notice how the flashes are pointing away from the background, and into the corners created by the folds of the white card.  You’ll hopefully see that this is better at evenly illuminating the backdrop, and the main reason why is that the light source has now effectively become much bigger.  The cost of this approach is that it requires the flashes to be at a much higher power – right up at 1/2 power with the exposure I was using.  That’s ok – at least the flashes can deliver enough power – but not ideal because it will affect the recycle time of the flashes, and so how quickly I can take photographs in succession.  By the way the flashes here are two Nikon SB-600s.

So the background is probably as good as I’m going to get with two SB-600s in this space, so all that remains is to light the subject.  The room is small and the walls are bright, so I am actually getting quite a lot of light bouncing all around the room even without a third flash on the subject.  I’m also getting some rim light for free from my background lights which bounces back on the subject (but not on the camera lens, so I don’t have flare problems).  But a third light, softened via an umbrella, will hopefully throw some nice soft light on the subject.

So how do you light a subject without a subject?  Well, in this case… you use a chair.  Not the best substitute, but the thing that was closest to hand.  I would refine this light in the first few shots during the shoot, but wanted to get it close in advance, and primarily was looking at the shadows on the floor to check they were diffused – another potential problem area, especially for full length shots.

So a few test shots later, and the main light – an SB-800 behind a shoot through umbrella, set to 1/8th power – lights a chair as follows:

You can see how those background lights are also acting as a rim light, both from the side of the chair and the shadows (which, as I wished for, are diffused).  The SB-800 is at camera right here, in case that’s not obvious, but for the two photos of Jonathan that you see above and below, I actually had it (due to the pose) at camera left.

Skip forward to the following night, and Jonathan is in situ in my studio.  The photo at the top is one of my favourites and I was happy to see that my new background lighting scheme meant the post-production required was minimal.

I mentioned a few days ago in relation to this photoshoot that I hoped to get a low-key shot with my white backdrop going dark, but sadly I didn’t have time to refine that look (primarily because I didn’t think about it during the previous night’s setup phase).  For the last four frames I did turn off the background light.  This was the last frame I took:

Just before I turned off those background lights I had promised Jonathan I would take just three more frames.  He was counting, and four frames later reminded me that I had taken more than three, so I stopped shooting.

I therefore didn’t dwell on how to get the backdrop darker.  But the solution would have been to open my aperture a bit, move the main light as close as I possibly could to Jonathan (while at the same time moving him as far as I could away from the background) and dialling down the power on the SB-800 to compensate for the wider aperture and shorter flash-to-subject distance.

The corresponding increase in subject-to-background distance and the reduced flash power would have thrown that background much darker, but I liked what I was getting here all the same.  Next time I might start at the other end, with one light like this initially before moving onto the high-key multi-light stuff.

Two slightly different looks from the same shoot, but both equally valid.  In total I spent about 10 minutes photographing Jonathan, taking 43 frames and coming away with 27 usable photos and 4 different poses. Intensive and productive, with the previous night’s preparations paying dividends.