As you probably know the 2010 World Cup kicks off today in South Africa and I was hoping to mark it with a photograph that was somewhat relevant here. Maybe a photo from a soccer game? Nope, to my shame I have none of those. A photo from South Africa perhaps? No, never been. A soccer-related photo from one of the participating nations? Nada. So in a desperate attempt to make some link between today’s post and the World Cup, this is a shot I took at Africa Day for the Lesotho Embassy (the tenuous link being that Lesotho is the kingdom that sits in the middle of South Africa). Well, at least it’s close. And the photo does fit the requirements for a Flash-lit Friday post. Just.
You might recall that my brief for the Africa Day event photography that I did on behalf of the Lesotho Embassy was to essentially document the activity around the stand. A few members of staff from the embassy were manning the stand, before they headed on stage to show off some traditional Lesotho music and dancing to a very receptive crowd in what was a hot and sunny Iveagh Gardens. The brief included photographing those members of staff.
At a quiet moment in the stand I asked each to stand for a (very) quick portrait, taking advantage of the tree cover that was overhead, giving reasonably well diffused light despite the cloudless sunny sky above.
Each portrait had to be quick, as I didn’t have a lot of time to waste, and wanted to photograph as many staff members as possible in this way. So each portrait ended up looking a lot like the one above. And how I captured them was quite repetitive too, but that was always the plan – tie down something that met the requirements in a way that was repeatable, and repeat as much as necessary. It’s not the most creative approach to photography, or the most interesting, but it gets the images, which is important when you’re on the clock.
The general lighting scheme was two use two lights, plus the pop-up flash on my camera as a trigger. One light was actually the diffused daylight, and I underexposed it by about a stop to just tone down the background ever so slightly. It was about 2.30pm on a May day, so it was quite bright, and I needed to go to 1/250s shutter speed to keep the aperture from getting too small. A small aperture would have made my second light (an SB-800) strain to provide enough light to bring the exposure of the subject back up to the correct level.
That second light was already going to be under pressure as I was firing it through a 60cm double-diffused softbox – the Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe to be exact – which was going to soak up some of the light anyway.
Wanting to keep everything repeatable, I set the flash power manually (and remotely via the CLS system built into the D700 and SB-800, both Nikon) and I think it ended up somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 power. So I had a bit of margin to play with in the aperture/flash power/shutter speed/ISO equation for this ambient/flash balanced shot, but not much.
The softbox was mounted on the end of a (short) telescopic arm, held by me with my left hand, so at camera left, a little above the subject and not too far from the axis of the lens, as I held the camera, focused and pressed the shutter with my right hand. For a few later shots I did use someone to hold the softbox for me so that I could get a proper hold on the camera – the D700 + 24-70mm lens is a heavy combination for any extended amount of time when you’re shooting one handed.
The softbox is technically the main light, with the ambient acting as fill, though you probably wouldn’t readily pick out the use of flash at all from the image (apart from the giveaway catchlights in the eyes, and these may even be from the pop-up flash acting as a trigger, though I’m not sure). That’s the look I was going for. The purpose of the flash here was not to explicitly light the subject in a way that would draw attention to this being a flash-lit photo, but rather to allow me to underexpose the background. The quality of the light from the softbox is similar enough to the soft fill light that was bouncing around to make the two reasonably indistinguishable.
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