“Langers: Welcome to the Capital” read the banner on Hill 16 as Dublin took on Cork in the All Ireland Football semi-final at Croke Park yesterday, in a meeting of two rivals that rarely gets played out but is much anticipated when it does. Cork has a reputation for thinking of itself as the real capital of Ireland and so the message from the Dublin supporters to the Cork fans was clear: you’re in our backyard now. I’m glad to say the right team won on the day in a victory that deserved some recognition on the blog, and one that gave me an excuse to practice some on- and off-camera flash in a five minute photo shoot this morning.
My first attempt at a photograph is the image you see at the top of this blog post, and it’s simply executed. One flash, mounted in the camera’s hotshoe, and bounced off the ceiling directly above me (and the jersey) to spread even light across the entire scene. The flash is set to TTL mode so that the power required is calculated automatically, and the camera exposure is manually set to f/3.2, 1/250s, ISO 200. It took more time to set up the props in the photo (the jersey and the flag) than it did to get the photo right – in fact, this was a case of first-frame success. Shot in the bag. Done.
Or maybe not.
The photograph above is fine, and actually has a nice graphic quality to it which is why it got top-billing on this post, but the lighting, while even, could also be called flat, boring, uninteresting. In fact it’s almost a case of “what lighting?”. In some ways that fits the bill for this kind of a shot, but having got the photo, I wanted to see if I could do something with the lighting to show a bit more texture in the materials I was shooting.
When you want to show texture, you need to think about side light, and angle it so that it skims the surface of whatever it is you are shooting. To begin to get to a more 3-dimensional shot of the jersey and flag, I started by sitting a flash on the table next to the jersey, at the bottom left of the frame as you look at the picture, firing diagonally across the surface towards the top right corner. I set the flash power, once again, to be TTL-driven, and triggered the flash using the pop-up flash on my camera in CLS mode so that the pop-up would add no light to the scene, but just be a trigger.
The resulting image looks as follows:
One light (bottom left)
Now you can begin to see shape and texture here that is missing from the first (evenly-lit) frame I took, but there are some issues with the shot. First of all, the surface of the jersey isn’t particularly flat and so parts of it are thrown into the shadow of other parts – particularly the sleeve at the right of the frame, where the word Corcaigh is hard to make out. More distracting to my eye is the sheen at bottom left from the material, which is a consequence of that part of the frame being closest to the light source, and so represents an over-exposure.
Because I’m using TTL flash, just before the shutter opens the flash emits some light and the camera meters it back to determine how much light is required to light the entire scene, and it then tells the flash to use the appropriate amount of flash power. But the appropriate amount of flash power to light the top right corner of the scene is way more than is required to light the bottom left. On average, the amount of flash power used here is probably correct, but the nature of the lighting scheme that puts the flash nearer one corner of the frame than the rest means that it’s always going to either over-expose the corner or underexpose the rest.
An improvement can be had by adding a second light source, and that’s what I did for the next image, placing it at bottom right, pointing across the surface of the jersey towards the top left corner of the frame.
Two lights (bottom left and bottom right)
Now things are getting better. The addition of that second light source means the first doesn’t need to work so hard, and so it’s flash power is reduced by the TTL system. That mostly takes care of that over-exposed sheen at bottom left. Also some of the detail in the shadows from the first light are being filled in by the second light, though there are still areas thrown into darkness due to the low angle from which both lights are throwing illumination, and the uneven-ness of the jersey.
A clue to the lighting of an image can always be found in the shadows and two shadows in the image above give away the positions of the light sources used. If you look at the shoulder of the jersey at top right, you can see its shadow indicates a light source at bottom left. Also take a look at the collar of the jersey, and there’s a shadow from the second light source at bottom right that isn’t present in the previous image. While you’re at it look again at the top image and you’ll see it is virtually shadow-less, indicating the light is all coming from the front.
So with two off-camera light sources, I’m approaching more even light while showing texture, but still have some shadows to deal with. So I turn to the pop-up flash on my camera and instead of using it purely as a trigger for the other two flashes, I set it to TTL mode also, but dial it down a stop, so that it adds a hint of fill light to the scene, in the hope that it will fill in most of the remaining unwanted shadows on the jersey.
That gives me an image that looks like this:
Two lights (bottom left and bottom right) plus on-camera fill
The lighting on the “Corcaigh” part of the sleeve now means that it is (almost all) out of shadow, but the fact that the fill light is not as powerful as the other two light sources means that I still maintain some texture and shape in the image. The total quantity of light falling on the jersey in this last image is the exact same as in the first image – both are at the same exposure – but the effect, due to variation in where the light is coming from, is quite different.
I do prefer the first image for this particular subject due to that graphic quality that I mentioned, which is itself due to the flat frontal lighting, but getting to the last image, with its texture and detail, was a worthwhile learning exercise.
Recent Comments