Teddy Bears Made Easy

On Saturday morning I gave up one of my few remaining lie-ins (for the next 18 years at least) to participate in my first official photowalk.  Organized by Stephen over at Photowalk.ie, this was an outing to a local (to me) online flower delivery business, Flowers Made Easy.  The idea was simple and yet refreshingly different. 25 photographers were given total access to all aspects of the warehouse for about 3 hours, and let loose to photograph (or not photograph) whatever they wished.  With a warehouse full of fresh flowers, and even some studio photography equipment available for use, there was always going to be only one outcome from the day – a bunch (pardon the pun!) of happy photographers armed with an impressive selection of flower photographs.  Or in my case, photographs of teddy bears.

I actually thought a fair bit about what I wanted to shoot, and how I wanted to shoot it, before I headed off to the photowalk.  The “what” wasn’t teddy bears – it was actually flowers (and I did photograph some of those too, as you’ll see tomorrow).  The “how”, though, did come to pass, and I spent my morning taking low key product shots in a studio set-up.  Except I didn’t have a studio set-up.

What I did have, to be precise, was the following:

• A Nikon D700 camera
• A 24-70mm f/2.8 lens
• A Nikon SB-800 speedlight
• 2 Nikon SB-600 speedlights
• A Lumiquest Softbox III
• A plastic Stofen diffuser
• A mini plastic tripod and a plastic flash foot
• A roll of insulation tape
• A camera bag

Add in a couple of buckets and a flower stand borrowed from a nearby shelf when I got there and that equipment became the following impromptu studio in a corner of the warehouse:

What’s most note-worthy in that list is not so much what I had with me, but what I didn’t have – specifically I didn’t bring, nor did I scrounge, a black background, be it black paper, black card or a black sheet – all of which would have made the job of doing a low-key shot that bit easier.  Instead, I set out to do my low key shots using two things – light, and space.

Quite a few people commented on my setup during the morning, with a couple of people asking if I wanted black card to block out the cluttered backdrop that appeared to exist in my mini studio, and others wondering, when they saw the shots on the back of my camera, how it was that they were low-key without such a backdrop. I tried to explain how it worked to one or two people, but to do so in a sentence or two was difficult, so I’ll do so here instead.  The key to getting that background black is to control the lighting, and it all comes down to an important ratio:  the distance between the ligh sources and the subject versus the distance between the subject and the background.

To start, for a successful low-key shot without using a black backdrop, you need to ensure that the light is entirely under your control.  So you want to kill any ambient light that there is.  My chosen aperture was f/16 for these shots, and when I took a frame, with no flashes firing, at f/16, 1/250s, ISO 200 it looked like this:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is my black background.  Note that in the frame here, could you see it, is a pile of boxes, a white brick wall, some metal shelving, and some grey concrete floor.  But you can’t see it, as my exposure is such that none of the light falling on that, light coming from overhead fluorescent bulbs, is registering in the shot.

And actually, in many ways, that’s the hard work done.  With the ambient light, which I have no real control over, given that many of the remaining 24 other photographers were using it to light their shots, effectively removed from my photographs, I am free to add as much or as little light as I need to the parts of the scene where I need it.

My camera settings are now determined – again, I’m at f/16 (for decent depth of field at small working distances), 1/250s (because that’s the fastest shutter speed I can use with flash, and using a fast shutter speed helps kill the ambient light) and ISO 200 (because that gives the best quality image from my camera).  So I need not worry about the camera.  All I need to decide is where I place my light, and how powerful I make it.

Obviously I don’t want to place my light in a way that throws light onto that background that I’ve worked (not so) hard to keep black.  You might be tempted, therefore, to position my light back behind me, so that the distance between it and the background is greatest.  The further away it is, the less likely it is to illuminate the cluttered background, right?  Yes, that is true.  But as well as requiring that light to not light my background I need to ensure it does light my subject, and lights it to f/16, 1/250s, ISO 200.  That’s the very purpose of the light.

So let’s visualize that set-up with the aid of a diagram:

The thing about light is that, as you get further from the source of the light, its intensity falls off.  There’s a fixed mathematical relationship with how it falls off, and put simply, if you double the distance from the light, you quarter the intensity.

So lets say the furthest I could put my light from my background was 16 feet, and I had my subject half way between the two, things would look as shown above (with the distance measured in the direction that I would aim my light, wanting it to come from off axis, at camera left).  I’d set my flash power to give me a proper subject exposure – that might be 1/4 power at that working distance, but the actual number isn’t important.  What is important is that, however much light fell on the subject 8 feet away, the mathematical relationship between distance and light intensity tells me that 1/4 of it would fall on the background 16 feet away.

1/4 of the light means that my background would be underexposed by two stops.  That’s not very underexposed, and nowhere near it going black.  In fact, given that the background included a white brick wall, 2 stops underexposed would mean it was a mid-grey at best.  And all that clutter would be visible.

I should mention that I was limited in how far I could put my subject (and me with my camera) from the background by the fact that any further back would have simply put me in the way of the other 24 photographers.  But I could have positioned a light even further back behind me without it being too much in the way.

But, non intuitive as it might seem, moving the light further away from the background would not, in itself, do anything other than make the problem worse.  If it was 24 feet away, for instance, and I left my subject in the same place, now 16 feet from the light and still 8 feet from the background, and I adjusted my flash power up to ensure that my subject stayed well lit, the mathematical relationship tells me that my background would then be just about a stop under-exposed, so even brighter.

In fact, the correct thing to do is to move the light as close to the subject as I can.  And that’s the set-up I used.  It looked like this:

With this setup, my required flash power is very low – the light only needs to travel 1 foot.  I play with power setting until I find one that gives me a good exposure, and I know that the background now will be about 8 stops below the subject – enough to ensure no light falling on it registers in the frame.

That basic principle applied to every photo I took on Saturday – having got my light set-up, I just dropped different subjects into my improvised studio and took the shot.

In terms of the lighting, I used the Lumiquest Softbox III I mentioned in my list of equipment above to soften the light, and feathered it across the front of the subjects in the photo above to spread it evenly from left to right.  While that’s a small softbox to you and me, to the teddy bears it’s quite large, and hence gives soft light.

I used two other lights, but each followed the same principle as the main light in terms of position.  For the shot above I had some light from camera right coming from a bare SB-600, and a hint of on-axis fill from a hot-shoe mounted SB-600 with the Stofen diffuser, more to cut it down than to actually diffuse it.  Both of these ended up being set close to minimum power.  And because they are close to the subject, neither contaminates the background.

My final setup looked like this then:

To get the reflection under the teddy bears, and to give me a clean dark surface on which to sit them, I used a sign advertising the company logo which was on black corrugated plastic – the same stuff election posters use.  Having got the shot above, I changed my shooting angle to take the one below, which acts as a nice “cover shot” for the set of photos I ended up with. The lighting here is almost the same, but because my camera position has moved, so too has the on-camera flash position, and I removed the Stofen diffuser and zoomed the flash head to give me the hotspot of light around the company name, which, being further from the other lights, would otherwise have been even darker:

Tomorrow I’ll post some of the flower photos I captured, which used much the same lighting as above, and where the thinking cap was required not so much for the light as for composition.

In the meantime, I shouldn’t finish this post without a word of thanks to Eamonn from Flowers Made Easy and Stephen from Photowalk.ie for organizing an enjoyable morning on Saturday.  And to the twitter photographers who I met for the first time on Saturday, it was nice to meet you all finally, and to put faces to names!