Let there be light
..and let it be managed.
I have talked about this many times before, and I will do it again. When you add light, and manage it, massage it, and work with i, you get drama, cheerfulness, whatever you like. So when you make the light, you make the mood.
Case in point. In the model shoot I did Monday on Toronto Island, here’s the light the way it might look to a casual observer, and the way it might appear in a properly exposed photo:
Fine. Nice. Pretty young lady (Miss Halton, incidentally) on the beach.
Now let’s work with that. That background is a bit bland to my taste, so let’s darken it. The colours on the model are OK but I’d like them to stand out more.I want drama, and I want the model to stand out, not to be just a thing on a beach.
So first I turn down the ambient exposure. Two stops.That will make light blue into dark dramatic blue. Then I add a flash, on a light stand – shot through an umbrella to get soft light. I fire that from my on-camera flash using E-TTL II IR technology. I turn the flash up or down as needed.
I now get the result I had in mind.
That’s better.
And more importantly: that’s entirely different. And that is the photographer’s task, to make things the way he or she wants them. You can say you like, or you don’t like – but you can’t say it isn’t different!
How I rate photos in Lightroom
It occurs to me that it may be helpful to share my “rating”-workflow in Lightroom. I go through the following sequence:
- Import everything as 2 stars
- Go to grid view and step through them, and reject any that are technically bad (e.g. out of focus or badly exposed, or the subject is blinking). They get an “X” marking. I exclude X from my view.
- Go through them again and rate any that “could possibly be used” as 3.
- Go through the threes again and rate any that are “great in this shoot” as 4.
- Go through the fours again and give any that are “great and can be used even outside this shoot as portfolio shots” a five rating.
- Then I select just the 4 and 5 stars rate them all as PICK.
- Then I step through the 3 stars and decide with of them I want to use; I rate those as PICK also.
- Then I check for doubles and unpick those.
- Then I do any post on my picks.
Done.
Here’s a couple of (unedited) 4-star images from yesterday’s Toronto Island model shoot:
(70-200 f/2.8 IS lens on 1D MkIII, manual exposure -2 stops from ambient and key flash though umbrella, fill flash on camera.)
Balance light
You know the problem. You shoot a living room with large windows and what do you get?
OK outside. A bit light but OK. But dark furniture. Like, silhouettes.
Ah no – you went to a photo course, so you know about “exposure compensation” – the “+/- button”. So you turn that up to, oh, plus two stop (to make it brighter) – and yes, now the furniture looks light. Nice.
But uh oh – the window is now all white. Nothing visible. Like a gateway to heaven in “heaven can wait”.
Fortunately, you have also done a “mastering flash” course. So you know to:
- Turn exposure compensation down to make the sky nice and blue
- Then turn on the flash (and turn it around so it lights up the wall behind you)
- Then take a test shot
- Then decide whether to use “flash exposure compensation” – the “plus minus with flash next to it”. This turns the flash power up or down. You decide you need some more light on the furniture so you turn this to plus one stop.
Now here’s your picture:
Nicer, no? Try this technique if you haven’t yet. And you can compete with the best interior photographers.
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