Photography News Issue 38

Photography News | Issue 38 | absolutephoto.com

Technique

spaces like the hotel room we used. A final alternative is to use an ND filter to cut out some of the light. Wide aperture, low-power Fortunately, smaller lights have lower minimum power settings, so for example the D-Lite RX One heads can be used at a lowest 6W/s output (0.1 on the head), allowing you to open the aperture to your heart’s content. So, for this shot, we placed the first RX One light fitted with its 66cm softbox around 3 feet off to Emma’s right, angling it down on her position at around 45º, to give a natural room light look. The second RX One head was fitted with its 56cm Octa softbox and directed at the background, which without the second head would have fallen into complete darkness. The first light was set to its lowest 0.1, and a reading was taken from Emma’s position using a flash meter. With the meter set at 100 ISO a test fire of the flash gave us an aperture reading of f/2.5, and those settings were duplicated on the camera with the shutter speed set to 1/125sec. For the lighting of the background the second RX One head was also metered at f/2.5, but set to 0.2 power, the slightly higher setting allowing for its greater distance to the wall, and the loss of power therein. Of course if a backdrop brighter than the subject had been required it would have been easy to turn up the power of the light up via the Skyport Transmitter. help enormously in shooting at wide apertures to blur the background, when it comes to using them to get a shot that’s sharp from front to back you might reasonably expect them to struggle. Why?Well just as the wide apertures used for a shallow depth-of-field mean that a lot of light is recorded and therefore flash power needs to be low, the smaller apertures needed for lots of sharpness cut down the amount of light entering the camera and therefore you need more flash power. So, for the second shot I set up a light either side of Emma, turning the power to full onboth (5.0, or 100W/s). With the Square and Octa softboxes fitted the light was metered again, at ISO 100 and gave f/8. Not bad, but not as high as I wanted. How do you get more power then? Well, with the lights at their maximum, you can’t raise the output, but you can either move them forward, or raise ISO. The former wasn’t an option as they were already close to the bed, but raising the ISO from 100 to 400 effectively gives you 2 stops more brightness. From that point on it was easy to get a well-lit shot with lots of sharpness. Second shot, deep depth-of-field While low-powered lights can

Changing the lookwithmodifiers

Although it comes with a Square and Octa softbox, the D-Lite RX One kit has a neat trick up its sleeve in the form of a Translucent deflector dish that can be fitted to almost any modifier via the same port as a traditional umbrella stem. So, for example with the Octa softbox fitted, you can remove its diffusing panel and slide the deflector into place in front of the flash ring to further soften the light, avoiding any hot spots when using it close to the subject. Deflectors can also be used without the main diffuser giving the Octa or Square boxes a beauty dish look, and the design is exclusive to Elinchrom kits. Other colours and styles are available in the Elinchrom Deflector Set (£30), including Silver, Gold, and Frost as well as the aforementioned Translucent. Below you’ll see how the different dishes affect the look of the light when fitted without the main diffuser.

Translucent

Naked flash

Main diffuser

Silver

Half silver

White

Gold

Above Modification of flash comes in many forms, and small changes can make a significant difference to the look of a portrait. In these example shots, in which we used an ElinchromD-Lite RX One, the light was first fitted with a 56cmOcta softbox, and fired without the main diffuser, which gives a hard look (1). With the diffuser added the light softens (2). With just a Translucent deflector added to the Octa ’box, the light is halfway between the two (3). With the Silver deflector (4) light is softer but has more contrast, and with it half covering the light, slightly harder (5). The White (6) and Gold (7) deflectors show how skin tones can be warmed and cooled.

Next month: High-key effects with umbrellas.

Adding to the system

Hair light effect

When lighting with flash, a shallow depth- of-field can present an interesting set of challenges... the minimum power of the kit is very important...

If you’re moving up from a flash system built around speedlights you might be wondering how they can be integrated to give you a third or fourth light on top of the two heads you get in a kit like the D-Lite RX One set. Ordinarily this can be done by setting your speedlight to manual power and having its triggering mode set to Slave, so that it fires when the other flashes do. This isn’t always easy as you might position the speedlight hidden by other objects in the scene, meaning it may not fire. But use an EL- Skyport Receiver Plus (£79) along with the included Transmitter Plus and you’ll be able to trigger a compatible speedlight up to 200m away. In the shot here, we simply placed a speedlight behind Emma to act as a hairlight while the two RX One heads were positioned as key and fill lights.

Thanks to: This month’s model was the wonderful Emma Davis, and we shot on location at the beautiful The William Cecil Hotel, Stamford, Lincolnshire.