Photography News issue 27

Photography News Issue 27 absolutephoto.com

Technique

Ambient light alone Shooting with just the fading daylight, Amber’s movement is shown as a blur from start to finish. The 2sec shutter speed isn’t even fast enough to keep her sharp when standing still. That’s why we need to put the flash in.

Not enoughmovement Shot using just the daylight and the flash, Amber is stopped by the firing of flash at the end of the exposure. While the picture has a ghostly look, there’s not much movement picked up, which is where adding the LED light comes in.

LED light alone Here, the continuous light from the LED panel helps to pick up Amber’s movement much more clearly than exposing using the daylight alone. However, with no flash firing to stop the motion the image is lacking a focal point.

Combined lighting With the long exposure picking up the ambient light and the LED adding to it to help show the movement across the frame, the 2nd-curtain flash fires at the end of the exposure and the finished effect is achieved.

The kit we used

This technique relies mainly on using flash, but for best results it needs to be placed off camera. This allows the flash to be more easily directed, and aimed at the position where the subject’s movement will finish. You can do it with a pop-up flash, or an accessory flash placed on the camera, but it’s not as good. If you’re working on location, you can use a speedlight on a stand, or a dedicated kit like Profoto’s B2 250 AirTTL To-Go kit, as I did. The B2 is a lightweight head and battery pack combo costing £1495. It’s lighter and more compact than many heads, making it easy to transport, has a good, adaptable nine-stop power range at 1/10EV increments, and output can be controlled manually on the pack itself. The kit also supports all existing Profoto Air transceivers allowing you to set it from the camera or use full TTL metering. The second thing you need in your bag is a bright source of continuous light. This could be a powerful LED torch, but for a more adaptable solution we used Rotolight’s NEO LED at £299.99. This uses a rather ingenious bi-colour LED system allowing you to control the colour temperature of the light (I set it to mimic the 5500K temperature of the flash). Output is flicker free and fully controllable, and it can be easily mounted on a stand like a flash.

Adding some light Triggering the flash wirelessly (with the Profoto Air Remote), a test exposure looked good in terms of brightness, but there wasn’t quite enough of Amber’s movement visible. At this point, changing the exposure settings – for instance slowing the shutter speed won’t necessarily help as you’ll be making not only the subject lighter, but the background, too. The more effective route is to add light to the subject alone, or to have them move even more slowly. I did both, getting Amber to move at around half the previous speed through the frame and also adding some light from the opposite side to the flash using a Rotolight NEO LED panel. The extra light added, with the Rotolight NEO on full power, was enough to pick out movement of Amber’s light jacket, but it was important not to let the light spill too much on the background, which would defeat the object. To achieve this, the light was directed slightly away from the darker backdrop and flagged with a large piece of card to restrict its spread. Experiment and adapt With everything working, it’s time to experiment, making sure you get the kind of poses you want. With that in mind, it worked well on our shoot when Amber got into a pose at the end of a move and held it. To avoid any static-looking parts, apart from the frozen final

subject to practise the kind of movement you want, timing how long it takes and matching the shutter speed to that. With Amber walking across the shot and spinning slightly a speed of around 2secs was best. With the ISO set to 100 and the aperture at f/8, this gave a good exposure for the background. Next, it was time to add the flash. Flash power Setting up the flash (here, a Profoto B2 250 AirTTL To-Go) on a stand at the edge of the frame where it would catch the end of Amber’s left-to-right movement, I gauged the power using a Gossen Digipro F2 flash meter. You can do this by eye or using the histogram on the camera’s screen, but a flash meter is more accurate and cuts out trial and error. Setting the meter to ISO 100, I reduced the flash’s power in steps ending up at around 1/8 which matched the f/8 exposure setting. The light was fitted with a simple spill kill and directly as much as possible towards Amber’s finishing position. Next, I set the camera’s flash mode to 2nd curtain. This means that the flash will fire at the end of the exposure, rather than the start (1st curtain). You can change the flash mode via a button on the body, or within your camera’s shooting menu, but it’s not vital and using the default 1st curtain mode sometimes means you’ll can fix a posemore easily; the 2nd curtain route is a bit more random, but it’s fun.

pose, it also helped if Amber wasmoving as the exposure started. If the ambient light changes during the shoot, you’ll need to address the exposure settings again to make sure that you’re not over or underexposing. This is particularly important as conditions get darker because the flash will become more and more dominant as the ambient light stops being picked up. Lights, camera, action To achieve a slow- sync effect you need to use a long exposure (2secs here), giving time for the ambient light to be recorded along with the flash. A little extra illumination, here provided by a Rotolight NEO LED panel, helps show the subject’s movement, while the flash can be set to fire at the beginning of the exposure, or the end (2nd or rear curtain).

profoto.com/uk rotolight.com

Nextmonth More creative lighting set-ups to enjoy. Thanks to... This month’s model was the wonderful Amber Tutton. To see more of her work, or enquire about a booking, visit amber-tutton.co.uk.