Photography News Issue 40

Photography News | Issue 40 | absolutephoto.com

Technique 40

Lighting Academy Spot on lighting Start your journey into the exciting world of creative lighting effects with PN ’s Lighting Academy. This is the place to find out all about how flash and continuous lighting works and how it can be used to improve your shots. This month, how restricting the light can make for stylish portrait effects...

Words & pictures by Kingsley Singleton

Before photographers start out with studio- style flash, they’re often racked with fear and mistrust. There’s an assumption that studio flash is technically difficult; that firing and correctly powering the lights will take a lot of getting used to. In fact, with modern kits, the technical aspects of flash are very simple and take just minutes to learn. The part of lighting that does take longer to master is controlling and shaping the illumination to your will; the ability to direct, restrict or spread light out is key in developing your lighting techniques, and this month we’ll be doing all three to get the looks we want. When it comes to triggering, take a typical enthusiast flash kit like Elinchrom’s D-Lite RX 4/4 Softbox To Go for example; firing both RX 4 flash heads is simple because they have a built-in Skyport receiver. So, all you need is to fit the included EL-Skyport Plus transmitter to your camera’s hotshoe, set the channel and group of both heads to the same as the transmitter, and you can trigger up to 200m away (you can even use your iPhone or iPad to control the lights using the EL-Skyport App). Freedom of lighting Andwith the freedom to position and fire your lights wherever you like, you can think about how their position will affect the lighting of the subject. No longer do you need them to be close to the camera, and this opens up lots of possibilities, such as aiming the light from the subject’s rear, for a hair or backlight effect. Using a hair light presents some challenges, such as how powerful the light needs to be, how to position it accurately so it strikes the subject where you want it and how to avoid it ending up in the picture and causing flare. The last of these requires modifiers that restrict the light, and there aremany that do this, some generating a smaller circle of light than others. As you’ll see in this technique, they can be used from the front of the subject, too, creating more dramatic spotlighting effects. Adding a hair light I started off this month’s technique by setting up one D-Lite RX 4 head on a clip lock stand at around 2m in height, at the foot of the stairs – where Emma was to be seated – and one RX 4 head behind her. This second head was placed on a small landing up the stairs and directed downwards using the angle control. But with a 21cm Standard Reflector’s 50° angle of light, it was obvious that the light would be too broadly spread for good hair lighting alone, and would overpower the background. So, to restrict the light further I fitted an Elinchrom Snoot, first channelling the light into a much smaller 15° circle and then fitting the included honeycomb grid, which narrows the spread further (both come in a set at around £50). This did the trick andwith a little modification of the light’s angle it picked up Emma’s hair nicely. To help aim, I switched on

Feathered softbox with hair light

Above Sometimes all you need to restrict the light is to angle a softbox, but for very fine control, like the hair light here, modifiers like snoots and grids are required.

Unfeathered softbox

No hair light

Toomuch hair light

Right Using a hair light, here provided by a D-Lite RX 4 head fitted with a snoot, gives sparkle and separation from darker backgrounds. But while you may need to power the light up to get enough kick, too much will burn out the hair and look clumsy.