Photography News issue 22

Technique 30

Photography News Issue 22 absolutephoto.com

Lighting academy Get freshwith high-key outdoor photography

Get ready for great summer portraits with this simple technique. Here we’ll use two flashes off camera and bias the exposure to flood the frame with light for a beautiful, flattering high-key effect…

Words & pictures by Kingsley Singleton

It’s well past mid-summer now, so you may already have spent some time on outdoor portraits, but getting out of the studio doesn’t have to mean leaving the flash behind. With the right approach you can use flash to augment the sunshine and fill in the shadows in a way that’s much more controllable than shooting with just the natural light. For the most flattering results, the drill here is to turn the subject away from the sunshine and to fire the flash in as a fill light. A second flash can be used to add to the sun’s backlighting, so you can control its position more easily on the subject and also keep shooting when the sun goes behind a cloud. For pictures like this, using a flash is often better than a reflector for several reasons. The flash’s light is more controllable, and also not as intrusive to the subject, because while the constant sparkle of a reflector may make them squint, the flash is, of course, only brought into play in the split second it’s required. With just a little experimentation we’ll achieve a bright, summery, high-key image. We went to a local woodland for this shoot, full of fresh greenery, bluebells and nice straight trunks to create a background reasonably free from distractions. Framing fairly wide to start off, but using a wide f/4 aperture to knock the background out a little, Amber stood with her back to the sun and we took a shot in aperture-priority, metered in multi-segment mode (1/200sec at f/4, ISO 200), which, as expected, exposed the background quite well, but left her too shadowed, and had none of the high-key sparkle we wanted in the shot. Dialling in +1EV of exposure compensation gave a better look to Amber, and the background gained the desired brighter look, just right to create the high-key effect we were after when the fill and hair lights were put in. In fact, just using exposure compensation correctly to expose the subject and let the

M A S T E R C L A S S

background take care of itself would be a perfectly good set-up if we didn’t have flash to add as well, but the extra light you can add really pays off. Switching to manual mode and dialling in the 1/100sec, f/4, ISO 200 exposure we knew was good for the wider scene, it was then time to set up the flashes and get their power to the right level. First came the fill light, initially positioned to Amber’s left (camera-right) and fitted with a basic reflector dish. The height of the fill light contributes tohow natural it looks, with flatter angles looking more artificial. Placing the light highermimics the look of the sun, so we settled on an angle of around 45º above Amber’s eyeline. It’s worth checking at this stage how the shadows are falling on your subject’s face, and the cardinal rule here, for a flattering style, is to avoid anything too long or deep; for instance, if the shadow from the subject’s nose breaks over their lips the angle needs lowering. Light check To check this you can use your flash’s modelling lamp if it has one. The Safari 2 lights we used have a 15W LED lamp, equivalent a 150W tungsten bulb, but this wasn’t too visible in the sun (it would be easier on a dull day), so we made do with a quick test shot. Positioned around 5ft fromAmber, we then metered the light using a Gossen DigiPro F2 flash meter arriving at a power output of 1/32nd. The light worked okay here, but as expected the lackof diffusion fromthe reflector dish meant that it wasn’t the most flattering; in fact, for a shot like this where the subject is turned away from the undiffused sun to avoid high contrast on their face, using unmodified flash is just creating the same problem. When we switched to a bounce umbrella (which provides lots of diffusion) and fired it from the same distance and height, the results were much improved, with exactly the natural look we were after. For the most flattering results, the drill here is to turn the subject away from the sunshine and to fire the flash in as a fill light

Above With Amber turned against the light, overexposing the shot by about 1EV gives an okay exposure, but there are still shadows to deal with. With a hair light and fill light firing, these are more easily controlled than using a reflector. And if you’re short on lighting stands, just wait for the editor of a photographic magazine to wander past…

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