Many people know my ‘under cover’ technique. Just put your subject in the doorway, under a bridge or any other form of cover and you often get nice light. It’s soft because you create a large source and it’s directional because there’s no light coming in from above. This prevents getting dark shadows under the eyes.

At least one of the students paid attention to what I said and yelled ‘cover’ the minute we stepped outside. This time it was a large garage with the door open. The open side of the garage (camera left) forms a gigantic softbox. The dark green garage door became our dark background.

The disadvantage of using a dark background is that the shadow side of the subject can get lost in a black hole. To separate the subject from the background, we placed a small flash behind (to camera right) the camera. That tiny bit of light in the hair creates more depth and separation.

I often start with a certain setting and then improvise some variations. By zooming out the flash (to get a wider beam) and placing it a bit further, we still get the hair light and we get some (flash) light on the door too.

Another way to create separation between a subject and a dark background, is simply to light (part of) the background. We put a grind on the flash to create a kind of vignette.

For the pictures above, we used natural light as our main light and flash as a hair/background light. But you can do it the other way around as well. In the picture below the sun is up high and behind the subject. You can see the sunlight on the shoulders. To leave some blue in the sky we had to shoot at 1/250 and f/10. A flash with shoot through umbrella to camera left is powerful enough to balance foreground and background.

To illustrate that those small flashes can be pretty powerful, we took this picture at f/22 and full power on the flash.

Hard light is often difficult to work with, but I wanted to show quickly that you don’t have to leave the camera at home on a sunny day.

Sometimes (California) or often (Belgium) the natural light just isn’t what you want. In those moments, you just create the light yourself. One single flash against a brick wall shows the structure of the background, gives a rich contrast on the subject and draws a line that leads the eye to the subject.

Here’s the setup shot. This picture is made outdoors on a sunny day btw.

Give me some time to evaluate the workshop, so I can announce a new one soon. Thanks to everyone who participated for the fun atmosphere and the hard work.