During my lecture at the congress I showed some of my pictures and briefly touched on my lighting style on location but there was no time to really explain. Because I got a lot of questions from people who wanted more info on how I combine flash with ambient light, we setup up a short improvised lighting demo on the last day of the congress.

I only had my 50mm lens with me, time was limited and I had to borrow a flash so I guess I have an excuse for not being entirely happy with how the pictures came out.

During one of his workshops, Pieter learned me to always start with an anchor point when posing couples. When he explained that, I realized that looking for an anchor point is exactly what I do when lighting a picture. So I explained how you just have to pick a starting point. This can be a background, main light, accent light, texture, … whatever. As long as it gets you going. Don’t worry too much about how it will work out. It’s OK to make mistakes as long as they lead you to a final picture. I consider most of the pictures in this post to be in that beta-stage. Normally I would work further to get a final result but this demo was not about the final picture, it was about my workflow when shooting on location.

For the first setup, I picked a background scene with a palm tree, blue sky and some ugly buildings as my anchor point. I manually set my camera to expose that background like I wanted it too look. It didn’t bother me that these settings left Carol, a very talented young Spanish photographer, in the darkness because I know I can add light on her. We only had a battery powered studio flash with a standard reflector at our disposal. We placed it to camera right and adjusted the power until the flash and the ambient were nicely balanced.

Being a model when some 60 people are watching you is never easy but it’s even harder when you are unexpectedly picked out of an audience to be the subject of a weird photographer. But Carol did this with grace and her smile more than makes up for my crappy lighting. Italian wedding photographer Antonio Fascicolo did everything he could to keep the smile going. He even did a very good Tarzan imitation when we moved to the second setup. This was basically a corner of the hotel’s garden where guests are not supposed to come. I explained how it’s often the imperfection of natural light that makes it look natural. This area was completely covered in shade, so we directed the light of the flash through the leaves of the tree. The point I was trying to make is that you don’t have to depend on where the sun is to create a sunny look. In the picture on the left you see Carol’s reaction on Antonio’s Tarzan imitation. On the right (blurry) is Antonio after he almost fell out of the tree.

The next setup is one of my all time favorite tricks: Look for nice soft ambient light and then add a little hair light to create a more open, happy atmosphere. It’s not that the pictures would be bad without that hair light but it’s a small detail that creates depth and atmosphere to the picture. This is a technique that I use very often. Most of the time I have someone hold the flash behind and to the side of the subject. This allows the subject to move as long as the person holding the flash keeps aiming it at her.

Another way to create more depth and separation in a portrait that is mainly lit with natural light, is to use flash to create some light in the background. During our last setup, we moved indoors and used the big windows as our main light. The background was pretty dark, so we added just a touch of flash to it.

I often try to generate some kind of light pattern in the background. Here, the flash is to camera left, aimed at the floor behind Carol. I put a chair in front of the flash. The back of the chair acts as a gobo and creates the streaks of light on the floor. It’s often those small details that give something extra to a picture.

A big thanks to all those who attended the demo and made it such a funny experience, thanks to Carol for being a patient model, thanks to Luc for live translation and to Antonio for being his silly self.