In this fully packed hands-on one day workshop, Bert will teach you the crucial lighting techniques to create stunning portraits anytime, anywhere. In a small group of maximum four participants, you can be sure of a very personal learning experience and a fun atmosphere
THE DAY
We’ll start the day with a lesson in choosing the right gear for the job and then we’ll proceed to an in-depth study of the most important lighting setups. Great light is all about subtlety, so during a number of exercises we’ll pay a lot attention to the fine art of flash placement, feathering, choosing the right modifiers and blending flash with the available light.
After a tasty lunch (included), Bert will present you with some lighting challenges and assist you on bringing them to a visually pleasing end. We will get you a great subject to shoot some pictures for your portfolio. We’ll end the day by discussing our images over a couple of beers.
WHAT TO BRING
You basically only need a DSLR and a lens. If you want to bring your own speedlights, triggers, … feel free to do so.
Thanks to the support of Servix & Partners and California Sunbounce, you’ll be able to play around with lots of great toys from Pocketwizard, Manfrotto, Lastolite, Chimera, Elinchrom, Sunbounce, …
PRACTICAL Location: The Barn, Dijkstraat 42, 1820 Steenokkerzeel
Time: 9h30 to 17h (I’m notorious for going over time)
Number of participants: max 4
Language: English (unless all the students speak Dutch)
Price: 245 EUR excl. VAT (296,45 EUR incl. VAT) Workshop fee includes teaching and a tasty bread lunch
DATES AND BOOKINGS - Sunday June 10 : book your spot (4 spots available)
I got lots of reactions on my first and second 70 EUR Studio post, and even more on Facebook. I also felt like exploring this idea a bit more and arranged a second shoot (in the mean time I did a third one too). This time we kept the video camera rolling (thanks Steve) to give you an idea of what equipment I got for 70 EUR and how I used it. The beautiful and fun Stefanie was brave enough to be part of the experiment.
LIGHTS – a double halogen work light (2x350W): This throws out a lot of light at first sight, but when you diffuse it, there’s not much left. You can still shoot handheld but then you’ll have to shoot at iso 800-1600 to avoid camera shake. On the 5D mkII these iso’s show very little noise, so I don’t hesitate to use them. I shot most of the soft light pictures on a tripod at 200 iso and around 1/10th of a second. I would normally never have done that but I found out that it’s perfectly possible to get a good keeper rate when the model, sits down and doesn’t have Parkinson. We played with very small subtle movements because I think they can often make a picture more “real”. That organic feel is exactly what I was looking for because I found my studio pictures where always to artificial.
The work lights come with some downsides too. For a start these things get incredibly hot. You really have to watch out if you want to work with them. When I just started experimenting with artificial light, I used some of these too and managed to let them perform double duty: making light and acting as a smoke machine by setting the diffuser on fire. An ear drum piercing fire alarm, a burned carpet and a scared model later, I decided to buy a couple of flashes instead.
The stand that comes with the lights isn’t exactly as well build and stable as a nice Manfrotto stand. And it doesn’t go up very high so I had to improvise platforms to raise it above eye-level.
In time, I might replace the work lights with some really nice photo/video lights. But apart from being safer, easier to handle and better looking, light is just light.
Diffuser/Scrim – 2 White Shower Curtains: Many people who’ve been to my workshops, know that I always carry a plastic shower curtain in my lighting kit. It has come in handy numerous times as a diffuser, background and picnic blanket. These things are dirt cheap (10EUR for a 2×2 meter light modifier), light and pack very small. I usually clamp or gaffer tape the shower screen to whatever I can find. For this shoot I taped them to my background support system. I guess you could also make some kind of frame for them.
Just like the lights, there are commercial alternatives on the market for the shower curtain diffuser. In fact I have some of them because they handle well and look more professional. But if budget is tight, a shower screen or white bed sheet will get the job done just as well.
Background – 2 textured rough blankets: I like texture in the background, often it looks even better out of focus. When I work on location it’s usually pretty easy to find a textured background but in the studio you have to supply it yourself. I keep some old doors with rust and chipped paint in the studio to be used as a background but it’s not always easy to handle these heavy things. I also wanted to have something lighter that I could use in different ways. When I went buying the lights and shower curtains in the local DIY store, I saw these blankets, and knew immediately that they would be great backgrounds. The rough texture will create interesting highlights and shadows when light strikes the blanket from an angle.
These things are rather small, so I’m thinking about buying some more and stitching them together.
After having seen the video, I’m sure at least half of you are thinking: “Fuck the light, when is he going to tell more about that wireless tethering to the iPad?”
Well … I’ll save that for a future blog post. I first need to go over the hard light pictures.
The two pictures are above where the result of a happy accident. During a break, Stefanie was working on her tan by standing close to the lights. The light looked quite nice even though it was hard and coming from below eye-level. So we started playing with it.
It’s got that timeless, glamorous Hollywood look from the 40′s and 50′s (and even earlier). There are a couple of reasons why this hard light works. First of all, Stefanie has a great bone structure and smooth skin. It’s not impossible to make hard light work with less good looking people, but it sure is hard work.
The second reason is that the hard light, isn’t actually that hard. A work light is a lot bigger than a bare speedlight. If you place the light source meters away from the subject there won’t be much of a difference but when used up close the relative size of a work light is a lot bigger then a small flash, so it gives you softer light.
And then the light becomes even softer because it’s a DOUBLE light. This off-course doubles the size of the light source. And because the two lights are slightly apart one will fill in some of the shadows that the other creates and vice-versa. This is much like those classic Hollywood pictures. In the days of slow film and not-so-powerful lights, they didn’t use much diffusers. Instead they used multiple movie lights to create a bigger surface.
A couple of days ago, I showed you the first results of my studio experiment with a 70 EUR setup (lights, modifiers and background). I basically shot most of the pictures with my 5D mkII so I could see the results instantly but I just had to use my old Hasselblad and shoot some film too. It just felt right. In the end I managed to shoot only a couple of rolls of film because we’ve spent quite some time testing the light and finding the right amount of movement or the lack thereof. But I’m pretty pleased with the results.
I tried out some different films, to see which ones would suit the setup best. The next three pictures are shot on Ilford HP5+
This only color picture is shot on Fuji Pro 400H which captured the skin tones surprisingly well.
And the last one was shot on Fuji Neopan. It’s only the second roll of Neopan that I shoot, but I really like it. I’m going to try it a bit more often.
Too bad all the developing, scanning and dust spotting is such a pain in the ass. If it wasn’t for that I would shoot a lot more film.
I can’t really remember why I started my Confessions of a Photographer videos on YouTube, nor can I remember why I stopped doing them. But I’ve had so many request to take it up again, that I decided to try to free some time to do some more Confessions videos.
The biggest attraction in digital medium format to me is the image quality. Sure, the huge file sizes can come in handy but the dynamic range and the depth in the images are even more important to me. I’m sometimes frustrated with the lack of range and gradual transitions in standard DSLR images. But on the other hand I find that the ergonomics and slowness of medium format, often slows me down to much to shoot in my style for a majority of the jobs I do. And then there is the price tag of MF. So I only rent a digital MF camera if the job really requires the image quality and comes with the budget for rental and spending more time on the shoot.
But things are changing in the digital MF world, and because I like the image quality so much, I keep an eye on the evolutions. Pentax announced the 645D so long ago and kept postponing the release so often, that many thought it would never come. But it’s here now. The specifications look very interesting and promise a medium format camera that handles like an ordinary DSLR. So when I was asked by Shoot Magazine to test the Pentax, I jumped to the occasion.
All medium format camera’s work well in studio or another controlled environment but I wanted to see how the camera handles in a real world location shoot. It was also a last minute thing so we improvised a fashion/portrait shoot in the snow. Lien volunteered to model, Andy assisted and Pieter walked around with a video camera (yes, there’s a behind-the-scenes-video). I wanted a challenging environment and that’s exactly what I got, maybe even a bit too challenging as it was terribly cold. It was just unbearable to work for more than 5 minutes at the time before taking a 15 minute heating up break in the car. So we had to improvise and working really fast. I was curious to see how the Pentax handled such a situation.
First impressions count, so here they are: Even though the camera came without a manual and I’ve never shot a Pentax before, I was shooting within a couple of minutes. The shape of the body may look a bit weird but is very ergonomically and surprisingly light yet sturdy. All the buttons are where you’d expect them to be and I could even operate them with big gloves. Pentax Belgium delivered the camera with the relatively light and compact 55mm 2.8 lens which is like a 40mm on a full frame DSLR.
The viewfinder may not be as big as some of the other MF camera’s but it’s still a lot bigger than your average Canon or Nikon. The LCD screen is also pretty good. Some people say the LCD-screen on a MF camera is unimportant because you’re supposed to tether it to a computer. I don’t agree. I like to shoot tethered whenever possible but sometimes it’s just not practical and then I like to have a decent LCD.
The autofocus is fast and accurate with several focus points. That’s a pretty normal feature in DSLR land, even the entry level camera’s have decent autofocus but not all medium format score very well in this discipline.
The buffer is big enough to keep shooting at a normal pace while the camera writes the images to the card. Dual SD card slots instead of CF, seem a bit of an odd choice to me, but hey, why not? The downside of the buffer is that it has to be emptied completely before you can go through the images. I found out that 10 seconds can seem really long when your genitals are freezing off.
Another downside is that the flash sync is only 1/125 while some MF camera’s can go to 1/500 and higher. It may seem like a small thing but I know shooters who switched to MF only for the faster sync speed.
For this kind of work, I’d normally shoot a longer lens but the Pentax 55mm lens pushed me towards more creative angles and compositions. It seems to distort very little but this isn’t a lens for headshots off-course.
When I looked at the picture on my computer later, the first thing you notice is how big 40 megapixels really is. Even for high end commercial jobs, 40 megapixels is often not a must for the end result. But more pixels, means more options when retouching. But like I said before even more important than the image size, is the image depth and the Pentax certainly didn’t disappoint. Even at high iso’s the noise levels where pretty acceptable and the colors are crisp and clean.
Conclusion: I’m pretty impressed with this camera. It’s a nice combination of image quality and usability. When my work shifts even more towards bigger commercial jobs and pure portraiture (and less reportage style work), I will strongly consider going the medium format way and the Pentax would stand a good chance. I hope to test out some other MF-systems in the near future so that I can compare them to the Pentax.
The behind-the-scenes video is coming very soon! EDIT: here’s the video
For years I’ve been very happy with my PocketWizard Plus II’s to trigger speedlites and strobes. Basically they just tell your remote flash to fire, nothing more, but they do that simple task really well. I prefer shooting full manual (camera and flash) whenever possible to have complete control over my light and the perfect consistency considerably speeds up post processing because you can batch process. That said, I have nothing against automatic TTL flash control. I’ve been controlling my 580EX2 speedlites with the Canon ST-E2 controller on events and other assignments where I needed to work fast or manually setting the flash power wasn’t a practical option. The downside of the ST-E2/580EX2 combo is that it communicates with infrared signals. Because infrared is just light, you need line-of-sight between controller and flashes. This seriously limits the range and angles at which you can put your speedlites.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine the range and reliability of good radio triggers with the flexibility and speed of wireless TTL? Well, you can. The clever guys at Pocketwizard came up with the Mini TT1 and the Flex TT5 to do just that. The Flex is a tranceiver. Which means you can use it as a trigger in the camera hotshoe or as a receiver for your speedlite. The Mini is a transmitter only (so it goes in the camera hotshoe) but it is small and looks way smarter that the walkie-talkie like Plus II. In fact, people have been asking me several times what that thing with the antenna on my camera was and they all believed me when I told them it was a special walkie-talkie that allows me to talk to my assistant on events without releasing my camera.
The new Pocketwizard system translatse the E-TTL signals from the hotshoe to radiosignals and sends them over to the Flex TT5 who transmits them to the speedlite on top of it. The camera and speedlite(s) behave like they are on camera. However they didn’t stop there, they build some really nice extra features into the system. I’m not going to explain the whole system and all it’s features in this post. There’s lots of info and informative videos on the PocketWizard website.
The main reason why I bought them is not for the TTL-features. I simply got so tired of attaching the PLUS II’s to my speedlites every time, changing broken pc-to-minijack cables and having that big walkie-talkie in my hotshoe. The Flex TT5 has a hotshoe, so you can simple slide a speedlite on top of it and attach the whole set to a light stand. Most of the time, I just keep the 580EX’s attached to the Flex’s in my bag. That alone is a small but significant workflow improvement to me.
But being the tech geek that I am, I just had to start experimenting with the wireless TTL functions a bit. I found the system to work surprisingly well and overall improve the Canon wireless flash system. I’ve been using TTL on many occasions in which I would previously have shot manual. When I bought the AC3 Zone Controller a couple of weeks ago, the system got even better. With the AC3 I can control 3 zones of light separately without running back and forth between the speedlites and my shooting position. First of all, you can switch each zone on and off. This might be a small thing but in a later post, I will show you how important that is to me. You can simply set the flash compensation for each zone individually. And last but not least, you can use manual and wireless change the power setting of your speedlites in a 6-stop range. You can even combine TTL and manual.
Only very recently the Nikon versions of the system became available. My buddy Tom aka Fotofolio, who runs the fantastic CreateThatLight blog, got his hands on one of the first sets and has been pretty pleased with them. Tom is one of the few people who’s just as much a lighting geek as I am and I always learn from him when we shoot together. We decided to go playing with our PocketWizard toys together to compare notes, techniques and tricks. Tom went first and immediately used all the ideas that I had in mind, so I had to come up with something else. While our model tried to warm up again in the car (very cold day), I tried some wireless high speed sync stuff with Tom as stand-in.
Our model Lucie proved to be very brave and professional on this very cold day and Antoon (picture below) was great as our assistant. But you don’t always have the luxury to work with skilled and motivated people. Therefor I wanted to play a bit with a very simple setup that would allow me to get decent shots in a short time and with a minimum of hassle.
It was a very grey day with dull light. Because it was around noon, most of the light comes from right above and even though it’s diffused it casts dark shadows under the eyes. I wanted to give the light some direction by working just below the ambient light levels and complement that with a small amount of flash.
For speed, we mounted the flash on a monopod and just added an umbrella to soften it up. Held by Antoon we could quickly change and finetune the position of the light.
I switched back and forth between TTL and manual, whatever worked best for the situation. Because I could control it all from the AC3, it all went fast and effortless.
After some shooting and lunch, it started raining and we were forced to look for an indoor location. Thanks to Twitter and the very kind people of Visit Oostende, we got free access to Fort Napoleon. At first I struggled a bit to get my flashes to fire. Maybe it was Tom’s aura or maybe I shouldn’t have tried getting the radio signal through two meter thick concrete walls. But eventually I went for a simple setup with some dramatic light. I used a single speedlite with a grid to create a small spot of hard light.
I tried to balance the gridded flash with the little ambient light that we got in there.
Lucie teaches yoga, so we decided to do some yoga poses.
Does buying some new PocketWizard stuff, make your light better? No, but if you know what you are doing, you’ll produce that great light faster and more conveniently. If you don’t know what you are doing, you’ll just be able to spend less time before you can get bad light. I’m looking forward to experiment even more with this stuff. Also check out Tom’s blog post to see what he did and thinks.
Ine has been helping me out as a model on quite a few workshops and equipment tests but we never really did a proper shoot together. We talked about shooting many times but our agendas seemed to be rather incompatible. But at the end of last year we finally managed to do a shoot. We decided to do a sad story about a lonely girl. So we went outdoors at night and tried to setup some dramatic light. Ine dug deep into herself to get the tears flowing.
To be honest, we settled on no story at all, we both just felt like shooting and experimenting. The tears are from the ice cold wind.
After ten minutes outside in the cold, my trigger finger started trembling so bad that I managed to shoot faster in single shot mode than the motordrive can. Five more cold minutes later, my hands pretty much stopped working and we wisely decided to continue our shoot indoors. Ine kindly agreed to explore and experiment with some ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while.
I’ve always liked to do a lot with little. It was born out of necessity, when I started I just didn’t have much gear so I had to be creative and inventive with what little I had. I slowly started investing in more and better gear but stayed true to the Strobist philosophy of “less gear, more brain”. It suited the kind of assignments I mostly did in those days: annual reports, family portraiture, corporate portraits, weddings, … All work where clients really appreciated my ability to work fast, travel light and yet get good and affordable results. Nowadays I get to do more and more bigger commercial work in which there’s time and budget to work with big lights and crews. I dig the complete control and the freedom to work for hours towards one image. But the more “big” stuff I do, the more I feel the need to counterbalance it somehow with more intuitive, organic personal work with little gear.
For a while I felt really torn between having the complete control of shooting “big” and the intimacy of shooting “small”. A couple of months ago, it struck me that I don’t have to choose between the two. It seems logical but even though I refuse to be pigeon holed into just one little niche of photography, I kept feeling like I should specialize and build my name into just one thing. There are valid commercial reasons to limit yourself to a very defined “look” but I feel that for me these limitations kill my creativity. And isn’t it just that creativity, that is my most valid asset. It’s the only thing in my business nobody else has.
I got lots of creative ideas boiling in my head for personal projects. Some require to be shot “big” and will probably speak to potential commercial clients. But I also feel the need to go back to my roots from time to time and shoot intimate, dramatic portraits with the beauty of the imperfection.
In this shoot with Ine I tried to get a certain atmosphere I’ve been thinking about for a while. I believe it can only be obtained when shooting with minimal gear, so I can focus 95% of my attention on the subject. I’m not quite where I want to be with this, but it’s getting in the right direction. I’m sorry if this blog post is a bit confusing and vague. That’s because I haven’t figured everything out just yet. But I find the whole thought process interesting to share and it will certainly be continued over the next months. I’ll talk about what I want to achieve, what inspired it and how I will eventually make it work.
I got some other shoots planned to explore this atmosphere even more. Big thanks to Ine for a fun shoot without any guarantees to get some good pictures (because I’m working out of my comfort zone). I certainly hope Ine will be willing to do a rematch once I got everything figured out.
The frustrating part about teaching workshops in cool places is that there usually isn’t much time to shoot yourself. And Karama in Dubai is a spectacular location. It’s not the most posh, fancy spot in Dubai but it’s the kind of place where photographers start drooling from the first second. The place breathes light, textures and character. Luckily the group of students let me have a 15 minute shoot after begging them on my bare knees.
The picture below is what sparked my imagination the minute we arrived at the location:
The exposure I choose for the street proved to be a bit dark for the models:
So I added a single bare speedlite (camera left in the final shot). The picture below is just a quick test shot to see if the flash exposure was right. This is a pretty spacious setup, so if you keep running back and forth between the camera position and the flash to make adjustments, you are going to loose a lot of time (and in the case of Dubai also: sweat). So adjust the power setting on the flash, take a quick test shot from the position of the flash and if necessary repeat the process until it looks right.
Then we added two back lights to create more depth in the picture and to give the whole picture a bit of an artificial look as these classy models with nice clothes look a bit out of place. I like the contrast between their look and the location. It’s an unreal situation so if you would light this naturally it wouldn’t work too well, I believe.
The finishing tough is adding dust. We just had two guys kicking up dust right before I took the shot. It’s all about getting the timing right. You want the models to get in their walking action just after the dustkickers went past. I actually like the setup picture below a lot.
I must admit that I stole the dust idea from my buddy Fotofolio. But hey, I once saved him from being a ridiculously cheap photographer, so I figure I can steal his ideas whenever I want. Here’s Tom’s video.
I wish we had more time to do some more fine tuning, especially on the poses and expressions but we only had a couple of runs before we had to catch our bus back to the conference center. But still, I’m very happy with the results.
The pictures where shot with a 5D2 and a 70-200 2.8L IS at iso 50, 1/160th at f4. I used the follow focus on the center point because the models are walking towards the camera. The follow focus on the 5D2 isn’t the best, so that’s why I went for f4 instead of 2.8 for that little bit of extra depth-of-field. If I recall it correctly all the flashes were set to 1/2 power.
In the video about my Dubai trip, you can see some behind-the-scenes shots:
One of the students suggested we’d do a group shot in the same setup. Here it is:
Fotoweekend has been a 7-day rollercoaster. Big thanks to all the wonderful students and models, here’s a slideshow with many student images. An even bigger thanks to Faisal, who did a great job taking all the practical stuff out of my hands by assisting me. I had lots of fun and great conversations in the Vista Bar with my co-instructors: Bobbi Lane, Carol Dragon, Martin Prihoda and David Nightingale. Last but not least, the biggest thank you’s are for the Gulf Photo Plus team, especially Mohamed and Hala, who are both great and busy photographers but still find the time to make GPP a success.
One of my favorite ways to instantly spice up a portrait is to use a hair light. The picture on the left is done with just the ambient light. For the picture an the right, we placed a single bare speedlite behind the model, camera right. We also added a bit of reflector fill from camera left (the catch lights give it away).
A hair light creates depth and separation from the background. It also makes your subject looks stronger and cooler. These pictures were shot at GPP Fotoweekend in Dubai, where there’s always a summery feeling (a bit TOO summery to me sometimes). But if you live in a country where you need to cope with grey, depressing weather (like here in Belgium), you can instantly create summer (well, at least a summer look) by adding a hair light.
The best way to show how I light something is to show the whole process. Whenever I have time during a workshop, I ask the class to give me an assignment. And then walk through the process including the mistakes. You need to understand that it’s a way of thinking combined with lots of screwing up and the ability to fix those screw-ups.
At GPP Fotoweekend one of my classes gave me the assignment to shoot a picture of a girl who’s sad and feels lonely because she just lost her cat. Many people who’ve been to one of my workshops know that I have a thing with dead cats. If you want to know what, you just have to book a spot on my next workshop
I decided that I wanted to show her loneliness by placing her alone and rather small in a pretty empty setting. The auditorium was a great location to do that. First I set my ambient exposure to get some detail but overall it’s underexposed.
The reason why I wanted to underexpose the ambient light, is because I wanted to light her face with a gridded speedlite. This puts all the attention to her and makes it stand out that she’s alone even more.
For the final shot, we added another speedlite behind her for separation and to define the shape of the chairs behind her. All this creates more depth in the picture.
This one works pretty well I think but I don’t always succeed in these kind of challenges. And actually I don’t care, I always learn something.
