Tag Archive for: studio

Tip for light meters and ambient light

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Often I get messages from people that their light meter is not reliable outside, inside no problem but outside…..
Do always remember that outside there is also ambient light.

Let’s say you have a small flash system (the system flashes like Canon/Nikon/Sony) and your shooting full manual and get a reading of F5.6 inside, now when you go outside a day later and you get F11 don’t expect that the strobe is actually on F11, it could very well be that the strobe is outputting only F8 or lower.

8 Juni 2014 Marie 0066 1

The meter works very simple
When you press the button to meter in strobe mode (the lighting bolt) it will actually wait for a pulse and start metering, now the pulse from the strobe is registered of course and the meter does it’s work BUT if the ambient light (on the giving shutter speed) is higher than the strobe the meter will of course give you the F stop for the ambient light (since it overpowers the strobe).
So the next time you’re outside and want to check if your strobe is registering, or if you suspect a problem…. first set the strobe on the lowest setting and meter, now start raising the strobe and if the meter value doesn’t change you know you’re metering ambient (or in other words, ambient is overpowering the strobe).

 

So don’t bash the meter, understand how it works 😀

now let’s look at some solutions….

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Aimed light

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One of the most difficult things to do is really aiming your light.
In a lot of workshops you will see big soft boxes aimed at the model from a moderate distance, this is of course very understandable for the simple reason that in fact you really can’t go wrong…. however the resulting image is often “a bit flat” and not that interesting lighting wise.

 

A next step is using smaller light sources like striplights or for example a beauty dish with grid.
For example in this shot I used a small striplight.

Roosmarijn Mei 22 2014 (73 of 155)-Edit

It can get way more interesting however when we start lighting our model from the back and creating a very dark front. Now normally one would let the model look upward to catch some light, but often that doesn’t really result in the image you want, a model looking towards the camera always has a little bit more….. connection, especially with glamour.

 

In the next shot I used a beauty dish from the back and lit the models face with a very small light source, in this case a snoot with grid.

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Sometimes a mistake can be cool

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When using a digital back (in the case a Leaf AptusII7) on a camera like the Mamiya RZ67ProII one can run into a problem when shooting to quick… in 99% of the cases this means you can throw away the images, but sometimes an interesting image comes out.


What happens is that part of two images are mixed together but also a lot of “artifacts”. Normally the back will tell the camera when you can shoot again, but with the RZ67ProII there is no “communication” between the back and camera, so officially I have to wait for the beep….. when you don’t in the heat of the moment stuff like this can happen, it happens rarely but when it does…. very very rarely something comes out that is fun enough to share, but this time I think it was interesting.

Fashion with the Credo60 and Nadine PartIII

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In the final part of this series some outside shots with natural light.

Shooting with the Credo60 in natural light is a really nice thing to do.
As mentioned before in the previous posts about the Credo60, the display is a huge improvement over the previous leaf digital backs but also the speed in which you can work is something I really love, even on the card there is no buffer, meaning you can just keep firing until the card is full (well I think you can, I never tried it but let’s say that if there IS a buffer you will probably NEVER ever fill it up), and with a speed of 1 second per frame there is a really nice flow to the shots. It’s quick enough to nail some shots where the wind is a vital part of the story like in this series and it’s still “slow” enough for the model to get into her “groove”.

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