Christiana Aretta writes a journal about food, photography, & toys.

Today’s exercise was inspired by Chris McVeigh‘s action figure shots. I replaced his adorable use of chipmunks with the rather boring use of gels to up the learning factor. (If only I could convince more brides to let me photograph their wedding Buckaroo Banzai-style..)

The action figure is Butterfly, one of three assassins from Taiyo Matsumoto’s great comic, Tekkonkinkreet (published as Black & White by Viz in the US). I started with a two-light setup: one light trained on the background and gelled with a Full CTO, the other with a homemade grid and focused on the subject.

Camera: 1/90th@f4, ISO 200. Flash: ETTL mode, -3EV

For you portrait geeks, this is a comparison of two common and similar portrait styles: Rembrandt on the right and loop on the left. Light illuminates pretty much the whole mask of the face in loop lighting, which is named after the loop-shaped shadow that forms under the nose. In Rembrandt lighting, the subject is turned somewhat away from the light and only the triangular space under the eye is illuminated.

As satisfying as these pictures may be, they illustrate one of the main conundrum of the wedding photographer: balancing the color cast of ambient light (in this case, quite orange) with the very cold light of the flash. Regardless of whether you shoot with your white balance set to flash or auto, if the main light source illuminating your subjects is a naked flash, your subjects will look colder than much warmer ambient-lit background.

Camera: 1/90th@f4, ISO 200. Flash: ETTL mode, -3EV

The solution is to gel your flash and bring it close to matching the color temperature of the ambient light. Honl Photo makes a nice kit that fits every flash I’ve ever owned and works with their Speedstrap system. It even works with the cheap IKEA lamp I used to illuminate the background. For the photo above and the following two photos, both the lamp and the flash illuminating Butterfly’s head and shoulders are gelled with a Full CTO.

In order to keep the light focused on Butterfly and off the background, I put a homemade grid on the flash and zoomed the flash to its maximum setting. The grid spot keeps the light even on the illuminated areas and falls off dramatically at the edges. You can clearly see the difference in lighting between the non-gridded flash above and the gridded flash below.

Gear notes: Canon EOS 5D, 50mm macro lens, ST-E2 Remote Transmitter, 580 EX II flash on its own cute little stand, homemade grid, Honl Photo color balancing gel pack & speedstraps, and one very cheap IKEA desk lamp.

2 Comments: