Studio Flash Photography: An induction

As some of you may know from my post about my very first time in the studio, before I came to Falmouth I hadn't really investigated studio photography and so – to that end – my supervisor Sian Bonnell arranged an induction for me with the very awesome Dave Mann. He took me through the studio and I also got the chance to ask him some questions about my technical difficulties I've experienced so far. Thanks Dave – you helped me so much and I'm really itching to put everything into practice!

Firstly, we went through the studio basics, such as health and safety. But I'm going to attempt to repeat everything Dave told me to make sure I've understood how everything works. Firstly, a light actually has two lights: the modelling light and the flash bulb. The flash is actually what 'goes off' when the camera clicks. The lower the setting, the shorter the time the flash goes off - good for 'freezing' action. The higher it is, the longer the flash will be on.

If your camera is set to a shutter speed of higher that 1/200, you'll get black bars on the image so it's best to set your camera to 1/125 and then meter from there. However, it's actually the aperture that controls flash – shutter speed controls the ambient lighting.

The lights are set at increments that range from 0.5 to 6.0 and can be adjusted in 0.1 increments. 10 increments equals one f/stop on the camera, so if you meter and it comes up with f/11 and 6 bars, you would turn the light down by 1.6 to give a perfect reading of f/8 and 1/125 shutter speed.

Using one light, Dave very kindly modelled for me:

1 studio light to the photographer's right

As you can see, on the left hand side of the image is a very stark shadow, and also the camera captures a slight grey on the background. In order to compensate for this one black polyboard was put to the right of the light in order to stop throwing light to the back of the studio.

1 black polyboard

This gives a completely black background. However, it makes the left hand more stark. To that end, a white polyboard can be used to reflect the light on the left hand side.

1 black polyboard, 1 white polyboard

As you can see, the shadow is slightly more graduated, providing more definition. My first question to Dave was how do you get a white background. Dave suggested metering the background to ensure it's the same as your foreground lights and lighting the background with the same flash. This means the highlights in the wall are also detected by camera:

But you can also turn the flash up one full stop (e.g 10 increments) higher than the flash light in front. Dave says this is good for bleaching and can bleach out blemishes such as crinkles in paper, or foot marks:

You can also just whack the lights up, but this comes out so overbleached you lose the lines/edges of the picture:

 

 

Though not technically 'wrong' this lighting choice is obviously made by the photographer.

I also asked Dave about night photography, and he set up a practical example in the studio.

 

In this picture, the flash freezes the model in the foreground and completely obliterates the background, due to faster shutter speed. This is a good example of how shutter speed controls ambient lighting.

And in this picture, even though we have motion blur in the background from a longer exposure and hand-holding, the flash freezes the model in the foreground. In this way, motion blur can create an interesting artistic effect.

However, even with longer exposure times on a tripod, this 'flashing' then captures ambient light in the background without over-exposing the subject in the foreground.

All I can do now is employ what I learned in the studio, so wish me luck for the next time I go in!