In this episode, I'm going to show you
some fundamentals of off-camera flash.
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of
Exploring Photography. I'm Mark Wallace
in Perth, Australia, in an awesome place
called Mercado 32 owned by Katie! Now
Katie.. you might recognize her because
she's a model I've known for at least 10
years, and she was originally a friend of
mine in Phoenix, Arizona, and now she's in
Australia, and so she actually has an
awesome tiny studio in her store, and so
over the next four episodes, I'm going to
be teaching you some fundamentals of
off-camera flash in this studio. Now
we're doing that on purpose, for a few
reasons. Number one is to show you that
you can do this stuff anywhere, you don't
have to have a really fancy huge studio
to do this, and secondly to illustrate
that this isn't really rocket science. If
you learn this it can revolutionize the
way you use your flash, but it's not
really hard to learn it. So the first
thing we need to do is learn about the
language of light. When you learn how to
describe it, and how it behaves. So let's
do that right now. There are lots of
words that photographers use to describe
light. Let's start by talking about two
of the most common terms in studio
lighting. (i) Hard light and (ii) Soft light.
The best way to tell if light is hard or
soft, is by looking at the shadows. It
casts.. hard light casts, a very clearly
defined shadow. It's edges are hard. Soft
light casts a shadow that's hard to tell
where it starts and stops. It's edges are
soft. On a day where the sky is clear, the
Sun will throw a concentrated beam of
light that will produce deep sharp
shadows on the subject. This is hard
light, but if the clouds come out then
the light becomes diffused. Instead of
the light traveling in the same
direction, it is cast in different
directions, and the source of the light
becomes much larger. A larger light
source will throw a wider beam of light
with shadows that are more open because,
light is bouncing around, and spilling
into the shadows. This is soft light, an
important term is, 'effective size', the
'effective size' of a light is based both
on the physical size of the light, and
its position in relation to the subject.
in other words, the closer a light is to
the subject, the larger its 'effective
size' and the softer the light will be.
The farther away a light is from the
subject the smaller the 'effective size'
and the harder the light will be. To
illustrate this point, let's look at the
Sun although the Sun is 100 times the
width of the earth, it looks like a tiny
speck in the sky. That's because it's 93
million miles from the earth.
This makes the sun's effective size very
small, and therefore it gives off very
hard light. Now if we were able to move
the Sun very close to the earth, its
effective size would be much larger, and
the light it casts would be much softer.
We can change the quality of light by
changing the 'effective size' of our light
source, since moving the Sun closer to
the earth would be impossible, and a
really bad idea. There is another way to
modify our light source, we can use
modifiers, and let's bring back the
clouds in this scenario. The Sun would be
the light source, and the clouds would be
a light modifier. The Sun lights up the
clouds, and the clouds become a huge
light over the earth. Now our
illumination is the entire sky, not just
the tiny dot of the Sun. The 'effective
size' of the light is much larger, and the
light is much softer. Sometimes soft
light is called diffused light, and hard
light is called harsh light.
Contrast is the difference between the darkest and
lightest areas in an image. The greater
the difference, the higher the contrast.,
In much the same way you can change how
hard, or soft a light is by moving a
light closer or farther from the subject.
You can also change the contrast of your
image, by changing the position of a
light. When you position the light in
front of your subject,
get a low contrast lighting. If you move
your light to the side of the subject,
you'll get a much higher contrast
lighting. All right I promise not to
catch you on fire, but over the next few
episodes we're going to put those
fundamentals into practice. So make sure
you don't miss it!
Thanks for joining us, and I will see you
again next time!