In this video, I shoot a location portrait using both flash and ambient light.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama, the
camera store that has everything for us photographers.
Today I'm at the Gatwick Aviation Museum for a shoot
where I'm going to challenge ambient light against my flash, to see what can
produce the best, most creative pictures.
Now I can't do this on my own so today I've been joined by Roger. Roger is a
fully qualified paid-up member of the pilot society...I thought he was a
boxer but it turns out he's actually a pilot so this is brilliant.
So I'm going to start with some ambient light. Let's see what shots we can get
right here and then we'll move on to flash in a minute. When I'm working with
ambient light only, I will put my camera into aperture priority mode. That's my
favorite mode to shoot in. It means that the camera will figure out the exposure.
All I need to do is tell it the aperture and the ISO I like, anything that makes
my life a little bit easier. Now, today we've got kind of overcast lighting. It's not
particularly dynamic or dramatic but for portraits, overcast is often exactly the
kind of ambient light you want to shoot in. So we've got Roger here, who's going to lean
against the plane looking all piloty.
That's good. I'm going to shoot a couple of different apertures, because, of course,
with ambient, I can mix my apertures up really easily without having to worry
about exposure.
What I see on my camera is exactly what I'm going to get,
and that's one of the delights of working with ambient. The other delight,
of course, is it's free
I haven't had to pay for this sunshine. It's here. Obviously with ambient, the
downside,
I can't do this in the middle of the night. We would need extra lights, so
ambient has its pluses and minuses. Let's take some shots, see how they look.
OK, Roger, that's great.
So one of the great things about working with ambient is if I want to shoot at f/2.8
which I can with this lens, I just dial in f/2.8. If I want more depth of field, I
can just dial in f/11 and take the same shot.
I don't have to move, I don't have to re-calculate, I can let the camera do the
thinking. If I wanted to move Roger around... so Roger, if you just lean with your back against the
plane,
I come around the other side, I don't have to worry about moving the lights
around. I can just move around. That's fantastic.
That works really well. If I want to get a different angle, I can.
Ambient light is here all the time. I can move around fluidly and get a much lower
angle. I'm going to come around to the other side of your Roger. Again, if you can lean with
your shoulder, just like you were, that's perfect.
However it does throw up some problems because the direction of light is out of
my control.
If it isn't right, if it isn't working, there's not a lot I can actually do or
is there? Whilst I might not be able to change the direction of the sun,
easily, I can at least control something about it using reflectors. Now reflectors,
as the name suggests, allow you to bounce light in to fill in shadows and to give
you some control back with your ambient light.
Now these are great because they are kind of small. They fold-up really tiny.
They're pretty cheap as well and it's a good thing to have if you're an ambient
light photographer. Now have a look at Roger's face when I use the reflector. At
the moment, there's shadows underneath Roger's chin but when I get the reflector,
and I put the reflector in, I can fill the shadows in. Because it is an overcast
day, I'm using the silver reflector rather than a white reflector to push as
much of the limited amount of light that we've got here today
underneath Roger's chin. Now of course I could do this myself but
it does become quite tricky so an assistant for a reflector is a really
useful thing, so Christian, I asked my assistant for the day, Christian, to come in.
So you're going to hold the reflector and if you just
angle it until you can just get a little bit of light just about there.
Fantastic.
And we'll pop that in. That's superb and again I'm going to come down underneath.
Fantastic.
And if we compare that to when it's not in place, as you can see, there's much more
shadow compared to the shot where it was actually in the shot. So as you can see I
have now switched to flash.
I've got my Streaklight 360 inside a 95cm ParaPop glow softbox,
just to soften the light down a little bit.
We're going to put it nice and sort of in front of Roger, something like that.
That should give us a good position. Now, before I take a picture with flash,
I'm actually going to set an ambient-light reading and my camera is telling me,
well f/11 but I want to get the sky a little bit darker
so I'm going to underexpose by a stop to f/16 so that should make the whole shot a
little bit dark.
Here we go. That gives me a much more dramatic sky, but clearly Roger's
underexposed by a stop.
Well that's where the flash comes in. I need this flash to produce enough light
to light Roger at f/16,
so we get the flash meter, point the dome at the flash, turn the flash on and at full
power it's telling me f/22,
so if I drop this to half power, f/16, that means I'll get a correct exposure
on Roger. One-stop underexposed on the background.
If you want to find out more about this stuff, remember to check out the Adorama
Learning Center where there's loads more videos on how to mix ambient and flash. OK,
let's take that shot.
Here we go.
There's no getting away from it. Flash gives me so much more control of the
light and it's pretty simple to do.
However it's not all good news. I don't get the ability to move around.
Now I can move, I mean watch this, if I step this way and I shoot with a more
telephoto end of the lens, I get the same light. It doesn't matter how close or far
away I am, but what matters is the direction so if I come around the other side.
If you want to spin yourself around, Roger. Now if I don't move the light, you can see what's going to
happen. Let's just take the shot, here we go.
I mean, it's moody. It's arty, but it's not what I wanted.
Now, of course, it's not too difficult, I can pick this up, it's not nailed to the
floor.
I can pick this up. I can move it around,
but I need to re-meter every time or take test shots, so flash,
well, it works, but it's a slower process.
Let's take the shot.
So both ambient and flash have their own distinctive looks and their own pluses
and minuses.
Let's do a shoot around the aviation museum using both flash and ambient and
see what great pictures we get and then we'll compare at the end.
Okay are you ready? Let's go.
So we've moved inside to the Gatwick Aviation Museum. We're lucky it's got a lovely
big hanger because it's
chucking it down with rain outside. Well, this is a British summer,
what do we expect, but ambient light and flash work both inside and outside.
Now obviously with ambient light inside I'm relying on the electric lights in
here, because the windows are kind of small but there's enough ambient light
still to take pictures, so let's get a shot of Roger, a nice wide shot, we'll get
the museum in the background.
OK, Roger we'll just take a nice and wide shot and it looks fine. It looks exactly
how it looks to my eyes, and through the viewfinder and that's not really a
surprise because that's what you get.
Ambient light- what you see is what you get. I'll be honest, it's perhaps not the
most exciting of lights. That's where flash comes in.
Now that looks completely different to my viewfinder and that's what I like. I like the fact that
flash gives me a whole new look to this shot.
I've gone through a few of these pictures and I found the processing in
Photoshop,
I've actually done pretty much the same thing with both the flash shots and the
ambient only light shots.
So, let's have a little look. Now this is a picture lit by flash,
I like those, I think a bit more, the contrast, the mood,
I think that really works for this day and I'm going to take that idea even
further by jumping over to the effects here in Camera Raw finding the de-haze
and just increasing the de-haze quite a bit and de-haze is a lovely new feature.
It really boosts contrast, really brings out detail and if I go back to the basic
panel, I can supplement that even more by getting my favorite slider clarity, of
course, and popping some clarity in there.
Now those two sliders have done some bad things to the colors so I'm just going
to take the vibrance down just to mute those colors down quite a bit.
I actually think that helps a lot with this picture.
That's fine I can do some other basic edits here. I can bring back to the
highlight detail and open up the shadows a little bit.
All of those kind of standard things are great but what I want to do now is just
make the sky a little bit darker and the lower left side of it darker too and the
great news is, I can do both of those things using a single tool.
So anything that multitasks, that's always a good idea.
Now the tool I'm going to use is a local adjustment tool right at the top here,
the radial filter and I'm just going to drag out a nice kind of little oval shape
like that, something like that, we can change that in a second.
What I want to do is probably just change the exposure rather than the
shadows and we'll just bring the exposure down, I'll give this a little
rotate and we'll drag that into position.
Something like that, and that really helps us to darken the sky, darken that
lower left corner and I can just bring some, let's put some more clarity in and
there we go. That's
great, to really take that to town. Now, once you've done those changes you often
find that once you've made big changes, you need to go right back to the beginning
and make some small ones. In this case, all of those changes have made the whole
thing feel slightly under exposed so we'll just bring back a little bit of
brightness into the shot and there's a bit more fine tuning to do but there you go, that's
basically my final picture completed.
Well there we go, we got some great pictures using a combination of light
and that's what photography is all about.
No rights, no wrongs. Now if you want to see more videos from myself and the
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I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.