We're going to show you how to balance strobes with a setting sun.
WPPI is coming and we love going to this show each year because there's so much energy there,
and so much great information.
So come and connect with us.
I'm gonna be in the Tamron Booth on Monday and Tuesday from 1:30 to at 2:15 doing lighting
demonstrations there.
So come and talk with me.
See what we got going on.
We'll connect there.
Then on Wednesday, I do my presentation.
It's gonna be 11:30 to 1:30.
I'm gonna talk about how to do the perfect interview, cameras, and how to set it up,
and how to light it.
So come and join, Monday and Tuesday at Tamron Booth or Wednesday at my presentation.
So keep those cameras rolling.
Keep on clicking.
[00:00:36] [music]
[00:00:51]
Hi.
This is Jay P. Morgan.
Today, on The Slanted Lens, we're gonna talk about balancing our strobes with the setting
sun.
I've got Spike here.
I love that name, "Spike," @SpikeLeffkey, if you wanna check her out on Instagram.
She's gonna help us illustrate this.
She's our Alice in Wonderland.
But we're gonna talk about how to balance your strobes in a setting sun.
This is an easy formula.
I picked this topic, and I've talked about it before because I want everyone to understand
the principles of balancing strobes to the setting sun.
There's about three things you need to do to understand this.
Number one, you pick an ISO.
I usually do about a hundred ISO.
You can go up to six.
Do whatever you want on ISO.
It affects both the ambient and the strobes equally.
So I usually start about 100 ISO.
Now, I'm going to pick an aperture setting that's going to match the power on my strobes.
If I want a lot of depth of field, I'll do f11.
If I want a very shallow depth of field, I'll do f2.8.
Then, I down my strobes down to where I'm getting the correct exposure on her face at
the aperture setting that I've chosen.
Now, the third thing is a shutter.
Now, the shutter is going to work throughout this entire process.
The shutter is gonna be changing constantly because the shutter now will control the ambient
light or the sun.
If the sun is too dark compared to my strobe setting, I would just simply lengthen the
shutter.
And that's gonna brighten up the ambient light.
If my sun is too bright, then I'll just simply shorten the shutter to make the sun a little
darker.
As the sun goes down, I'll start off at about 160th or 125th of a second.
And I'll just start making it longer and longer and longer.
I could get up to a second or a second and a half burning in the background.
The only problem you get is when you go to a second and a half is that if Spike moves
a little bit, then the strobes go off.
It sets her in the frame and then when she moves a little bit, the background doesn't
burn in and it creates a little black silhouette.
And you'll see some of those.
I'm sure as we shoot along.
So it's just the nature of the process.
But in the beginning, as we're lengthening that shutter just a little bit, it will just
feel nice.
I can choose to make that background a little brighter, a little darker, and I'll make decisions
on it based on how I want the image to look.
We'll show you those images that have the shutter speed, and the time of day as the
sun gets darker and darker.
Really, you can shoot way later after the sun goes down than you would ever imagine.
The really beautiful time is right after the sun goes down for about 30 or 40 minutes.
It's called civil twilight.
After civil twilight ends in about 20 to 25 minutes and it just gets dark.
But until it ends that sky in the back is just gonna go blueish.
Now, a lot of times, I will run my white balance on auto white balance.
I'm just gonna let the camera do auto white balance.
Of course, I'm shooting raw, so I can go back later and correct them if I don't like it.
But what that does, generally speaking, is I get a nice warmth on her and I get a very
blue sky background, which I really love the look of.
So to predict where our sun was going to go down in our shot, we use sun seeker.
Now, I was a little discouraged in that process because during the day, as we set up, it would
look as if the sun was gonna go down right there on that little mountain.
And I'm sending it right on the lens.
So I'm looking straight out, exactly what the lens is gonna see.
But then it would move.
Now, I know it's a little over on there, now, it's a little on there.
And of course, when you set this all up, we kind of want to know exactly where it's gonna
be.
So this was a little arbitrary, it feels like.
So I have a funny feeling when the sun goes actually down.
We're gonna be scrambling to try to get our camera lined up so you can let that sun kind
of be over her right side, and just have it in the background.
So that's the reason we picked this setup up here.
Is we want to see the sun in the background as it goes down.
We also have some smoker and put in the foreground.
Going through our chill box, we get some smoke hanging on the ground in the bottom, but a
little windy out here.
Smoke and wind never have a great time together so it's gonna be a bit random to say the least.
So let's talk about our light.
I basically got my my favorite light, that's my OctoDome up front here, that's gonna give
us a nice light on her face.
Then we've got a strong yellow rim light on the camera right side.
That rim light is going to give us a nice rim on the flowers, on the mushroom, and on
the side of her hair, and her body.
Just gives us a sense of the sunlight.
It's a little overdone, but then, of course, these are crepe paper flowers out, so it's
all little overdone.
But as soon as the sun drops out of the frame, we all see it any longer, then we will bring
that light in in the background, and we'll use that as our sun, and just burn that in
with the sky as it gets a little darker and deeper purple.
So it'll look really fun.
So let's get this all going.
Let's get our shots done and then we'll talk about it when we're done.
So the sun went down right here in this image at six o'clock.
So let's take a quick look at this lighting breakdown.
This is no light on her whatsoever.
We have just balanced the strobe with the background.
So I first light, I'm just gonna add a little bit.
It's a softbox on the camera right hand side, just gonna open up the shadows just a little
bit on her you see, just a touch of light to open the shadows, so it's not quite so
darkness, not me coming to become a main key light on the image.
Then I added a rim light on the camera left side to rim her with just that kind of.
I won this really yellow kind of light, kind of make it feel very surreal.
And then we added her key light on her face, which is a softbox of the camera right side.
I will feather this up and down as I'm playing with it trying to make it softer and not quite
so directional, and then I added a really heavy rim light on the camera right side in
that same yellowish color.
So there's our lighting breakdown.
The sun's now gone down.
We quickly reset our light to balance it with the background, and our exposure triangle
at this point is five six at one one hundredth of a second, and at one hundred ISO.
I'm now going to just keep taking shots and I'm just gonna keep lengthening the shutter.
I'm gonna keep the aperture the same.
We go to one-sixtieth of a second at 6:11, then we go to one-fiftieth of a second at
6:13.
We go to one-fourthieth of a second at 6:17, then we go to one-thirtieth of a second at
6:20.
Then we go to 125th of a second at 6:22 from 125th to 120th the 6:22.
So within that same minute I change the shutter twice.
Then we went to one fifteenth of a second almost 6:23.
Then, one-thirteenth of a second at 6:26, and then one-eighth of a second at 6:27.
So at 6:27 almost 6:28, I looked at the image and it just seemed a little bright.
And so I made a quick change to an aperture of six point three to just make it just a
tiny bit darker on her.
The strobe light on her because I'm trying to control the strobes with the aperture and
the background with the shutter.
So I just darkened the image a little bit by going to 6.3 and now I'm still at one­-sixth
of a second at 6:28, almost 6:29.
Now I'll stick with 6.3 for the rest of the the images.
Now 6:29, 23, I'm still at one-sixth of a second.
At 6:30, I'm at one quarter of a second.
At 6:30, almost 6:31, I'm at 0.4 of a second.
Then at 6:32, I'm at point five of a second.
Then at 6:33, I'm at 0.8.
At 6:33.05, I'm at 1:00.
And the rest of these will be at one second here.
Was pretty tough to do much after one second, and so we kind of wrapped it up with that.
I mean you get that dark ghosting, you can keep shooting but she's really got to hold
still.
So there's kind of time frame.
I could have if I wasn't looking at the sun, if I was looking over and didn't have that
sun actually in my shot, I could have started this image a whole lot earlier.
I could have started at 30 minutes earlier at least.
But this just gives you an idea of how quickly the sun falls, but you could just keep it
balanced with that background by just simply lengthening that shutter.
So there you have it, the concept of balancing your strobes with ambient light or in this
case the setting sun.
You can apply this to anything that you do outside, a daylight, direct daylight, in the
shade.
There are so many different combinations when you control the strobes with the aperture,
and the background with the shutter.
Now, you can decide which is gonna be brighter, which is going to be darker.
And use that combination to really create different interesting images depending on
the situation you're in outside.
So there you have it, keep your cameras rolling.
Keep on clicking.
Look what it costs to shoot a photograph on this seamless setup here.
If you want to know how to estimate, give our video a download.
It's at theslantedlens.com, where you can understand the estimating process.
Don't let yourself estimate without it.
Get over to theslantedlens.com.
But it's just time to go home.
So keep those cameras rolling.
Keep on clicking.
Kevin, you have to come here.
So there you have it, another day at The Slanted Lens.