Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of 'Exploring Photography' right here on
AdoramaTV. I'm Mark Wallace. Well, recently I did a video in Mexico City where I
created this portrait and I got an email or a message on Facebook that said
that this: 'Hey Mark, I'm a little bit confused with your last post I saw some
natural light in the room and the picture you came up with
looks like it was taken in a dark room with one light.' Well, absolutely. The
way that was done is using one of the basic techniques of studio lighting and
that is separating the ambient light from the light from our flash. Now what I'm
going to do over the next few episodes is show you some basic studio lighting
principles so that you can create your own studio and make your own work and
you can take those principles and really do some amazing things. So the very first
thing we need to understand is this concept of ambient light and light from
our flash and it all boils down to understanding one very important thing
and that is how our camera's shutter works. So let's start there by learning about
sync speed. It's important to understand how your camera's shutter works. Your
camera's shutter has two curtains and these curtains have names, the first
curtain and the second curtain. They open and close to reveal light to the sensor, much
like a curtain opens and closes in a theater to reveal what's happening on
the stage.
Let's take a closer look. When you press the shutter release with your finger, it tells
the camera to open the shutter. The first curtain opens to reveal the light to the
camera's sensor, then the second curtain follows behind to hide the light. Then
the curtains reset and wait for you to press the shutter release again. Let's
watch that again.
Notice in this animation that the first curtain opens completely before the
second curtain begins to follow. This only happens at slower shutter speeds, usually
speeds under 200th of a second. Now, watch what happens when we speed
things up. When the shutter speed is faster, the second curtain can't wait for
the first curtain to open all the way. If it does, it won't make it across in time.
Notice in this animation that the shutter is never fully open, it just
reveals a slit of light as it travels across the sensor and the slit becomes
smaller as the shutter speed increases. Sync speed is the shutter speed on your
camera that allows the first curtain to fully open before this second curtain
begins to follow. In other words it's the fastest shutter speed you can use with
the flash.
Let's take another look at your camera's shutter, this time with a flash in the
mix. When your camera shutter speed is set to sync speed or slower, a few things
happen. When you push the shutter release button the first curtain opens and as
soon as the first curtain is fully open, the flash fires. Then the second curtain
closes. Normally, if we have our shutter speed set too high, we have problems.
Let's take a look. When you press the shutter release, the first curtain will
begin to open. But before it's fully open, the second curtain begins to close. When the
first curtain is fully open, the flash fires just like it did before, but this
time
part of the sensor is covered by the second curtain.
This will cause our photo to have a black area and the faster your shutter
speed the more black you'll have in your photo. Alright, well now that we know about sync
speed we're on the right track to solving the riddle of how I shot in a bright room
and got a very dark exposure. Well, the secret to this is the understanding that
anytime you add a flash to your camera, it doesn't matter if it's a speedlite or a
studio strobe, one exposure becomes two exposures. We have the ambient light
that's the light that's all around us, the light that's from the sun, the light from the
street lights, the light that's from those office lights that you can't shut off, any light that
you can't control that you have to react to you as you normally would, that's
ambient light, natural light, whatever you want to call it. That light, we have that
exposure, and then we have our light from our flash. The nice thing is we can control
these two things
independent of each other and so what we want to do, in the studio, is you want to take
that natural light and get rid of it and so the only thing we have left is the
light from our flash. That way we can totally shape that light and make it
exactly what we want it to be and so that's the beauty of shooting in a
studio. Now to illustrate this I have a fantastic model. She's the tallest model
in the world. Her name is Kelly. Come on out, Kelly. Now what we're going to have her do is we're going to
have you stand right over there and I'm going to take two photos and so the
first picture I'm going to take is just to show you that I can get rid of
the ambient light all together. Now, we have some basic parameters that we
already know about and that is first, we want our ISO to be as low as possible, so
we don't get a lot of ambient light, so I've set my camera to its base ISO. That's
ISO 200. I want to keep my shutter speed as fast as it can go, but remember
because of sync speed, I can only go so fast. So on this camera its 180th of a
second. So that leaves us with the third leg of the exposure triangle and that is
our aperture setting. So I've already looked through my lens and used my built-in
light meter to figure out that at f10, my ambient light goes away. So to
illustrate this I'm going to shoot with no flash. So I'm going to turn right around. I'm
just going to take a picture of you really quickly here and so we've got this shot
of Kelly. Now if you look at that,
it is absolutely, totally 100% under exposed, so it's just a no light. There's nothing
there. Now, the cool thing is that means when I turn this flash on the only light
that my camera sees is the light that's coming from the flash which means you
could have an entirely white room, a white wall, you could have white floors, all of that
stuff and make it go completely dark. Now, I'm going to show you how to do this. So we
need you here is Kelly's giving me my Profoto air remote. This allows me to
trigger my flash. I'm going to put that on my camera here and then I have a light
meter. Now, what I've already done here is I've metered this, so I'm metering this here and
that meters at f10 and so that matches the aperture value that I've already set up and
so what we're going to do now is I'm going to take another exposure. So, Kelly look
right into that and we are going to shoot in this. It's going to look
beautiful.
Alright, here we go and look at that now we have a nice portrait and as you
can see, all of that ambient light goes away and so we have a bright room and we
don't see any of that natural light, we only see the light from the flash. So
there you have it. Once you know about sync speed, get your shutter as fast as you can
go, lower your ISO, crank your aperture value down as small as possible to get rid of that
ambient light and then you're only going to get light from the flash and then you're
on your way to shaping that light and making it exactly what you want it to be
and that's how that works. Well, thank you so much for watching this episode about
getting rid of ambient light and sync speed. Don't forget we've got tons of
videos on AdoramaTV. They're absolutely free, so subscribe. Do it right now, it's
absolutely free to do that. Thank you, Kelly, for a fantastic episode and I will see
you again next week.