Lighting Academy sponsored by Lencarta

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FLASH ON LOCATION LIGHTING ACADEMY

WORDS & PICTURES KINGSLEY SINGLETON

Model: Harriadnie Beau (harriadniebeau.com)

Background lighting effects How you light what’s behind your subject can be just as important as the main key and fill lights. Here, find out how you can get a range of great background effects with just two flash heads When setting up portraits, there’s huge emphasis on how you place your light or lights to illuminate the subject’s face. Should the illumination be broad and low contrast for a shadowless and flattering look? Or should it be partial and glancing to accentuate facial contours and increase shadow?

Or is it somewhere in between? Of course there’s no right or wrong answer, it all depends on the subject and the mood or the style of picture you Advanced Photographer is also available as a fully interactive magazine – go to iTunes now!

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want to create. But look beyond the subject and you’ll also find that placement of lights behind them can have a huge effect on the modelling, allowing you to light the background or add separation and impact to your model. In this month’s Lighting Academy we’ll look at several background lighting techniques which can liven up your portraits and they’re all achievable with just two lights and a reflector.

SPOTLIGHT Angling a light, fitted with a snoot, onto the dark background creates a pool of light and helps Harri stand out.

The snoot concentrates the light into a very small area.

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LIGHTING ACADEMY WORKING WITH TWO LIGHTS NO BACKGROUND LIGHT

BACKGROUND TOO BRIGHT

BACKGROUND & RIM LIGHT

While having no background light (above left) means Harri’s dark clothing merges with the background and results in a loss of separation and detail, it’s important not to overpower the background light too, which looks bland. The overpowered picture was shot with the background light using a spill kill fitted with a honeycomb at 1/4 power, and while the power is too much, the broader lighting isn’t too bad. In the third picture, with the unit set to 1/16th power, the light is also turned slightly more onto Harri giving a slight rim-lighting effect.

THE CLOSER TO THE BACKGROUND THE LIGHT, THE SMALLER AND STRONGER THE SPOT WILL BE

The first technique we’ll look at here is getting a pleasing spot light effect behind the subject.

This effect can help in a number of situations, principally when you’re shooting a subject wearing dark clothing, placed against a dark background, like Harri is in our example pictures. Although angled so that it doesn’t fall at all on the subject and doesn’t extend far into the background, lighting the background in this way gives a real lift to the picture and helps to separate it from the subject. As you can see from the unlit example above, without the light, the backdrop is very flat and dull, and the shadows on the subject merge with it, leading to a loss of form – you simply don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

After lighting the subject as you wish (we used a Lencarta 80cm Octo softbox with a silver reflector on the opposite side), you can choose to light the

background broadly, or keep the light in a tight area so it frames the subject more like a glow or a halo.

Which you choose will depend partly on the length of your shot and, obviously, the look you’re after, but our mid-length framing meant we wanted a tighter spot light. To shape the light, we first went for a regular spill-kill reflector fitted with a honeycomb, but the effect of this was too broad, so a snoot was needed. At around 5ft from the background this produced a disk of light around 40cm in size, which perfectly framed Harri. The closer to the background you position the light, the smaller and stronger the spot will be. In terms of power, we wanted a subtle lift, which meant setting the power quite low, especially as the snoot concentrates the light. At f/11, 1/125sec ISO 200, we only used about 1/16th power.

Most of the time, it’s desirable for the background light to be kept entirely off the subject,

BUILDING YOUR RANGE OF LIGHT SHAPERS In the same way that buying lenses for your DSLR body expands your creative choices, it’s modifiers that add freedom to your lighting style. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to start building up a range of light shapers as early as you can. When you buy a lighting kit, like the Lencarta Smart Flash II twin-head kit, you’ll get modifiers with it, typically umbrellas, softboxes, or a mix of both, as well as simple spill-kill reflectors. Taking things on a step means buying honeycombs, grids, and snoots, all of which will help channel the light, but these don’t need to be expensive. For instance, a Lencarta Conical Snoot with Honeycomb is only £25, so you get plenty of creative bang for your buck.

Again, like lenses, it makes sense to buy modifiers that will fit on a wide range of lights, so that you don’t need to start from scratch when upgrading or replacing your flash system. Lencarta flash units use the very popular S-bayonet fitting so a very wide range of modifiers is available.

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LIGHTING ACADEMY

Controlling the spill of light is very important when placing heads to illuminate parts of the background, because most of the time you don’t want any extra light falling on the subject’s face. but experimentation always pays off: we also found the wider spread of the spill kill and honeycomb looked good when angled across the background, lighting the dark cloth and falling slightly on the subject like a hairlight.

Getting a brighter background It’s a look that’s become commonplace for everything from formal portraits to family group shots – you use even lighting on the subject and also light the background for a clean, bright white finish.

It’s simple enough in style, but you’ll find a lot of people respond well to this look, so it’s well worth having in your arsenal. Setting up with your subject in front of a white background, you’d think it would be easy, but there are several places where people go wrong, resulting in a grey or spotlit effect. To avoid problems, you need to do two things: first make sure that the light fills the background and doesn’t fall off, leaving grey areas; and second set the lighting ratio, so that the flash on the background is slightly brighter than the light on the subject.

In our example image, Harri stood around 5ft from the white background giving us room to light it with a single white reflective umbrella (silver is less good as the light is harder). The further you can move the subject away from the background, the better, as with less space there’s more chance of light reflecting off the background and on to them.

With the light bounced into the umbrella you get the widest and most diffused throw of light, but you can use softboxes, too if the area is quite small.

If you have a large softbox, you can even put your subject directly in front of that and if you have more than two lights, try angling two or more across the background, which gives the most even fill.

Next comes the power. It’s really important not to overdo it, and to avoid this, try lighting the Advanced Photographer is also available as a fully interactive magazine – go to iTunes now!

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To create a perfect white background for your subject you need to overexpose the backdrop, making it burn out, but also give the light enough spread so that it doesn’t fall away and turn the background grey.

A bounce umbrella does a good job here (two is preferable), casting the light as widely as possible, but still angling it away from the subject.

LIGHT TOO DULL

LIGHT TOO BRIGHT

With no light on the background, only on Harri (above left), the white backdrop goes grey. But with the light on the background set too high, the flash will bounce off it, flaring and making the edges of the subject lose detail.

The power of the background light needs to be higher, but only by about one f/stop – a flash meter comes in very useful here. If space is limited where you’re shooting and you can’t get the coverage on the background you need, you can also place the background light behind the subject and angle up onto the background.

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LIGHTING ACADEMY WORKING WITH TWO LIGHTS HAIRLIGHT

HAIRLIGHT LENS FLARE

NO HAIRLIGHT

When adding a hairlight, it’s important that the effect complements, but doesn’t overpower the subject. Too much power and you’ll start burning out detail when all you really want is a subtle glow. Equally, the hairlight shouldn’t fall on the subject’s face as this may compromise the lighting you’ve already set. Angled onto the subject from behind, it’s also important to watch out for any flare. This can be cut down by using a honeycomb or grid to channel the light, but if you’re still getting flare, try fitting a lens hood or blocking the light using a panel to stop it entering your lens.

background before you start on the subject; that way it’ll be lit how you want, even if you need to move the model around and rethink things. As a guide, the light on the background should be about one stop brighter, or slightly less. Yes, the idea is to overexpose the background, but if it burns out too much, it’ll flare, and you’ll lose edge detail on the subject. In our shot, at 1/125sec, f/11 and ISO 200, the background light was set to 1/4 power, while that on the subject, fitted with an Octo softbox, was just under 1/8th. You can use a flash meter for the background, but it’s often easier to enable the highlight clipping warnings on your camera and check that the area around the subject is blinking.

The hairlight should be angled so that it doesn’t spill onto the subject’s face which needs to be lit separately for the maximum level of control.

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Adding a hairlight Just like using a spotlight effect on the background, a hairlight adds separation and depth to the picture.

This time, the light is angled back onto the subject, picking out the edge of them, or the hair itself. A hair or rim light would normally be added as a third point alongside a key and fill light, but you can use it in a two-light set-up with pleasing results, too. As before, we first got the light right on the

subject, then brought in the hairlight, which was placed above and to the rear of Harri, angled down.

The hairlight can be placed anywhere behind the subject, but in this position it’s most natural.

Again, you need to shape and power the light correctly. You don’t want the light spilling all over the place, as this will cause flare or hit parts of the subject that are already lit, leading to overexposure or hard shadows; the hairlight should never add to the subject’s face. We used a spill-kill reflector fitted with a honeycomb, which worked fine, but you can fit a grid to a softbox if you want the light to be more diffused. Power-wise, we wanted the effect to be obvious without losing detail in Harri’s hair. At 1/125sec, f/11 and ISO 200, the key light on Harri was set to 1/8 power with a silver reflector panel used to fill shadows. The hairlight was set at just under 1/8, but appears slightly brighter thanks to the concentrated effect of the honeycomb and spill kill.

NEXT MONTH: More great two light set-ups, including butterfly and split lighting

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ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE LENCARTA ELITEPRO 2

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which recycles in just one second at full power and 1/5sec at the 1/32nd minimum power setting.

This means the heads deliver five stops of power adjustment from full power; don’t be misled by other manufacturers who can describe this degree of control as six stops. Flash durations are equally short. Full power is 1/2700sec and minimum power 1/900sec making the units suitable for a wide range of studio subjects.

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The same remote controls are also compatible with Lencarta’s own Atom, Safari 2, SmartFlash 2 and SuperFast units so you can confidently buy any light from the company’s comprehensive range without having to worry about compatibility. And there’s further versatility on offer, if you have a hotshoe flashgun that fires a preflash as the ElitePro 2 units can be fired using their S1 or S2 slave modes.

GREAT FOR HOME STUDIO USE, OR ANYWHERE YOU NEED BOTH POWER AND VERSATILITY ON TAP

LENCARTA.COM | 0845 618 2889

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