May 18 Intro II Photography Workshop | Winner and Tips

First let’s start with a new tradition! Just like being able to being a new routine on a Tuesday, we are going to take group photos at all our workshops! Many of our students return for a deeper understanding of photography. Class after class, these ‘student’s become your friends. And friends take pictures of each other! So to the May 18th Intro II class. Thanks for coming back for more =)

May 18th: Intro II Photography Workshop

Indoor lighting can be dramatic and beautiful, as our model Kayla is showing us. To achieve this picture, we set Kayla up in the hallway to the bathroom. Sound glamorous? After dimming the lights and shining a video light falling softly on her face, we helped change the boring hallway to a dramatic black and white portrait. We love working with video light because the image turns out much more dramatic. This is also a much faster solution than carrying a strobe around everywhere. If you’re walking from one scene to another, and see a cool lighting situation, don’t  be afraid to pop out that video light!

Another lighting situation was Kyle, outdoors with the video light. Often times, it’s so cloudy or there’s so much tree coverage, there’s hardly anything the reflect. A great option for this low lighting situation is the video light. It’s off camera- it’s like having daylight in your pocket, you can turn the power up or down, just like you can on a sunny day with a reflector.

When there’s no sun, and you want a hair-light, quick! What do you do? Use flash! Put the light before the model, set the flash to manual. Leaving the flash off, set your exposure for the image you are looking for. then turn the flash on, and using a transmitter fire a test shot. Tweaking the power of the flash, but leaving the settings in your camera alone, start working with your model! and Voila! Artificial sun streaming through her hair!

The last lighting scenario we gave you, that you’ll see repeated below in our runner up’s image, is off camera lighting. You can still see the difference an off camera flash is making on the ‘molding’ of Leah’s face. If this image was taken with diffused sunlight, the shadows would be a little softer. If you had tried this image with a video light, the light wouldn’t have even shown up because it was too bright out. So instead, we set up a portable flash, attached it to a lightstand, and put a softbox around it. The softbox was added for softness, it also has a hard black edge, so that, when faced almost completely away from Leah just the edge of the light (the softest part of the light) is falling on her. The off camera light created wrap around light. Remember, if you want more daylight and less intense shadows, change your shutter speed. when introducing an off camera light, the f-stop on your camera relates to the flash, and the shutter speed controls more or less ambient lighting.

Now on to the Students!!! Congratulations Diego! You made our hearts flutter with this low angle, bokah background, in focus image of Kayla!!

And we can’t have a winner without runner ups! First runner up goes to Dreama. You nailed the exposure for this dramatic and goofy photograph of Kyle. It’s often tricky to get such a low lighting images to be crisp, but also not to blow out highlights. But you did a great job! I love the light fall off too, i’d love to see it compared to nearly the same picture, but with Kyle looking straight into the camera. But let’s not get too deep here!

Second runner up is Angela. You sent in an amazing image that highlights one of the tricky situations we covered. Off camera flash exposing for the background!