How To Keep Light Soft With Portable Lighting

How To Keep Light Soft With Portable Lighting

by William Lulow

The best way to keep lighting soft when using portable strobes is to bounce the light off a ceiling and/ or to use a diffuser over the flash to soften it further. The principle of soft light is that it needs to be very large compared to the subject. If you bounce a flash off a white ceiling, the entire ceiling acts as the light source. So, if there are people in a room, they will be small in comparison to the ceiling itself, thus rendering the light on them diffuse and causing no really  harsh shadows. Problem with this is that whatever shadows are created are below the face and sometimes the tops of people’s heads are to bright.

This is harder to do when the ceiling is quite high because the light fall-off from the portable flash will be too great. When this is the case, I usually put a diffuser over the flash and instead of positioning it straight up to bounce it off the ceiling, I angle it about 60 degrees or so. This will throw some of the light up and some of the light that’s diffused will fall on the subject directly. This basically indirect  light, will be soft in nature, eliminating most shadows and gives a pleasing, overall light. It’s a great technique to use if you’re shooting a wedding or other event in a large room.

You can also use one of those after-market reflectors that try to simulate the light from an umbrella, but I find that too much light is lost from portable strobes to make these things worthwhile.  Especially if you’re using a portable with a low guide number (say 60 or below). It’s just not powerful enough to give you the coverage or the lens aperture you need.  You could try to bump up the ISO setting and see if that helps. I’ve done some pretty good event coverage at ISO 400 or even 800. There doesn’t seem to be too much noise with those settings.

In the past, another solution I’ve used is to take one or two studio strobes placed in strategic places in a large room with high ceilings and aim them at the ceiling. The problem with this is that if you have to shoot a subject that’s too close to one of the lights, the ceiling will be overexposed. So, this technique will work if your subject is usually in the middle of the room (like a dance floor, for example). You are basically raising the overall light level of the room to where you can shoot with small enough lens openings to get some depth of field.

Another solution would be to put the camera on a tripod or monopod and shoot with just available light. Again, if you can increase the ISO to an acceptable level, you might just be able to shoot without any flash at all. This obviously won’t work for a wedding where the dance floor is lit dramatically or with colored lights. There are times when you simply need to add light.

Here’s a shot with just available light:

Here, you can see the effects of normal house lights. The farther the light is from the subject, the more yellow it gets. There is no really direct light on the subjects here.

Here’s the effect of light bounced off of a high ceiling:

Notice the shadows on the faces. Light from above tends to light the tops of people’s heads. Even though it may light up a room, it’s generally not a good lighting for people.

The best way to light a scene with portable strobes is to use a bounce card mounted on the camera with additional lights placed strategically to add accent lights. Here’s an example:

This is a shot of people dancing at a party. You can see the subject in the middle, clearly lit up. You can also see the evidence of at least one additional light at the upper right. There was a second off-camera light as well to provide additional accents. This is the rig I use to get these results: