Shooting Technique With Off-Camera Lights

Shooting Technique With Off-Camera Lights

by William Lulow

The last blog piece talked about setting up ONE LIGHT off-the-camera, to make your portraits much more interesting. Recently I did an assignment which consisted of making some portraits of my subject on the street using only one light. When I use this technique, I usually place my subject with his or her back to the sun and use my light to fill in the shadows. There is another reason for setting up an off-camera light, however. Here is what my setup was:

The camera, with a long lens (135mm f/2) on the tripod and the light on a stand, connected to the camera via radio trigger, in front of the camera. Because of the very shallow depth-of-field of the telephoto lens, I can place the light at a distance from the subject that will illuminate the face and allow me to have my subject’s back to the sun. What makes the exposure in this situation, is the distance of the flash to the subject (lamp-to-subject distance). I adjust the distance to make the subject about one-half to one full stop less than the ambient daylight in order to have the face register a normal tone but to keep the sunlight working as a highlight on the head and shoulders. Here is the finished image:

This is a fairly easy setup to use and I can carry the equipment needed and set it up in a matter of moments to yield results like this. I think the entire shoot, with several different poses and locations took about twenty minutes.

Notice the highlights on the head and shoulders. These give the image a nice “punch” and also serve (along with the shallow depth-of-field) to separate the subject from the background. The subject just seems to “pop” off the page. This is achieved with the long (telephoto) lens. Even at an aperture of f/11, the background is nice and soft. I like to be able to stop the lens down in order to make the image as sharp as possible, especially when doing portraits. It is the crispness of the person’s face against a very soft background that make the face stand out. And it is the compression of the entire image from the long lens that makes it possible to keep everything in focus at a small aperture.

Again, the technique here is to adjust the lamp-to-subject distance so that it acts as a mainlight about one stop less than what the sunlight is doing. This uses the sun as an “accent” light, but makes the face stand out from the shadows. It is the distance of the light from the subject that makes the exposure here. The exposure specs are ISO 100, 1/125th of a second shutter speed and an aperture of f/11. This is pretty much what I use in the studio with much more powerful lights bounced into my extra large portrait umbrella. Here, I’m using the off-camera light (which is a speedlight) set at one-quarter power of roughly 100watt/seconds available. My studio strobe units are usually set on 250 watt/seconds, with the light a bit closer to the subject than here on the street. I need to do that because the light loses some intensity when it is bounced into my large umbrella. The large umbrella is used to keep the light soft, so I need a bit more power to keep my exposures constant.

If I wanted the exposure on the subject’s face one f/stop lighter, I would move the light half the distance closer. I also can use a light meter, either hand-held or in the camera to measure amounts of light. Before the days of built-in metering, we would use our incident light meters to measure exact amounts of light falling on our subjects. The light meter readings are used as a starting point when determining final exposure.

In the days of film, we used to have to take incident light meter readings of the amount of light falling on the subject, take into account the lamp-to-subject distance and figure our exposures from there. Today, once you begin to standardize your procedures, you will be able to make fairly educated guesses as to what the exposures should be under light conditions such as this. I am rarely more than one-half stop off. Every once in a while I will need to make a slight adjustment in exposure when the images are analyzed in post-production, with Photoshop. Also, to get skin tones the way I like them I use the VIBRANCE tool as well.