Strobist 101 pdf download

Login Register. Best cameras and lenses. All forums Pro Digital Talk Change forum. Started Mar 7, Discussions thread. Mar 7, Much too heavy and expensive equipment and too little time to go out and take photos.

Reply to thread Reply with quote Complain. Alter Ego MOD elfroggio. Forum Parent First Previous Next. Color scheme? Latest sample galleries. OM System 20mm F1. Tamron mm F Thanks for the tip. Oh, I am not blaming you I left the previous comment. If I had put a little thought into it, I would have realized that the world is bigger than the continent where I live. It is easily solved - I should have mentioned this earlier.

In the Acrobat print dialog, simply set the page scaling to "none" instead of "fit to page" or anything else. In some cases the resulting print will not fit on one page e.

But the rest is easy enough to figure out. And by the way - thanks for posting the links. You park him on his couch just behind his genuine, stuffed-rhino-foot planter! This will create your shadows - but with detail. Assuming your camera can synch at up to a th of a sec, you have several choices.

The idea is to build an ambient- light-only exposure that would result in an underexposure of 2 stops. That will be your lighting ratio. You can choose another ratio and you should experiment but 2 stops is a good starting point. So, now that you have a 2-stop-underexposed ambient photo, you simply dial your strobe up or down on manual until he looks good well lit.

If this sounds a little seat-of-the-pants, it is and it isn't. One the one hand, lighting is a little like horseshoes and hand grenades. Close enough is close enough if it looks good. You will quickly start to learn to judge what your display and histograms are showing you. But the advantage to working this way is that it is fast and intuitive. And this is not to say that you want to be lazy. Fast is important because you a frequently do not have a lot of time, and b you want to get to making well-lit photos of him before you have used up all of his good will waiting for you to get your light just right.

Hey, he's got stuff to design, right? You'll light more often and your photos will look much better. Besides, as we'll talk about later, you'll quickly get the kinda-scary ability to set your flash's manual setting very close to where it needs to be on the first attempt.

I find that I am rarely more than a stop off on my first guess now. It is a very quick, intuitive way of working that fits well with the variables you need to solve when shooting an assignment. In our case, this lighting scheme can be completely set up in about three minutes with a little practice.

And that is including 30 seconds to pop few test frames to adjust the strobe's main output to nail the exposure down. Check your manuals for your particular flash to learn how to do this.

The advantage is repeatability. You nail down the light, and it flashes the same way, every time through the shoot, for consistent and predictable results. If you want to change the lighting angle during the shoot without going through the process of balancing just the 30 secs worth of test popping, that is simply keep the flash at about the same distance from the subject as you adjust the angle. Before we talked about the idea of balancing strobe with ambient.

We were using the strobe as a main light and the ambient as fill, but you do not always have to do it that way. Straight fill flash is very simple these day, with TTL flashes doing the heavy lifting for you automatically. But doing it the easy way usually means keeping the light on the camera, or using a TTL cord. These little cords tend to make the light come from a consistent position on the left side of the frame because that's where Darwin stuck your left hand.

The goal here is to start to replace the concept of 'fill flash' with that of 'balancing light. The process of using flash to augment which is a better concept than fill sunlight is very straightforward. First you are going to start at your camera's highest synch speed, because that'll get you the most flexibility from your small flash.

While you're at it, dial your ASA down as low as it will go to get better quality and avoid those CCD-chip dust spots, too. Now think about your lighting angle. As opposed to the idea of fill flashing, on-camera, from any angle outside without regard to the sun's direction, using a strobe on a stand effectively gives you two lights to play with. You can balance. You can cross light, You can do both. You'll have more flexible and consistent results using this approach. When you just fill flash from on-camera, it does bring up the shadows.

But while the flash adds detail it really misses out on the opportunity to improve the depth and quality of the light. So why not do both at the same time? Step one: Think of the sun as your main light, and your strobe as a secondary light. You are not just getting rid of raccoon eyes now. You are working with two lights. You have flexibility. Choose your angle of attack. Why would you have your fill on on camera when it would look better lighting from the upper right?

On camera flash limits you. All the time. Maybe you turn the angle around and shoot the subject in profile. Say he is facing to your right. You could have him looking into the sun, which is now angled to come from slightly behind his face to provide nice but too contrasty rim light.

Just move your strobe over to the left side, elevate it a little, and you have a cool-looking, two-light setup. Whatever the angle, the technique for balancing is the same. Assuming a sunny ambient to balance, set your camera at the highest synch speed i. Now, get your base ambient exposure. Now, with your strobe on manual and on a stand, set it to somewhere around a quarter to half power if you are working close.

Maybe half to full power if the flash is further away. If you are not lighting a large area and you usually are not zoom the flash to a 70mm or 85mm lens angle to make it even more powerful. Pop a test frame and eyeball it. If your flash-lit area is too bright, dial the flash down or move it back. If it is too dark, dial it up or move it forward. This is a fast, simple technique that works great. No flash meter needed. Full manual for a consistent shoot.

The important thing to remember and why I told you the angle stuff first is that this is now a starting point to turn your outside "fill" strobe into a true, useful second light source. One of the most useful guinea pigs subjects on which to practice your outside lighting is a simple mug shot.

What you have to remember is that they don't know you could do a perfectly good job by just sticking them in the shade for 30 seconds and bolting. Play with fill light and angles. You might want to grab something safe in the shade first just in case. Set up a quick umbrella in a corner where one wall is your background and another is your fill card.

You'll turn a mug shot into a head shot, which is just a more professional way to do it. You'll get some good low-pressure experience in your lighting. And they'll look better in the paper. It's a win-win. And, contrary to what you might think, most people will be secretly flattered by the effort you are putting in to making a better photo of them. And one more thing. Stop thinking of them as mug shots from this point forward. A reporter trained monkey can do a mug shot.

Start shooting head shots. You'll improve your quality and get into a habit of using light effectively. Using Gels to Correct Light I would hope that anyone shooting in color and using flash is color correcting their light by now.

But this is Lighting So just in case you aren't, we are going to run through it quickly and throw a couple tips out that you may not have considered yet. First, the basics. Every flash that you use should have two gels - Window Green and CTO, which stands for Color Temperature Orange where to get them nearby and ready to be used at any time.

These are your bread-and-butter correction gels. To attach them to a flash, I cut the gels into strips and put adhesive velcro very cheap at Home Depot, Wal Mart, etc. I put hooks on one side and loops on the other, so on very rare occasions you can stack the gels if need be. But mostly it helps to be able to stack them on the side of the flash for easy storage. You will also be putting the "loop" side of the velcro on the side of your strobe, as shown. Back to light color. Florescent light is not white.

It is a sickly, putrid green. If you are not gelling your strobe green to match it, objects lit by your flash will be white and the ambient-lit portion of your frame will be green.

This is a problem that even Photoshop cannot fix. The solution is very simple: You place a "Window Green" florescent gel over the strobe head. You color balance your digital camera for shooting in florescent light. You get consistent, reasonably color-correct photos, with both the strobe and ambient light coming out as again, reasonably correct color.

I say "reasonably," because all florescent lights are not the same color temperature. And, depending on which part of the 60hz electric sine wave cycle your shutter happens to grab from the florescent ambient lights, they will color shift on you, too. Don't believe me? You are trying to grab a portion of the sine wave here. Motor off ten available light frames in quick succession. See the color shifts between the frames?

That's what I am talking about. Not the ideal solution, but it does help. So, you balance your strobe output level for the ambient light levels when you shoot just like we talked about earlier and you should get a smooth, color-corrected photo.

If you run into problems, try warming up or cooling down the the florescent setting on your camera. I know my Nikon digital cameras do this very easily, and I would assume the Canon digital cameras do it, too. Tungsten is the same process, except you use the CTO gel and balance your camera to tungsten. And again, tungsten is not necessarily tungsten. Some lights burn warmer color-wise and some light - especially those turned way down on a dimmer, are almost red-orange.

But balancing the camera for tungsten and using your CTO gel on the flash will get you acceptably close on most all cases. Ah, but what about the rooms that have florescent overheads, tungsten desk lamps and big, daylight streaming windows? No problem. Just shoot black and white. Kidding, kidding What you have to do is to choose your dominant light color and go with it. Bear in mind that tungsten and daylight mix much better than do florescent and everything else.

Besides, if the window light was intense enough to be problematic, there should be enough light for people to work by. After that you just use your flash without gels.

Be aware of light levels coming from the the window and, as they say in Great Britain, Bob's your uncle. I suspect that as our library of photo examples in "On Assignment" grows, we will be getting into using colored gels for effect. But that's for later. If you feel compelled to experiment, just try to remember that a that 80's-MTV-Gel-The-Heck-Out-Of-It look is so over and b less is more when it comes to color-gelling your photos for effect.

Cereal Box Snoots and GoBo's Now that you are getting comfortable with the idea of shooting a light into an umbrella or ceiling, creating the lighting ratio and being color correct, it is time to start stretching a little. Sometimes what makes a photo sing is not so much where the light is, but where it isn't.

And, given that you already have a basic, off-camera strobe setup, you can make the gear you will need to restrict light for just a few pennies.

Remember when we put the Velcro on the sides of your flash head? It holds gels fine, but you should also add another piece of loop side Velcro so you can fasten a GoBo to your light. To make a useful-sized GoBo, Cut a piece of still cardboard to make a rectangle about 4x8 inches.

Cover it with gaffer's tape and stick some Velcro the "hooks" side at one end and at about a third of the way from the other end. This will allow you to attach it to the side of your flash either way so that you can choose how far it sticks out.

While I am thinking about it, you'll want to get a small roll of gaffer's tape. Looks like duct tape, but it is not. Back to the GoBo. Now, you have a sort of "barn door" that can block the light from your flash in the direction that you choose.

Your flash, being small and not-too-powerful, is just out of the camera frame. The GoBo could be stuck on the side of the strobe closest to you to keep light from flaring into your lens.

You can also use one on each side of the flash to make light that spreads vertically, but not horizontally or vice versa. You can keep light off of a background this way, as you may be lighting it from another source. If you are going to make one of these, you may as well blow a whole quarters worth of Velcro and make four or six of them. They just slide into the lid or back pocket of a Domke bag and weigh almost nothing.

No brainer. If you want to restrict the light even more, you'll want a snoot. It is nothing more than a sort of tunnel for the light to go through that will restrict it is all directions except for the exact direction the strobe is pointed.

Just shape the cardboard into a rectangular-shaped tube that will slide over your flash head. Make a few - 6", 8", 12" - the longer the tube, the tighter the beam of light. Now cover it in gaffer's tape to make it more durable and light-tight. By the way, when you shoot with a snoot, set your flash on its most telephoto setting.

No sense in wasting power by sending a wide beam of light just to block it with a snoot. How do you know how big your spot will be? Pop it against a wall from a good working distance say, 5 feet to get an idea of the beam spread of the various tubes. You might want to write your results on the tubes themselves, as in "1x2-foot pattern at 5 feet," etc.

This is a flash fired against the wall 4 feet away at the "85mm" zoom setting. Note the pattern of the light. This is the same setup, with an 8" cardboard snoot on the flash. Now, how are you gonna work like this without modeling lights? I'll tell you. You don't need no stinkin' modeling lights. Here's your modeling light: You ask your subject, "Can you see the front of my flash through the tube from where you are sitting?

You know that cool shaft of light you like to exploit when you see it coming from a window or something? Now you can make it any time. This is a very useful style of light for cool portraits, but you have to be aware of your ambient level. Crank up the shutter speed for more drama, or open it up for more detail in the unlit areas. For many beginners, this is a new technique that will open up loads of possibilities. Spend an evening experimenting with it at home to start to understand what it can do.

Textural Lighting for Detail Shots This is one technique I like to use when I am looking for one or two more photos to glean from an assignment. Designers appreciate the flexibility of being able to use a well-done detail shot in a layout, and you will sometimes be surprised by how well they are used.

This is especially the case when they have strong relevance to the story or are executed particularly well. The key is adding depth and texture to what may be a boring, two-dimensional object. To do this, you'll be placing the item somewhere so that you can get the strobe to exectly the same height to let the hard light rake across your object.

You can use a table, or you can simply set the item on a floor and place the flash on the floor a few feet away. I used to do this quick and dirty with a TTL cord when I shot film. But I do not completely trust TTL and digital yet. And besides, I have a TFT screen on the back of my camera to adjust the results very quickly while shooting on manual.

By far, your biggest variable will be the height of the flash to your object. Nail this variable down first. Little moves make big differences. That is why I like to use a table to get the object offf of the ground and the flash on a nearby stand for flexibility. You'll be surprised at how much texture you can bring out in a "2-D" object this way. Move the flash away a little. You have power to burn - you are shooting with direct, hard light - so there is no sense in getting llight fall-off if you do not want it.

Use a warming gel to mimic late-day light if you wish. Place books strategically between your light and the objects to create interesting shadows. If you do this, consider having the light come in from the direction of on of the corners of your frame. That makes for more interesting compositional lines. This is a technique that can quickly quickly boost a freelancer's income.

Most assignments are billed on a day-rate-against-space basis. We also have many articles here on our blog that will help in taking your craft photography skills to the next level for FREE :.

Tags: Craft photography , craft photography guide , craft photography tips , craft photography tutorial , list of craft photography tips , Photography , Product photography. Posted on There is also another version similar to this one that you can use almost anywhere and without Photoshop since this is an online version of almost the same product created in Flash named Lighting Studio.

This one is not a so visual complete version as the. I think it's pretty good for a Flash web one, oh well at least you got a good looking model to play with : Here are the links for each one: LightSetup. Enjoy them and have a great weekend. Posted by ruimleal Email This BlogThis!