Photography Blog DigitalPixels.net

As in all things you need to know your tools so you can pick the best one for the job at hand. The goals for different styles vary and if you plan to shoot a variety of styles you'll need a wide variety of modifiers.

Any light source will produce a pure white or pure black. The character if its light is defined by what is in between; how smooth or abrupt the highlight-to-midtone shadow transitions are.

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Master 550ex Speedlite

580ex slave Flash bounced in silver umbrella

Manual mode - 1/1 power

ISO 200 - f/6.3 - 1/200 sec - 70 mm

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"Typical indoor ambient light, for instance, might be about 1/60th at 4/f at ISO 400. So If I shoot you in that light, available only, you are going to be properly exposed. You'll still probably look pretty bad -- we nailed the quantity, but the quality of the light is likely ugly as it comes from overhead fixtures."

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"Bounce is a great alternative to direct flash, especially for people pictures made under low ceilings or near white walls. As its name implies, you bounce the flash off a nearby surface rather than blasting it directly at your subjects. Bounce creates much softer light for highlights and shadows that better convey the shaping of a person's face.

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"I shot in the middle of the afternoon to use this portrait as an example of how to light an outdoor portrait with a couple of small flashes on a sunny day."

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"The concept of diffusing light to control image contrast is the focus of this lesson. This is where the birth of the soft box came from. By controlling the raw light with a large fabric reflector then applying levels of diffusion material inside, this reflector gave photographers a level of control, portability and convenience unheard of in the past."

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" Single Flash Limitations :

A single direct hot shoe flash regardless of where it is positioned will create sharply defined dark shadows because the size of the lightsource is small and there is no secondary light source to "fill" and modulate the tone of the shadows. "

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"It's almost a magician's art: giving form to an object that's essentially invisible. Lighting and photographing clear glass objects and giving them real visual appeal is one of the hardest tasks you'll ever face in a studio."

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hit continue for video fragments and result image.

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In this lesson, we will look at how the efficiency of a light reflector works. To illustrate this, we will employ the line up of umbrellas from Photoflex: the RUD, a white translucent umbrella, the RUT, a white translucent umbrella with a removable black cover, and the ADW, a white opaque umbrella.

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Here are a few lighting diagrams from studio photos :

Monoblock bounced in silver umbrella, single light source, no reflectors.High on lightstand, close to model

"Few decisions can push your photography to the next level like investing in serious, off-camera lighting. But what type of light? Your choices include exotics like HMI and LED lights, but the most popular today are tungsten, daylight-balanced fluorescents, and strobes in two formats: AC- powered studio lights and DC-, battery-powered location strobes."

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