Lighting Pt 3

The Art of Photography: Exploring Lighting Options

When it comes to photography, lighting is one of the most critical elements that can make or break an image. In this episode of The Art of Photography, we're going to explore some common lighting options and discuss their benefits and limitations.

Typically, when working with two lights, you would want to place them at 45-degree angles on your subject to minimize drastic shadows from developing. This technique helps create a more even lighting setup, which can lead to more pleasing results. However, this is just one way to approach lighting, and there are many other techniques and configurations that can be used depending on the desired effect.

One of the most inexpensive and effective lighting options is using continuous lights, such as those available in video production. These lights are designed to provide a steady, consistent light source, which can be ideal for capturing smooth footage or creating a moody atmosphere in photography. However, they do run a bit hot and may require more power to operate.

Another common lighting option is strobe lighting, which can add a creative element to your photography. Strobe lights are similar to on-camera flashes but offer more flexibility and control over the lighting setup. One of the benefits of strobe lights is that they can be used as off-camera lights, allowing you to position them in ways that create interesting shadows and highlights.

Using strobe lights also requires a good understanding of metering and how to work with your camera's flash system. Many cameras come equipped with built-in flashes that use TTL (Through The Lens) metering, which can simplify the process of capturing well-exposed images. However, it's essential to invest in a separate meter if you plan on using strobe lights regularly, as this will allow you to accurately measure the light and adjust your settings accordingly.

One of the key benefits of using strobe lights is that they offer more creative control over the lighting setup. With off-camera flashes, you can position them in ways that create interesting shadows and highlights, adding depth and dimension to your images. However, this also requires a bit more planning and coordination to get the desired effect.

In addition to the benefits of using strobe lights, it's essential to consider the cost and battery life requirements when deciding whether or not to invest in them. While they offer many creative options, they can be quite expensive and require a significant amount of power to operate.

To help illustrate these concepts, we've set up multiple lights in our studio, demonstrating how you can use different lighting configurations to achieve specific effects. We'll be discussing these setups in more detail in future episodes, so stay tuned for that.

In the next episode, we'll break down one of these lighting setups and show you how it works in real-life scenarios. We'll explore some sample images, diagrams, and explanations to help you understand the principles behind this technique. Whether you're just starting out with photography or looking to improve your skills, understanding lighting is essential for creating compelling and well-exposed images.

Ultimately, when it comes to choosing a lighting option, it's not just about the equipment itself, but also about how you plan to use it and what kind of results you want to achieve. By investing time in learning about different lighting techniques and experimenting with various setups, you can develop the skills and knowledge needed to create stunning images that tell your story.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com groups artof photography hey everybody welcome back once again to the Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes today we're going to do part three in our lighting series and today we're going to talk about strobe lighting specifically now you might want to go if you haven't already and catch back up on the other episodes where we kind of this is going to be kind of the wrap up where we talk about the third type of lighting here uh we've talked previously about on camera flash and then also continuous lighting and today we're going to talk about strobes and a strobe basically more or less is is going to be a similar kind of idea to using an on camera flash but you get more versatility to it I've got an example here I'm going to show you today and like continuous lighting is much like a house light or something like that or video lighting like we have in here right now where you're going to emit light continuously it just turns on and that's it um there are times where you need more light or you need a brighter light and the the the amount of intensity that a strobe emits is much like an on camera flash uh there are a couple reasons why it wouldn't be continuous one it's very very bright uh and two it requires a lot of power and then thirdly it heats up quite a bit too so that's why being able to warm this light up and then give a short burst of light much like an on camera flash is a really good way to go if you need um a lot of lighting now this is um this is not a very expensive light this is a cheap one made by a company called JTL um that are very affordable lights this one just has a simple cable and I know you can't see it but it just plugs into the wall uh some of the more expensive models um when you get on up into the uh the big money uh have things like you'll have a dedicated power box and dedicated power cables that make sure that the voltage and you know the power is consistent to the lamp and basically the downside to using something like this is that you know if you have a bunch of bursts of light they may not be exactly consistent from flash to flash uh which may or may not be a big deal to you you certainly are going to get what you pay for um you know with the more expensive models but I like these because they're very versatile and they're very inexpensive and you could rig up as many of these as you need to and if especially if you're just learning or you're just starting out this is a really really good option a good way to go um this one just mounts onto the stand I'll pull this off so you can see it just has a collar Mount which also has uh you know slot in here if you want to use an umbrella with this and we talked about diff diffusion umbrellas in the last episode so you can go kind of review that if you want some more info on that uh but I just put this on the light standand here and basically what we're going to do here is I'm going to show you how this emits light um and let's go ahead and tighten that down now basically on the back here you've got um a series of controls and you also have some some lights on the top and I'm explain what those do this basically um this particular model I can set this just up to strobe if I want or also the second um uh power switch over here provides a modeling lamp so if I turn both these on you're going to see that in fact it is giving you a little bit of continuous light and you could indeed shoot just with the modeling lamp there's nothing wrong with that it works like a very low low watted continuous lamp um and if you don't need a lot of light that certainly uh you know is kind of a versatile function that that is uh you know makes this very usable uh but the modeling lamp uh or the modeling function in here it's its function is to basically give you kind of a hint of where Shadows are going to fall intensity things like that so you can kind of get a feel especially if you're shooting on film of what you're going to get um you know on your picture in the end if you're shooting digital you may not need it as much cuz you could take a shot and redo it but the modeling lamp allows you to set these up and work with it some uh and then there's a series of uh of buttons there's also point this out real quick you have a voltage meter so if you want to um you know uh bring back the intensity uh to 1/8 power or on full uh which gives you a little control over you know how intense the light is and there's also a test switch so once you get these set up you can hit the test and go ahead and pop a burst and it has a audio on and off switch and you heard it beep a minute ago and that simply says it's ready um sometimes if you have an older bulb or something is wrong with the lamp it may take a minute to warm back up so you wouldn't want to shoot rapid succession with these um you want to make sure that it's ready to to for the next burst um on the top here you have a series of of smaller lights and basically the green on here just says it's ready to go red would indicate that it's not and then this third lamp over here and this may be a little hard to see uh but it's kind of a clear Dome and that's not actually a light what that is is an optical sensor and here's what's really cool about having that on here is light travels at a very uh fast speed obviously um and one thing that's really neat is you can use these rather than having to have a very very fancy setup to trigger multiple lights to to go one time I'll use just the on camera flash to show you um it'll actually detect when a um when a a a big difference or a burst of light happens in the room as long as it can see it so I'll go ahead and turn on this flash so you can and run a test shot so that you can see it uh but basically I'll just turn this on and you'll see that when I hit the flash test on here this light will fire also and the reason is is that because this little Optical sensor is seeing that if it's out of range or it doesn't detect a uh a sharp increase in light uh and operates obviously at a very fast speed um then it may not um may not work but it works really well um for small setups for basic setups portrait still life things like that um and once again like I said it's got the little slot on here for an umbrella so you can actually go diffuse this light and and it gives you a lot of Versatility and uh and kind of room to go on it um you can also set up multiple lights um we'll talk about I'll do another episode uh where we're going to talk about configurations and show some examples some images um so you can actually see this in use and how you would set this up but typically you would want if you did two of these you would have them at 45 Dee angles on your subject to keep drastic Shadows from um from developing and then sometimes you can do some back lighting or some key lighting fill lighting that kind of thing uh so you know you can really get a lot of control over the way things go but like I said this is a very inexpensive light and these are a really good option um I think it's real important and I've stressed this in all three of these lighting episodes that you know you can obviously and there's a lot of podcasts that get really into the gear side of things and you can spend a lot of money on lighting and uh you spend a lot of money on gear period and photography and kind of one thing I try to make different about this podcast is that doesn't matter um what you want to do is think more and spend less um when it turn comes to gear um obviously we've done some episodes with things like a hogga and things like that where you can get really good results without spending a lot of money and lighting certainly is no different than any of that um I think it's more important especially if you're just starting out and just learning uh to not spend so much money to decide what you want um the kinds of effects you want to go for you know that kind of thing and then you know once you get comfortable with that if you're in a professional situation where people are paying you good money to get results very quickly then certainly yeah you would want to use something like this on a um on a proo where you're charging somebody uh you know actual money to to do your job uh but these certainly work great if you're looking to learn and I imagine if you're watching these lighting episodes that that is indeed where you are so anyway so we've talked basically in the last three episodes about uh where we are on this we've got uh the um the camera flash uh some techniques we can do with that we've got and I'm using them right now but we've got continuous lighting that you would use maybe for video which you could also use instill photography continuous lights run a little bit hot but they are continuous meaning they don't flash they just stay on and then finally we talked about strobe liting which is much like the on camera flash the beauty of strobe lights and we talked about this a little bit with the on camera flash is that um you know by default these sit right over the lens which is really not a good place to emit light it's a very unnatural look it's a very unnatural feel and strobe lights you can get these off camera and you can do the same things now some of the more expensive um Lighting systems from Nikon and Canon uh some of these speed lights do kind of the similar things they talk to each other they'll work with the TTL and your camera you don't have to meter as much and I should mention that too we'll come back to that in a second but anyway you could actually use these as strobe lights if you had several of them the downside of that is they're very expensive they do offer some pretty cool creative options but uh is certainly not a cheap way to go uh and of course they require a lot of battery power uh one last thing I want to mention about strobe lights um is we did a section on metering where I showed you my meter and it's really important to purchase a meter that will meter Flash not all of them will it needs to have this circuitry involved to grab that short burst of light and measure how how how bright it was and uh that's going to help especially if you're shooting film or if you have a setup like this that doesn't have TTL that that is going to work well with your camera your camera probably will do fine if you have a a modern up-to-date camera but sometimes those little things you're going to give up when you go off offboard with your with your lighting as opposed to using a system flash so anyway I hope that's helped a little bit in the next episode what we're going to do is actually break this down we're going to look at some photos I'm going to show you some diagrams and we're going to show you how this actually works in real life life I think it's one thing to kind of do a showand tell of equipment on here and it's another thing to see how it's actually used and so we're going to do that next time but uh anyway that's all for today once again this has been the Art of Photography and thanks for watchingjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com groups artof photography hey everybody welcome back once again to the Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes today we're going to do part three in our lighting series and today we're going to talk about strobe lighting specifically now you might want to go if you haven't already and catch back up on the other episodes where we kind of this is going to be kind of the wrap up where we talk about the third type of lighting here uh we've talked previously about on camera flash and then also continuous lighting and today we're going to talk about strobes and a strobe basically more or less is is going to be a similar kind of idea to using an on camera flash but you get more versatility to it I've got an example here I'm going to show you today and like continuous lighting is much like a house light or something like that or video lighting like we have in here right now where you're going to emit light continuously it just turns on and that's it um there are times where you need more light or you need a brighter light and the the the amount of intensity that a strobe emits is much like an on camera flash uh there are a couple reasons why it wouldn't be continuous one it's very very bright uh and two it requires a lot of power and then thirdly it heats up quite a bit too so that's why being able to warm this light up and then give a short burst of light much like an on camera flash is a really good way to go if you need um a lot of lighting now this is um this is not a very expensive light this is a cheap one made by a company called JTL um that are very affordable lights this one just has a simple cable and I know you can't see it but it just plugs into the wall uh some of the more expensive models um when you get on up into the uh the big money uh have things like you'll have a dedicated power box and dedicated power cables that make sure that the voltage and you know the power is consistent to the lamp and basically the downside to using something like this is that you know if you have a bunch of bursts of light they may not be exactly consistent from flash to flash uh which may or may not be a big deal to you you certainly are going to get what you pay for um you know with the more expensive models but I like these because they're very versatile and they're very inexpensive and you could rig up as many of these as you need to and if especially if you're just learning or you're just starting out this is a really really good option a good way to go um this one just mounts onto the stand I'll pull this off so you can see it just has a collar Mount which also has uh you know slot in here if you want to use an umbrella with this and we talked about diff diffusion umbrellas in the last episode so you can go kind of review that if you want some more info on that uh but I just put this on the light standand here and basically what we're going to do here is I'm going to show you how this emits light um and let's go ahead and tighten that down now basically on the back here you've got um a series of controls and you also have some some lights on the top and I'm explain what those do this basically um this particular model I can set this just up to strobe if I want or also the second um uh power switch over here provides a modeling lamp so if I turn both these on you're going to see that in fact it is giving you a little bit of continuous light and you could indeed shoot just with the modeling lamp there's nothing wrong with that it works like a very low low watted continuous lamp um and if you don't need a lot of light that certainly uh you know is kind of a versatile function that that is uh you know makes this very usable uh but the modeling lamp uh or the modeling function in here it's its function is to basically give you kind of a hint of where Shadows are going to fall intensity things like that so you can kind of get a feel especially if you're shooting on film of what you're going to get um you know on your picture in the end if you're shooting digital you may not need it as much cuz you could take a shot and redo it but the modeling lamp allows you to set these up and work with it some uh and then there's a series of uh of buttons there's also point this out real quick you have a voltage meter so if you want to um you know uh bring back the intensity uh to 1/8 power or on full uh which gives you a little control over you know how intense the light is and there's also a test switch so once you get these set up you can hit the test and go ahead and pop a burst and it has a audio on and off switch and you heard it beep a minute ago and that simply says it's ready um sometimes if you have an older bulb or something is wrong with the lamp it may take a minute to warm back up so you wouldn't want to shoot rapid succession with these um you want to make sure that it's ready to to for the next burst um on the top here you have a series of of smaller lights and basically the green on here just says it's ready to go red would indicate that it's not and then this third lamp over here and this may be a little hard to see uh but it's kind of a clear Dome and that's not actually a light what that is is an optical sensor and here's what's really cool about having that on here is light travels at a very uh fast speed obviously um and one thing that's really neat is you can use these rather than having to have a very very fancy setup to trigger multiple lights to to go one time I'll use just the on camera flash to show you um it'll actually detect when a um when a a a big difference or a burst of light happens in the room as long as it can see it so I'll go ahead and turn on this flash so you can and run a test shot so that you can see it uh but basically I'll just turn this on and you'll see that when I hit the flash test on here this light will fire also and the reason is is that because this little Optical sensor is seeing that if it's out of range or it doesn't detect a uh a sharp increase in light uh and operates obviously at a very fast speed um then it may not um may not work but it works really well um for small setups for basic setups portrait still life things like that um and once again like I said it's got the little slot on here for an umbrella so you can actually go diffuse this light and and it gives you a lot of Versatility and uh and kind of room to go on it um you can also set up multiple lights um we'll talk about I'll do another episode uh where we're going to talk about configurations and show some examples some images um so you can actually see this in use and how you would set this up but typically you would want if you did two of these you would have them at 45 Dee angles on your subject to keep drastic Shadows from um from developing and then sometimes you can do some back lighting or some key lighting fill lighting that kind of thing uh so you know you can really get a lot of control over the way things go but like I said this is a very inexpensive light and these are a really good option um I think it's real important and I've stressed this in all three of these lighting episodes that you know you can obviously and there's a lot of podcasts that get really into the gear side of things and you can spend a lot of money on lighting and uh you spend a lot of money on gear period and photography and kind of one thing I try to make different about this podcast is that doesn't matter um what you want to do is think more and spend less um when it turn comes to gear um obviously we've done some episodes with things like a hogga and things like that where you can get really good results without spending a lot of money and lighting certainly is no different than any of that um I think it's more important especially if you're just starting out and just learning uh to not spend so much money to decide what you want um the kinds of effects you want to go for you know that kind of thing and then you know once you get comfortable with that if you're in a professional situation where people are paying you good money to get results very quickly then certainly yeah you would want to use something like this on a um on a proo where you're charging somebody uh you know actual money to to do your job uh but these certainly work great if you're looking to learn and I imagine if you're watching these lighting episodes that that is indeed where you are so anyway so we've talked basically in the last three episodes about uh where we are on this we've got uh the um the camera flash uh some techniques we can do with that we've got and I'm using them right now but we've got continuous lighting that you would use maybe for video which you could also use instill photography continuous lights run a little bit hot but they are continuous meaning they don't flash they just stay on and then finally we talked about strobe liting which is much like the on camera flash the beauty of strobe lights and we talked about this a little bit with the on camera flash is that um you know by default these sit right over the lens which is really not a good place to emit light it's a very unnatural look it's a very unnatural feel and strobe lights you can get these off camera and you can do the same things now some of the more expensive um Lighting systems from Nikon and Canon uh some of these speed lights do kind of the similar things they talk to each other they'll work with the TTL and your camera you don't have to meter as much and I should mention that too we'll come back to that in a second but anyway you could actually use these as strobe lights if you had several of them the downside of that is they're very expensive they do offer some pretty cool creative options but uh is certainly not a cheap way to go uh and of course they require a lot of battery power uh one last thing I want to mention about strobe lights um is we did a section on metering where I showed you my meter and it's really important to purchase a meter that will meter Flash not all of them will it needs to have this circuitry involved to grab that short burst of light and measure how how how bright it was and uh that's going to help especially if you're shooting film or if you have a setup like this that doesn't have TTL that that is going to work well with your camera your camera probably will do fine if you have a a modern up-to-date camera but sometimes those little things you're going to give up when you go off offboard with your with your lighting as opposed to using a system flash so anyway I hope that's helped a little bit in the next episode what we're going to do is actually break this down we're going to look at some photos I'm going to show you some diagrams and we're going to show you how this actually works in real life life I think it's one thing to kind of do a showand tell of equipment on here and it's another thing to see how it's actually used and so we're going to do that next time but uh anyway that's all for today once again this has been the Art of Photography and thanks for watching\n"