Part 3 -- How to Shoot Your Wife (A Tutorial)

[RussHeath]

Thanks to Digidave for inadvertently suggesting the revised title.

So after I whined a little about the lack of comments on Part 2, you all really reinforced my bad behavior by piling them on. Thank you kindly, and so here we are with Part 3. If you missed the first two, check out Part 1 and Part 2 for a little background about what my intentions are with this series.

We're almost up to Christmas (where I'll get a second speedlight!) but before the big day we all took a road trip with my wife's family to see some cousins and her grandmother. This was to be my first time shooting any more than two people, so I had to come up with some new techniques.

So what to do with 11 people and one little speedlight? I decided to use the sun as my second light as it was free and did not require any odd battery sizes. The idea here is detailed by the Strobist article from Lighting 102 about crosslighting with flash and sun. Go give it a look, as Mr. Hobby explains it much better than I can.

Tired of me yapping? Here is a test shot I took after setting up my bare strobe 180 degrees from the sun. That means that the strobe is hitting them at about 45 degrees with the sun directly across from it. The subjects are my wife and her brother.

Note: Click on any picture for a larger version.



As it turns out, this was my favorite from the whole bunch. The SB-600 was firing at about 1/8-1/4 power at f/5.6. My shutter is at 1/100 to get the right amount of sunlight in the exposure. If I had it to do over I would have them trade places, because her black shirt gets lost on the dark background and she could use the added rimlight from being on the other side. Alternatively, I could have used a reflector or another strobe behind her for some backlight to give her left shoulder (camera right) more definition.

So, lets add a couple of cousins and a grandma:



This was shot less than two minutes after the first one, so the sun had not changed much (but it was going down). I had to reposition the flash, which forced me to power it up some more. The whole thing looked a little overexposed and I wanted a little more DOF so I solved both problems by changing my aperture to f/6.3. Notice that the dominant nose shadow is on their right (camera left), so I would say the flash here is the key (main) light and the sun is working as fill and rimlight.

So up until here I had been able to squeeze the various groups in front of that lovely magnolia that has been working as a backdrop. With everyone in the photo, that wasn't possible. Here's the obligatory family group photo:



It's only 9 minutes from when I took that first test shot, but the sun has gone down enough that I need to slow my shutter to 1/50. I left the aperture at f/6.3 for fear that any less DOF would not get both rows in focus, and the flash was on 1/2 or full power and moved back to avoid grossly overexposing the person farthest camera right.

This shot is FAR from great. But I also think it's a heck of a lot better than your average frontal flash group shot from the holidays. The people standing at camera left have more sunlight on them, and the people kneeling at camera right have more flash lighting, but they are all very close to the same exposure. And the quality of the light is fairly interesting too.

Oh yea -- I definitely should have asked the back row to move over by one person, but sometimes you have to balance getting things right with driving your family completely nuts.

Lessons Learned (or at least reinforced):

--You can light 11 people with one strobe (and the sun).
--Afternoon sunlight changes fast, but shooting in manual and slowly decreasing shutter speed gives you lots of control over this.
--Check to see if the grass is wet before you ask everyone to kneel down. Oops.
--Always check your background, even if 10 people are waiting on you.
--Crosslighting is easy.

Please feel free to comment on the series, this post, or any individual picture. My hope is that watching me fumble through the process of learning portrait lighting will help some folks out and encourage the hesitant to try this with your own families. It's lots of fun.

Part 1 -- Umbrella Specular
Part 2 -- Adding a reflector for fill (and a Mother-in-law)
Part 3 -- Crosslighting with the sun (for a group portrait)
Part 4 -- Now I have two strobes!
Part 5 -- Ghetto striplight high key fun
Part 6 -- DIY Softbox for serious light

[Nai no Kami]

You should post another about how to shoot your mother-in-law...

[reyjinn]

Originally Posted by Nai no Kami

You should post another about how to shoot your mother-in-law...

Hehe... that DID make me laugh

[Taallyn]

Nice job. Good writeup too. Did you have an umbrella on the flash stand? Or just use a diffuser?

[Digidave]

Nice job! Love the first shot. I see what you mean about having the brother on the other side.

Maybe it's just me, but on the group of five, notice the dude on far right. You can see a flash spot on his left cheek. Then you move left all the way to grandma. They all have that flash glow on their left cheek. The two on the left don't have that. I'm assuming 2 flashes set at a lower level would fix that problem . Or bouncing off of an umbrella at a higher level? I look forward to the your next step, graduating to a double flash set-up?

The group shot. Tough assignment for sure!! Lot to think about with everybody joking around. You did a good job though, all in all.

PS. Do you know anything about shooting Ex-Wives?

[RussHeath]

Originally Posted by Nai no Kami

You should post another about how to shoot your mother-in-law...

I think we could all find material for a post like that . . .

Actually, I did shoot my mother-in-law in Part 2.

Originally Posted by Taallyn

Nice job. Good writeup too. Did you have an umbrella on the flash stand? Or just use a diffuser?

Taallyn -- Thanks. No umbrella (I have one but didn't want to give up the flash power to use it), and when I did this shoot I didn't even own a proper flash stand. For the first two shots the camera was handheld and I was using my tripod as a flash stand. For the third shot, I needed to put the camera on the tripod, so I pulled the flash off and attached it to my gorillapod.

[RussHeath]

Originally Posted by Digidave

Nice job! Love the first shot. I see what you mean about having the brother on the other side.

Maybe it's just me, but on the group of five, notice the dude on far right. You can see a flash spot on his left cheek. Then you move left all the way to grandma. They all have that flash glow on their left cheek. The two on the left don't have that. I'm assuming 2 flashes set at a lower level would fix that problem . Or bouncing off of an umbrella at a higher level? I look forward to the your next step, graduating to a double flash set-up?

The group shot. Tough assignment for sure!! Lot to think about with everybody joking around. You did a good job though, all in all.

PS. Do you know anything about shooting Ex-Wives?

Thanks, Digidave. I see what you mean about the hotspots on the second shot. Hadn't noticed that before, thanks for pointing it out. In retrospect, an umbrella would have been nice. I even had one in the bag but I didn't use it because I was worried that I wouldn't have enough power if I diffused the light any. The sun was still fairly bright when I was setting up. As it turned out, by the time I was shooting it probably would have worked well to use an umbrella for all except the big group shot.

As for shooting Ex-Wives? Well, I can tell you that you'll need a lot more firepower than a D80. And an alibi. And a mean lawyer.

[Saralonde]

Nice series, Newbie. I only just caught up with it after all the changes in the forum. Thanks for putting "A Tutorial" in the title, too. Helps differentiate the type of posting. "A Lighting Tutorial" might even be better.

[RussHeath]

Originally Posted by Saralonde

Nice series, Newbie. I only just caught up with it after all the changes in the forum. Thanks for putting "A Tutorial" in the title, too. Helps differentiate the type of posting. "A Lighting Tutorial" might even be better.

Saralonde -- Thanks! I'll keep you're suggestion in mind if/when I get to Part 4.

[Darren Rowse]

really enjoying these descriptions of your experiments! Keep them coming!