Part 6 -- DIY Softobx for More Serious Light (a tutorial)

[RussHeath]

Thank you all for your interest and encouragement in my self-assigned journey to learn portrait lighting.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 -- One strobe, one umbrella, strobist style.
Part 2 -- Add a Mother-in-Law and a Great Dane.
Part 3 -- Crosslighting with the sun.
Part 4 -- My wife's family is nuts, but they're fun to shoot.
Part 5 -- Ghetto striplight high key fun.

If you're just joining me, check out the other threads to get a sense of why I'm doing these. If you're like me and don't have much of an attention span, I'm trying to learn portrait lighting by abusing my wife's good will.

So grab a beer and settle in for some portrait lighting fun!

Main Concepts Addressed:
-- Low Key portraiture
-- DIY softbox
-- Hairlight/rimlight
-- Using a reflector

If you're low on $$ and want to light, go check out my DIY striplight post. I started this shoot with the idea that I could convert those two home Depot striplights ($35) into a large softbox that would give me the quality of (North) window light at any time of day in any room of my house. I oriented them vertically on my Target laundry stand ($15) with some ball bungees, and I clipped a sheet of diffusion material directly in front of the two lights. I then hung a white sheet about 1 foot in front of this, to get a double diffused very soft light that was mobile and at least a little controllable.

The main disadvangates to this setup compared to an expensive ready-made softbox (Elinchrom makes a nice big one for $900) are portability, directionality, and light output. The obvious advantage is that for $50 you get the lights AND the softbox. And as you'll see, if you want to stick a fancy strobe behind it all that works well too . . .

So right from the start, I had too much ambient light in my room (the real window in my spare bedroom faces West and was bringing in too much ambient light that was competing with my fake window). This situation was going to keep me from using the longer shutter speeds that I need with a continuous light source (the softbox), so I stuck a strobe behind the softbox and voila -- a simple portrait with a great big light source. The fluorescent tubes are doing nothing here because I'm at 1/200, which also keeps the ambient sunlight in the room out of my shot:



The sun has finished going down while I was wasting time (no more ambient sunlight creeping into my room), so I can pull my strobe out of the softbox and use it like I originally intended. That means slowing the shutter and/or bumping up the ISO until those 4 fluorescent tubes in the DIY softbox are putting out enough light. Here is a shot with only the softbox used for lighting. I was shooting 1/40 at f/3.0, ISO 100 (handheld with a 105mm lens -- VR is awesome!)



Not bad, and some people would be content to leave it at that. The question to ask at this point, is what do I like and what do I want to change about this light? Learning to ask and answer this question has been key for me in learning to light. I wanted more light to wrap around the front of her face, a little more edge definition on the shadow side, and no prominent nose or chin shadow. So how can I accomplish those goals?

1) More wrap around light in front -- I stuck a strobe in a shoot-through umbrella above and camera left. It works with the softbox, being from the same side, but it's a little more front-on, and wraps around her face smoothly. I set the power to give me a little less exposure than the softbox itself.

2) Edge definition on the shadow side -- Easy. Just stick a piece of white foamcore at camera right to reflect some light back at her.

3) Reduce the chin/nose shadow -- also easy, just stick a silver piece of reflective poster board out of frame below her face.

So by combining these adjustments, I get this:



And this:

[RussHeath]

(Apologies for reposting to myself)

Now I want to make two changes. First, I want the light across the front of her face to be more even. I'll do that by moving the shoot through umbrella around to camera right and using it for fill, set to a power that is around 1/2 stop less than what I'm getting from the softbox. I'll leave that silver card and white foamcore in place.

Second, I want to use my other SB-600 to light her from behind and provide separation from the background (sometimes called a hairlight / rimlight / kicker depending on the exact placement and effect). Here is the only setup shot I took during the shoot:



And finally a shot taken with this setup:



I didn't quite get this posted during April, but as one of my flickr friends, Athena, has reminded me -- April was bare shoulders month. So here is one with a slightly different lighting scheme. I won't go into full details, but it's very similar to the above shot.



Hope you all enjoyed it! C&C welcome on the shots and questions welcome about any of the techniques. If you have absolutely no idea what I'm babbling about, ask some questions and there will be someone here to help answer. I will be out of town for a few days after posting this, so I may be a little slow to reply.

NOTE: At the request of my wife and model, very little editing was done to these. There are all sorts of possibilities here for PP, particularly with B&W conversions, but she convinced me that keeping the shots very near their original appearance would be better for the tutorial. All I've done is minor cropping and cleaning up stray hairs.

[Mr Guy]

Unfortunately for my wife, my new Metz flash just arrived today, and I bought the striplights and garment hangers after your last tutorial.

Sounds like she's in for a long weekend with me!


Excellent tips, can't wait to try them.

Somewhat of a silly question, but does the thread count of the sheet make a difference, to anyone's knowledge?

[RussHeath]

Mr. Guy -- I guess it depends whether you're using the sheets as diffusers or backgrounds. As a background, I don't imagine that thread count would matter. The black backdrop in these shots is a very cheap black sheet. If I got light behind it that would show through, but otherwise it's no big deal.

If you're using a white sheet as a diffuser, I think higher thread count sheets would block a little more light. So they may give you a little more even diffusion but will do so at the expense of power. The white sheet I'm using here is old and fairly low thread count.

Good luck with your photo shoot! Be sure to show us some samples when you get it done.

[Mr Guy]

My wife wouldn't volunteer tonight, some nonsense about working late and having to get up early.

Fortunately, I got hot little redhead to sit for me; Hope this doesn't belong down in nudes!




This was taken with two striplights, one pointed at her with a plastic diffuser sheet in front of her and the other pointed back at the backing material. I didn't have a plain sheet handy, so it looks like I'm hitting clearance at K-Mart tomorrow for sheets to drape. I'm also having a dickens of time with my manual 50mm flipping between completely overexposed and dark. This one was taken with the flash bounced off the wall/ceiling corner to camera right, zoomed in with my 200mm because I was getting so frustrated with the over exposure with the manual lens and I just couldn't get the bokeh I wanted with the kit lens. How do you get the aperture big enough to get the background you want without blowing out the picture entirely? There's clearly something I'm not putting together that would make this make sense!

I played around for a couple hours with my remote using myself as my victimmodel and think I have the lighting right, even if I couldn't get the focus right on myself.

PS I get the nagging feeling people are going to think your model is prettier than mine.

[RussHeath]

Originally Posted by Mr Guy

. . . I'm also having a dickens of time with my manual 50mm flipping between completely overexposed and dark. This one was taken with the flash bounced off the wall/ceiling corner to camera right, zoomed in with my 200mm because I was getting so frustrated with the over exposure with the manual lens and I just couldn't get the bokeh I wanted with the kit lens. How do you get the aperture big enough to get the background you want without blowing out the picture entirely? There's clearly something I'm not putting together that would make this make sense!

PS I get the nagging feeling people are going to think your model is prettier than mine.

Well, I think you have a lovely model there.

Your question above is at least two questions that I can see. The first is about bokeh. For a long drawn out explanation, see here for a thread I did a while ago. The short version is that bokeh is a product of both focal length and aperture (among other things), not just aperture. So your 200mm at f/5.6 might be as good or better than your 50mm at f/2.8.

The second part is about the lights. If you know all of this, please forgive the explanation (but it might help someone out there).

Lets assume that ISO is static for this explanation, so we're only dealing with shutter speed and aperture. First, we'll consider the strip lights, which are continuous light sources. That means that both shutter speed and aperture affect the amount of light in the picture. If you were only using the strip lights and felt that the shot was overexposed, you could either shorten your shutter speed or narrow your aperture (higher f/number).

Flash is a different animal. It's a burst of light that lasts anywhere from 1/1000th of a second to 1/8000th depending on power. With typical shutter speeds within your camera's sync range (usually max around 1/200), that means that shutter speed has absolutely no bearing on how much light hits the sensor. Only aperture matters.

So in the lighting situation you described you need to know which lights are causing your overexposure so you can adjust correctly. Do this by turning off either the flash or the striplights and taking a shot. If, for example, you find that the flash is causing your overexposure, then you must narrow the aperture or decrease the flash power. However, if you narrow the aperture then you've also changed the exposure for the striplights. If they were right already then you have to adjust them back up by making the shutter speed longer. Does this all make sense? I know I'm rambling.

If you find that the striplights are causing your overexposure (unlikely) the easy fix is to use a faster shutter speed. That keeps the aperture the same and will not affect your flash exposure.

All of this assumes you are going full manual with both the flash and the camera, otherwise there are more variables at play such as the camera's metering and the flash iTTL calculations. I do this kind of portrait work in full manual so the camera doesn't try to argue with me.

If any/some/all of this is unclear, please let me know. And if you knew it already, I'm sorry!

[KJTCS]

Woo hoo, part 6 has arrived, this has been very anticipated, will have to play tonight, good thing the kids are on school holidays, may be a long night...lol

Thats ok they enjoy it, makes them fel like models, and the lights make them act like "real models". They love it.
Thanks so much for these RussHeath they are great.

[Digidave]

Aaaaa, there she is, our lovely little crusader. You be sure to tell your wife that we all thank her dearly! We're going to have to make her an honorary something or an other. Another excellent tutorial Russ. Well done my man!

[Sime]

Yes indeed! Quality Tutorial... Thanks Russ

[RussHeath]

Originally Posted by KJTCS

Woo hoo, part 6 has arrived, this has been very anticipated, will have to play tonight, good thing the kids are on school holidays, may be a long night...lol

Thats ok they enjoy it, makes them fel like models, and the lights make them act like "real models". They love it.
Thanks so much for these RussHeath they are great.

Thanks, KJTCS! I hope the novelty doesn't wear off too soon for your daughters. My wife's getting a little sick of these and I'm going to have to get creative with the bribes to keep doing them . . .

Originally Posted by Digidave

Aaaaa, there she is, our lovely little crusader. You be sure to tell your wife that we all thank her dearly! We're going to have to make her an honorary something or an other. Another excellent tutorial Russ. Well done my man!

I'll be sure to tell her, Dave! She really likes the feedback about the photos, and it makes her feel more like she's helping me out when everyone seems to enjoy them so much.

Originally Posted by Sime™

Yes indeed! Quality Tutorial... Thanks Russ

You're quite welcome, Sime. Glad you liked it!