This is a quick lighting tutorial for those wanting to get started with off-shoe strobe lighting.
Backyard shots in the middle of the day are seemingly idea for most people, but the challenges are dealing with mixed exposures of the sun’s powerful direct light and shadows.
In the shot below, I grabbed a closeup shot and had my camera center-weighted meter to properly exposure for skin tones. The distant background house produces a drastic highlight that could be distracting. I could’ve retaken the shot and compensated a half stop, but then the house in the background would’ve been more bleached out.
Zooming out in aperture priority mode, the camera exposes for a mixed composition and averages out the shot to expose mainly for the sky, and less on my subject. Again, I could’ve compensated 2 stops to brighten my subject, but then the background would’ve been very blown out.
I setup a studio strobe off to my right and made a shot while exposing for the blue sky.
Then I moved the light to my left and took another shot.
I added a second accent light to my right slightly behind my subject. Ideally you would put this on a light stand, but used a chair to improvise.
Here’s a final shot with both lights in action.
Here’s a look at the setup.
Why go through all of this?
1. It highlights your subject by underexposing the hard sunlight and sky.
2. You get greater detail in your image.
3. It adds depth to the image. A wider gradient from highlight to shadow.
Here are 100% cropped views to show the detail.
This shot below is without lighting:
This shot below is with lighting:
Additional Details:
These were taken on a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24-70 2.8 L lens. The main strobe was a Profoto AcuteB 600R, Acute D4 head with 22″ white beauty dish. The 2nd strobe was a Canon 580EX. The lights were triggered using a cheapo Blazzeo MegTrig from hotshoe to the 580EX, the Profoto was triggered via built-in optical slave from the 580EX.
Remarks:
I’m far from a master of lighting, and the obviousness is that you can actually tell I used lighting. True masters will set this up and you won’t even be able to tell that tons of artificial lighting was used.
