I got a new toy recently. Shortly before Christmas, I purchased an AlienBees B400 monolight and 30×60 “giant” softbox. The main driver behind this purchase was A) I like Paul C. Buff gear, B) PCB stuff is very cost effective, and C) I wanted to get a really big softbox without doing something home made with my non-standard existing strobes.

The Test Drive
Here’s pretty much the first image I made with the new strobe and softbox. I had literally taken it out of the box ten minutes before. No other lights were used, and I took this in the middle of the living room. I was able to drop the ambient to black by placing my wife and son right next to the light. This shot showed me that I really love the soft light coming from that big softbox.

Getting Down and Dirty
We recently moved into a new house that needed renovation before it could be lived in (a beat up foreclosure). So the new toy went into storage and didn’t get played with again for several weeks. But this past weekend I got to a point where I could take some time for photos. The new house has a great big basement that we’ve decided to make a dedicated studio space. It just needed to be set up. So I took a little time to get things all squared away. Then I decided not to let that work go to waste, so I brought out the new toy again.

For this shot, I used classic butterfly lighting. I put the giant softbox up high pointing down. Then I used a reflector down below to lift any shadows. But I decided to try the gold side to warm up the light. Seeing the nice warm color, I decided to put a deep blue gelled flash on the background for some warm/cool pizazz. I like how it turned out.

Then it was my turn in front of the camera. This time I took away the reflector and just went with the straight softbox. Again, the blue gelled flash on the background, but this time lying on the floor pointing up.

A few observations while testing out the new strobe:

• It’s plenty powerful. I would easily be able to light a decent sized group with the 400 w/s flash.
• The softbox is big, but it folds down easily with the umbrella type mechanism.
• Because the softbox is so big, it’s heavy, and needs a larger than normal stand to hold it up and keep from tipping.
• The flash recycles really fast, especially at lower power settings. It will keep up with my camera’s burst speed. Awesome.
• I like that the modeling light can track the power setting. I also like that it cuts out and turns back on when the flash is recycled. My other strobes beep when ready, and that gets old.

Conclusion
It’s awesome. I highly recommend this combination if you’re looking for a new studio strobe setup. I plan to buy a couple more.

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I left off on this series. The last article from the series, Mid Key Lighting, was over a year ago! I’ll try to be better about writing more of these. So here we go, high key lighting.

My son on his 1st birthday

The Concept

So now you’ve learned about low key and mid key lighting. To recap, low key is where the photograph is dominated by darker tones. Mid key is dominated by medium tones. Can you guess what high key is? Yep, totally dominated by bright tones.

A high key image lends itself to a bright and cheery feel. It evokes happy emotions.

This is exactly why I chose to photograph my son in high key for his first birthday portrait. It’s an awesome, happy time, full of cheer and pride for tackling that difficult first year. The first year is full of challenges and triumphs, both for baby and parents. The first birthday also marks the beginning of the “sweet spot” (in my opinion). Year number two is awesome! Then comes year number three, when the terrible twos start, then the honeymoon is over! Ahem, ok back to the program.

Background

Obviously, since high key is bright, you’ll need a bright background. White seamless paper is my choice here. You could use white cloth, but paper seems to work best. You could use a less than white background, and nuke it with lights, but I wouldn’t suggest it, especially if you’re just starting out with this style of lighting.