A few weeks ago, I took the photos of about 30 employees for a government contractor in Fort Collins, CO. These were to be simple head shots for the company’s use on the web and in an employee directory. Nothing special.

Here’s a diagram to show how the lighting was set up for the employee photos:

The camera was about 15 feet from the subject, set to 70mm with a shutter speed of 1/250th to kill the ambient light. Aperture was set to 6.3 to throw that background a little out of focus (helped by the longer focal length). This also let me choose a low power on the flashes to use less juice and recycle quickly.

The key light was a Canon 430EX set to 1/4 power, and shooting through a translucent umbrella. I feathered the light forward to soften it and direct a good portion of the light across the subject and onto the reflector.

The gold reflector bounced the light back into the shadow areas and warmed them up, giving the subjects a nice glow.

The background light was a Vivitar 285HV, set to 1/16th power and zoomed out all the way to give a tight light pattern. It was up about 8 feet off the ground, and placed about 6 inches from the wall. The light was pointing down at about 45 degrees. This made the light sort of “skip” or “scrape” down that wall, adding lots of shadow to the rugged stone. Had I pointed the light straight at the wall from a distance, it would have come out looking flat and lack interest and shadow.

This was a very quick throw together shot. I got to the hotel about ten minutes before the employees, picked the spot in about a minute, and threw everything up in a hurry. Two test shots to get the lighting nailed and I was off and running. Bang bang bang, 30 people in about ten minutes. Each person was literally less than 20 seconds. They sit down, a couple posing instructions, *click*, “Next”.

I got an email a few weeks back from Ken Kobre, the inventor of the Lightscoop. It would seem that the good professor stumbled across my article on making your own off camera lighting using an index card. The Lightscoop was mentioned in the comments, and Ken wanted to chime in, but didn’t want to make any shameless plugs. I can appreciate that Ken.

Instead, he emailed me and offered to send me a Lightscoop to play with and give an honest review right here on Sublime Light. I accepted and he shipped one off right away. Ordinarily I’d be on something like that like white on rice, but with my move to Colorado, I had to put the playtime on the back burner. As soon as things calm down and we get settled in to our new home in the Rocky Mountains, you’ll see what I think of the Lightscoop.

I plan to see what this thing can do out of the box. Then I’ll go Tim “The Toolman” Taylor on it and see what kind of photos we can really get out of it. And of course, I’ll compare it to direct popup flash and to the index card trick.

So keep your eyes peeled in January if you have any interest in buying a Lightscoop. Happy New Year everyone!

I recently put my house on the market. I’m a photographer. Naturally, one thing immediately popped into my mind when it came time to list the house…taking my own photos of the house. I’ve been toying with the idea of breaking into real estate photography for a little while, and thought that moving to Colorado would make a good starting point for that venture. Since I had to get my own home looking nice for sale, it would make a good guinea pig.

During my research for this new venture, I stumbled across a real estate photography blog, aptly named Photography For Real Estate written by Larry Lohrman. Larry knows his stuff, and I spent hours scouring his blog for useful information that I could use in my own photos. He was even nice enough to provide me a little feedback on the job I’d done, mentioning that the photos were good for a first time, though I needed to ensure that all vertical surfaces remained vertical in the photos. Mental note taken. If you ever need to do any kind of architectural photography, check out Larry’s site before you do.

So here are a couple of the interior shots from my own house. Here’s my living room:

From a recent
portrait session

Wow, it’s been a crazy couple of months, and I’ve decided it’s time to come up for air for a few minutes, just long enough to write up a post. I know many of you regular readers out there have been wondering where I’ve been and why I suddenly stopped posting. One reader even called to make sure everything was ok (thanks for the ring Scott).

You see, right about time I made my last post, things got crazy in the Solley household. As some of the more longtime readers know, I’ve been planning a move to Colorado from Texas for some time now. Well that time has finally come. I’ve been busy for the last two months straight getting my house ready to sell (lots of work there), packing for the move, and of course with Christmas coming up, we’ve been shooting lots of portrait sessions. We’re actually making our move to Colorado this weekend. That’s right, immediately following Christmas we’ll be loading up and heading to the mountains. What this means is that you’ll start seeing portraits taken with the beautiful Rocky Mountains in the background from here on out.

I’ve been getting some questions coming to my inbox, but have just been too busy to answer them. So I thought this would be a good time to do so. Since time is short today, I’ll just answer one that seems especially relevant.

Julius writes:
I’ve been looking at your site.. and love it. For some reason I’ve been getting many requests to photograph parties, and weddings. I’ve been looking at some basic traveling light kits from Photogenic, and noticed the Pocket-Wizard Plus II. How does this work with the Nikon D300, the SB-800 and also light kits for portraits? Or, does it? I’m really wanting to get started and am very interested in any info you can provide to help get me on the right track.

You’ve come to the right place Julius. Pocket Wizard Plus II’s are the cat’s meow. You can use them on any camera with a hot shoe (including that D300) and they definitely work nicely with those Nikon flashes. There are lots of cables to connect them to any flash or studio strobe. For a little more info., check out the Portrait Lighting For Beginners: Camera and Lights article. And for tons more information that’s all over the PW’s, check out Strobist.

That’s it for today folks. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, have a wonderful holiday. For everyone else, take some awesome pictures.

A couple of weeks ago, I told you that I got my hands on a Vivitar 285HV shoe mount flash (click for more on that).

My first impressions of the flash were positive. With it’s uber-manual controls and low price ($89 from Amazon), this is a tough deal to beat.

Then I ran off to Colorado for five days and decided to bring my new flash along for the ride. I has intentions on getting some really great family portraits in Rocky Mountain National Park, but thanks to it being 35 degrees, wind blowing 50 MPH, and it snowing off and on, it didn’t happen. Did I mention I was wearing shorts? Yeah, the portrait setup wasn’t happenin’, no way. The good news for me though is that we’re about to put our house on the market and move there, so many portrait opportunities still remain to be had.

But I digress. My sister in law is pregnant with twins. What a great opportunity to bring some gear and get some nice maternity shots for her and my brother! Armed with two small flashes I had the control to get some great portraits of them in their new home in Colorado.

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.

Photo by cloudnine

You now know how to create low key portraits using dark tones. Now you’re ready to move on to mid key portraits. Mid key lighting is simply lighting so that the overall tones in the photograph are somewhere in the middle. Not too dark and not too bright. That’s it. To make your portrait model stand out, you’ll want her to be the brighter part of the image.

Like low key lighting, this style of lighting lends itself nicely to one light portraits. Sure you can use more lights and reflectors if you want to, but you don’t have to. You can position your subject and key light in such a way that the light hits both the subject and spills on to the background. Because your subject will be closer to the light, she will automatically be brighter than the background, attaining the look you want.

Rui M. Leal of
Lighting Mods

Portuguese photographer Rui M. Leal has put together quite a blog that I think is right up your alley. It goes by the name Lighting Mods and is dedicated to showing you fantastic and cheap ways to improve your lighting by putting together your own lighting tools. I’ve been keeping tabs on Rui for some time now, and he has yet to let me down.

The latest lighting mod is a do-it-yourself soft lighting panel made of PVC. I myself have been meaning to put one of these together for quite some time but just haven’t gotten around to it. When I do, it will include the ability to act as a reflector using an emergency Space Blanket.

Check it out for yourself if you want to improve your portrait lighting on the cheap. Rui is now on part two of this three part series.


Got a great tip? Let me know about it and I’ll tell the world! With credit to you of course.

Image by tracytoler

Reader and photo pool regular poster Tracy Toler put up a pretty cool photo last week.

This close crop shows how he took a Vivitar 283 flash, stuck it in a softbox, and then put a hand cut gobo over it shaped like a tree. The result is a catch light in the eyes of your subject that looks like…well…a tree.

Tracy’s creativity impresses me. Not just the photo. Heck, I don’t think I even have the artistic ability to make a cutout of a tree in paper. It would probably look like something out of a Tim Burton movie.

I also noticed another little tidbit of information in Tracy’s profile that I like. Tracy is a beer man, and I like anyone who likes beer. Right on Tracy.

Got any cool effects like this of your own? Drop a comment and tell us all about it. And of course don’t forget to add your own photos to the reader photo pool on Flickr. You might end up on the front page too. Woohoo!

I’m still on vacation in Colorado, but I’m going home today, so things will be back to normal. Did you even notice I was gone?

I’ve been wanting to expand my outdoor, small flash lighting gear for a little while now. At the top of my list of purchases was the Vivitar 285HV shoe mount flash. I went ahead and bought the flash last week from Amazon through the Sublime Light store. It came on Friday and I’m very impressed by what I’ve seen so far.

The Pros

Cost. This flash is only $89 on Amazon.

This flash is all about simplicity. I absolutely LOVE how simple it is. Want to turn the power output up or down? Just turn the dial. No LCD screen. No buttons. Just turn the dial. This is a major peeve of mine with my Canon 430EX. The buttons are hard to push and you really have to work at it to adjust the power output. Not with the Vivitar.

Keeping with the theme of simplicity, zooming the flash head is also manual. No buttons, no LCD. Just grab the head and pull. I like that there’s no motor to break as the unit ages.

Speaking of the flash head, there’s a slot in the front of the head for a diffusion panel (included). In that same slot you could slip your gels. No more using sticky Velcro to attach gels to your flash! I’m really starting to like this flash.

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.

Image by Chakoo

Low key lighting is perhaps my favorite style of studio lighting. There’s just something about the mood and drama that is created when you have a dark background with the subject standing out against it. Combine this lighting with some creative and dramatic posing and you have the power to create images that will be cherished for generations.

The Setup

The idea behind low key lighting is simple: dark tones, minimal lighting, and emphasis on certain areas of the subject. This is the perfect lighting setup for those of you with just one light, because single light portraits look great in this lighting scheme. While I have several lights with me on any given portrait session, when I get going on the low key setup, usually all get turned off but one. If I do use more than one light, it’s usually just to fill in a little bit of shadow detail so that the image isn’t too contrasty.