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.

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: