Better Point-and-Shoot Shots with an External Flash

Last weekend, one of our friends celebrated their daughter's birthday party.  On this kind of occasion, I don't usually bring a DSLR anymore - I feel it is a little too much when we're not the celebrants.  Instead, I brought our trusty Lumix LX5 (reviewed here).  However, to get the best image quality out of the LX5, I paired it with an external flash, the Yongnuo YN-560EX (reviewed here).

Yes, the 560EX is a manual not TTL flash.  (I don't have a dedicated TTL flash for the Lumix LX5.)  However, using a manual flash while shooting run-and-gun is actually easier than it sounds.  (See: Therapy for TTL Addiction: How to Use Manual Flash).

In this post, I'll discuss my thought process in setting the flash and ambient exposures.

Selling Staid Stuff Sexily in Sizzling Strobist Style - Part 2 (Basic)

One thing I noticed about stores in malls is that higher end ones tend to use a lot of hard light sources and they try to use spotlights to create pools of light.  I tried to use that approach for the shot above.

My wife was bugging me to sell my golf clubs.  I didn't argue even a bit.  I hadn't touched these clubs in a very long while, and I'm terrible at golf anyway.  Once, my friend and I were at the driving range and I hit the ball with my driver so badly that the ball flew perpendicularly from the intended path and hit my friend's leg.  If you think that was bad, it happened yet again on another occasion, hitting another friend's butt that time.

Back to the topic...

The sky was overcast, and I could have taken a shot with just ambient light, and the light would have looked very soft like this:

Instead, to add a bit of spice, I decided to create a subtle spotlight.  To avoid a harsh look, however, the ratio between the highlight and the shadow would have to be low.  The shadowless ambient light was perfect for providing fill.  I just underexposed ambient by about a stop.

For the spotlight, I put a flash on a tripod on camera right (the SB-800 was attached to the AS-19 speedlight stand it came with, which was in turn mounted on the tripod).  The flash was a couple of feet higher than the clubs and aimed down at a steep angle.  To restrict the light, I zoomed the flash to its maximum (105mm).  A snoot or grid would have created too narrow a beam for my taste.  The flash was in manual mode for consistency (manual mode is ideal for setup shots like this).  The flash was controlled and triggered via my popup flash (CLS Advanced Wireless Lighting).  I just chimped the power until the histogram was close to the right edge (which would mean that the golf balls would be rendered as white), ignoring the small histogram spike from specular reflections on the clubs.

Hopefully I can sell these clubs soon to avoid hurting more people.

Some related posts:

• Selling Staid Stuff Sexily in Sizzling Strobist Style - Part 1
• TTL vs. Manual: False Dilemma
• Therapy for TTL Addiction: How to Use Manual Flash
• Quality vs. Contrast
• Check out this very good explanation of Fill Light from www.portraitlighting.net

Fill Flash: Summer Pool Party! (Basic)

We attended a summer pool party-themed birthday hosted by our friends.  It was sunny but not hot - just absolutely perfect weather to have a dip in the pool.



Chastened by my failure to take good photos at our toddler's birthday, this time I resolved to take a back-to-basics approach.  How basic?  I stuck to on-camera flash, on TTL, bare (no diffusers or anything), in almost all cases direct frontal light.  OK, I can see the tomatoes coming from the strobist crowd... :)  There is a certain logic to the approach I took.  Outdoors, with virtually no suitable bounce surface, using flash for on-axis fill is a logical technique.

A second technique I used was to do my best to avoid direct sunlight on the face of the subject.  Direct sunlight looks boring (to me), is rarely flattering, and de-saturates colors:

Instead, I tried to use the sunlight as backlight or rim light.

Applying just those three simple lighting techniques, I was able to focus on capturing key moments, composition, and even on enjoying myself.  How'd the shots turn out?  Not bad, in my opinion.  In most cases, the Nikon TTL-BL was smart enough to know when the flash was functioning only as fill to lift shadows, so shadows still looked like shadows instead of being blasted by flash.  Compare the shots below.  The top shot is ambient only (the light on our toddler's face is from sunlight bouncing from the white towel), while the bottom shot is with flash.  The flash lifted the shadows without obliterating them, and managed to maintain a similar pattern of highlight and shadow as with the ambient-only shot.  The downside is that the flash did create its own shadow because it wasn't sufficiently on-axis.  (In the future I wish to try David Hobby's on-axis fill flash method or perhaps try a ring flash.)

After I got some safe shots, I tried from time to time switching to ambient only or to off-camera flash.  The ambient usually required some compromise such as leaving the shadowed areas underexposed, or overexposing the background (which would require layers and masks to fix in postprocessing), so I kept going back to using fill-flash.

Ambient only (background overexposed):


Ambient only (subject underexposed):


My off-camera shots weren't good either, in part because I didn't bring a tripod to use as a boom for the light.

Here are a few shots from the party (most are straight out of the camera or with just minor adjustments):





















Our toddler didn't want to leave:







After the party, we went around a bit and enjoyed the scenery.







Best of all, we had an awesome time!

Adding Form to Backlit Photos (Intermediate)

I love backlit photos, even though some people think backlighting is overused. When the backlighting comes from sunlight, one issue is that the face is almost always illuminated by shade, which is a very soft but very flat light source (because it's omnidirectional). Sample:

If on-axis fill light is added (e.g. from a popup flash), the shaded face will be lifted, but the form looks just as flat because of the direction of the fill light. Sample:



A backlit photo can easily be made to appear more three-dimensional by lighting the face at an angle, whether using a reflector or flash.  The light can be bright enough to act as a key light, as in this sample:

(bare SB-800 flash from above and camera right, zoomed to 105mm, triggered via CLS AWL*)
*Nikon Creative Lighting System - Advanced Wireless Lighting 
Note that there is a shadow on the right side of the face (camera left), making the face look more three-dimensional than in the sample photos above.

Alternatively, the light can have a lower intensity, at an angle opposite to the backlight, to simulate the backlight bouncing off from the ground to illuminate the face.  Sample:

(SB-800 with shoot-through on camera right, triggered via AWL)

The sample photo at the top of this post is somewhere in between the two foregoing approaches.  I underexposed the ambient light, then added light from a bare SB-800 camera left and additional fill from the pop-up.  No light modifiers were used, nor did I use any postprocessing (other than conversion from RAW to JPEG) but the light doesn't look harsh due to the controlled contrast.  That's a technique I'll discuss in a future post.

Shadows; three-dimensional lighting; softer hard light without modifiers

After learning about the advantages of moving the flash off-camera, I'm now learning how to deal with shadows. Conventional photo wisdom is to fill in the shadows with omnidirectional light or on-axis fill. Here is a sample:

In this shot, I used the popup flash to fill in the shadows.

The flash did lift the shadows but there are basically only 2 intensities of light on the subject's face - lit and unlit. I think this looks ok but looks "insufficiently 3d" or kind of flat because there are only 2 main intensities of light - the filled-in shadow and the highlight.

Another approach is cross-lighting. It looks very cool, like a still from a hollywood action movie but is sometimes too unnatural.

A third approach I'm learning about is to let the fill light come from around the same direction as the key, except closer to the camera axis. What this does is to fill only a part of the subject, leaving a portion still in full shadow.

Here's how I think it works (click on the diagram to enlarge).

Disclaimer: I'm not an engineer or physicist. In the diagrams above, assume that the view is a bird's eye view with the camera on the bottom of each diagram. In the top diagram, the red circle is lit by a small light source. The circle is lit basically in two ways: either it's lit (parts exposed to the light) or it's not.

The green circle shows the effect of a large light source. I simplified the large light source by representing it as 3 points. The circle has parts that are exposed to all 3 points, some that are exposed to only 2 points, some that are exposed to only 1 point, and some that are exposed to none of the points. The parts exposed to all 3 points are brighter than those exposed to only 1 point. Thus instead of having almost binary lighting like with a small light source, there is a smooth gradient (don't forget - there are an infinite number of points between the 3 points).

The blue circle is what I'm hypothesizing - that to some degree, it's possible to simulate a larger light source with 2 smaller light sources, where 1 of the light sources is closer to the axis of the camera. Like a larger light source, there are parts lit by 2 lights, parts lit by 1, and parts that are unlit. Unlike a larger light source, however, there is nothing between the two points of light, so the gradient won't be as smooth. I think it would look "more 3d" though, than just using a simple omnidirectional fill.

Real world sample: In the following shot, light from the window acted as the rim light. Instead of using on-axis fill to lift all shadows in the subject's face, or cross-lighting from the angle opposite the window, I positioned the flash from the same side as the window (as far as my arms could reach :) ). This is somewhat like having point A and B from the diagrams above. As a result, there are at least three distinct lighting intensities on the subject's face: rim light from the window, light from the flash which is functioning as the key light, and an unlit shadow area. (There's actually another area from the reflection of the music sheet but that's a separate point.) The effect IMO is to make the subject appear more 3d than binary lighting as used in the previous shot. In addition, even though the flash is hard light (I didn't use an umbrella or diffuser or anything - look at the shadow cast on the music sheet), it doesn't seem very hard on the subject's face (but I'm not yet sure if that's just because of the roundness of our son's face...).