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Creating With Light - Part 36 - Mixing It Up - part 2 of 1 2

by Dave Montizambert Published 10/04/2015

On my walk the night before, I brought my Sekonic light meter along to help me figure out what ratio of sunlight toSpeedlite I would use. My thought process was thus: first step is to figureout what aperture to shoot at for DoF, then create all else around that. Icalculated that f5.6 would be enough to keep Helen and her harp sharpwhile letting the background and foreground fall into soft focus, henceadding to the feeling of depth - her sharpness would separate her fromthe soft environment she was standing in. I stood where Helen wouldstand and with the white dome of the incident meter pointed, for the firstreading, at the sun, then for the second reading, at the open sky whichwas partially blocked by trees. The meter read f5.6 at 1/500th and f5.6 at1/8th respectively, a 6-stop range. After a little talk with myself, I decidedthat if I shot at f5.6 at 1/60th the sunlight would backlight Helen and forestto a dramatic three stops over the camera setting while the partial openskysource would act as a low-intensity fill-light at three stops below thecamera setting. Not bad, all I would have to do on the 'night-of' is set thePocketWizard triggered off-camera flash to strike Helen with f5.6 amount oflight for a correct exposure on her face. As you can see looking at the finalimage 001, this sunlight greatly overexposes the back edges of Helen, infact it burns the affected pixels to white with no detail! These burned outareas are okay with me since they add more tonal range to the image whichintensifies the sunny feeling. Why am I okay with these burned out pixels?Simple, since the sunlight comes from a back angle, it only creates a thinline of burned out light on Helen, not large areas lacking in detail.

So mixing it up a little with flash lighting added to sun-powered backlightingis pretty easy to do; the main thing is to break it down just likea studio shoot - main, fill, backlighting, etc. - and beforehand visualisewhat ratios you would like relative to the aperture you want for DoF. Inup-coming articles I'm planning to look at my latest addiction, HyperSync- studio lighting outdoors on location using high shutter-speeds (well inexcess of X-Sync) to overpower the sun.

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1st Published 10/04/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:55:57

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