Technique | Chris Beaumont

Balancing ambient light with another source

In this shot, I’ve combined the ambient light in the room with an external flash unit (Canon 580 EX II) that’s placed to the left of the scene. The flash unit is lighting the subject (my Mum :) ), while the rest of the scene is lit by the ambient light, which is basically that lamp on the shelf, although there was another light on in the kitchen but it wasn’t really adding much light.

Now why would you want to do this, you may ask. The problem is that the ambient light isn’t enough to light the scene evenly. If you expose a scene like this so that the subject is correctly exposed, the settings will have to be so open that you will over expose the lamp on the shelf. If you expose so that the lamp on the shelf is correctly exposed, the settings will be so closed that the subject will appear in darkness.

To overcome this, you introduce another light source that you have fine control over and then balance the exposure settings on your camera with the power settings on the light source to achieve the overall exposure you’re after.

As I’ve said, I used a Canon 580 EX II flash head as my controllable light source – the method for achieving the balance is as follows:

Make sure the flash is off
Take a reading that will expose the ambient light (in this case the lamp on the shelf at the back) put your camera into fully manual and set your camera to those settings.
Then turn the flash on and take test shots, adjusting the power of the flash until you’re happy with the balance between ambient and flash.

Of course, you don’t need to use flash. You can use any kind of light, as long as you have pretty good control over how much light it can put out.

In the image below, my other source was the sun, which was setting to the left of the scene and lit my brother up nicely.

I don’t of course have control over the power of the sun, but it’s a legitimate source of light! Use it any way you can :)

For lighting techniques like this, and much more besides, head over the Godfather of external flash lighting David Hobby’s Strobist.com site.

Arsenal FC – Emirates Stadium Panorama

I had the pleasure of visiting the Emirates Stadium recently – quite wonderful piece of architecture that strangely seems to lack the blood curdling atmosphere of other stadiums i’ve been to. The sound seems to waft straight out of the top of the stadium. In contrast, the new Wembley, which I went to a few weeks after this, had much better acoustics.

Arsenal were pretty spectacular that day, humbling poor Derby by five goals. I’m not an Arsenal fan, I should say :) My heart belongs to Liverpool.

Post production notes: This is a panorama made up of 5 different images. Getting good panoramas is tricky. The key, for me, is getting the right manual exposure. I hold the camera up and take exposure readings across the range that I want to photograph, from left to right. Usually you get a range of readings back, as some shots will be darker than others. The trick is to set your camera to something roughly in the middle and then take all the shots at that exposure.

Then you need to download an amazing little application called autostitch which does all the hard work of melding the images together. It really is incredible how accurate it is – i’ve been trying to do good panoramas for years now, and autostitch is by far the most usefull tool i’ve come across. Once autostitch has worked it’s magic, I brought this image back into photoshop and cropped and straightened and did the usual saturation boosts and contrast adjustments.

Natasha, taken for the Strobist CTO lighting assignment “Work That CTO”

If you’re a photographer and you don’t know about David Hobby’s Strobist blog then head over there immediately and absorb everything his wonderful site has to offer. Pretty much everything I know about stobe lighting (using flash guns to light your pictures) I learned from him.

This is the first strobist lighting assignment I’ve taken part in – it involves the use of CTO lighting gel. CTO is essentially just a light orange filter that you place over lights to warm their colour up. The effect that this has when you combine them with the tungsten white balance setting on your camera is what you see above; everything that isn’t lit by your CTO gel filtered light comes out blue, while everything that is lit by the CTO gelled light has true colours.

What’s so brilliant about Strobist in general is the way the site continually throws simple, pratical ideas at you and encourages you to go out and shoot with them. It’s a tremendously satisfying way to learn.

Subscribe to the Strobist flickr group and join in the fun!