While on a variety of locations, Bob will share his vast knowledge of photography and Nikon digital SLRs to educate you on:

· Camera settings for best quality in various situations
· Lens choice for creative and practical shooting
· Utilizing the Retouch Menu for in-camera editing
· Exposure fundamentals and shooting options

During the day’s shooting, Bob takes us to familiar situations around the home and demonstrates a variety of creative photographic opportunities. Understanding Digital Photography covers the use of the Nikon Creative Lighting System, using Nikon Speedlights for portraits and small groups. Bob continues removing the mystery of overcoming photographic challenges in a variety of environments including the difficulties encountered with twilight portraits and landscapes.

This DVD offers valuable instruction to anyone interested in digital SLR photography, particularly those who have some familiarity with a digital SLR’s basic functions. For those unfamiliar with basic digital SLR operation, I recommend beginning with the Nikon School© DVD, Fast, Fun& Easy: Great Digital Pictures.

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If you can find $1500 USD to work with then the answer is pretty simple: go Lowel. A Lowel Tota/Omni Core kit comes with three decent lamps with a lot of varied usage. They will work, no matter how much people fade them.

Tota/Omni Core 44 Kit (Soft Case): $1345.00 (list)

Used/New Mafer Clamp $20-40
The mafer clamp is a do anything clamp, that attaches to your stand and accepts a stand pin connection (a “spud”) for lights, arms, whatever.

Photoflex/Flexfill $50
You’ll see these EVERYWHERE, from photo studios to film sets. They’re fairly cheap and extremely versatile. They can be puchased from just about any online photo store (B&H, Calumet, etc).

Tyvek (yeah, the stuff in your walls) $10
Tyvek has an aluminum coated side that has UNBELIEVABLE reflectivity. It will catch and reflect a TON of light. You can find it at any building supply store.

Avenger Articulated Arm (with clamp) $75
Attaches to your stands and can hold most any light modifier… cardboard, gels, whatever.

Assorted Black and White “Backerboard” Scraps (Free!)
Go to your local frame store and ask from their backboard and matte board scraps. The white and black types are usually color neutral and hold up to a lot of abuse, while easily cut to your own needs. Sometimes stores will have entire sheets they’re willing to part with for free.

Go Tube Kit (Soft Case) $685.00

Windshield Heat Reflector $10
You can find these things at auto parts stores and department stores, for very little money. They have one shiny side, aluminum, and one white side. They are essentially the same thing as a photoflex/flexfill. Just take them and repeatedly crush them into a little ball to distress the material (provides a more even and defect free quality of light).

4′x8′ Foam Core $55
You might have to search a bit for this, but it’s simply unmatched in giving large areas of fill, and can always be cut down for your needs. I use them constantly, on location and in the studio.

Cheapest solution

So, you’re really poor (like all of us) and you can’t spare more than 250 bucks for your lighting needs. Well. Okay. I’ve got a kit for you. You can’t complain about the way it looks, but it might just get the job done. I have to admit, this kit is the coolest because it’s just so ridiculously cheap.

CTB Photofloods (250w) x3 – (each) $3.00
White Photofloods (250w) x3 – (each) $3.00
Clamp Lamps x3 – (each) $9.00
China Balls/Lanterns x2 – (each) $10.00
Tyvek – $10.00
4′x8′ Foam Core – $55.00
Gaffers Tape – (each) $25.00
Used C-Stand (With Arm) – $80.00
QuikClamps – (each) $5.00
Assorted Backerboard/Matte Board – $Free
Windshield Heat Reflector – $10.00
Duffle Bag – $Free

That’s 250 bucks for a working kit. It ain’t pretty, but it will do the job. You can usually find a duffle bag for free or nearly free at Goodwill, or from some company outing, or some sort of corporate merchandizing. I know you can find one for free.

China balls/lanterns can be found at most cheap stores, like “BigLots” or “Ocean State Job Lot” (if that exists still, I don’t even know). I’m sure there’s international equivalents of all these places. China lanterns are just paper wrapped around a metal frame, either as a sphere or a rectangle. Both are extremely versatile. And combustible. So keep an eye on them.

In a “million-dollar-a-year” studio system, you’d balance to the sun with your already perfectly temp accurate broncolor strobe system and use a specific gel to match the strobe to your metered readings of the ambient light, but usually we don’t have that luxury. So first, let’s talk about mixing source light on the cheap.

If you want to mix daylight and your incandescent household light bulb system, you can purchase CTB photofloods for about $3 USD a piece from any online photo store.

The downside is that they only last for about three hours at their rated color temperature, and then they begin to shift severely (change their color) or just die completely. These won’t give you a perfect match, but they’ll get you in the ball park. The filaments are also very weak and fracture easily. But at three dollars a piece, they’re tough to pass up. You’d need to buy a lot of photofloods before you’d get close to the cost of a single strobe head, let alone a full system.

In order to get us a little closer to the “blue” of the exterior sunlight, we’ll need some gels. Most of us live near a city, at least within driving range on a monthly basis. Get out your phone directory and find all of the printing shops in your nearest city. Call those shops and ask if they have “used acetate approval sheets” and tell them that you’ll take them before they throw them out, for free!

The most common type is the Kodak Color Approval System. In the printing process, four sheets of acetate with each color dyed on its own sheet are used to make color proofs for the client. After a single usage, they’re discarded, leaving LOTS of color left on the acetate.

All of the colors can be used creatively (and the Cyan is often pretty close to CTB) but beware, they are not fire/melt proof… use them too close to your lights for too long and you’ll have a goopy mess on your hands.

Another note about saving money with gels. Instead of buying 1/4, 1/2 and Full CTB gels, just buy four sheets of “Full CTB” and cut them into strips of varying widths. This way you can mix the natural temperature of the light source (be it incandescent or otherwise) with some of the gel. You’ll find that you save money this way, and end up with a more accurate color in the end. I rarely ever use a full gel sheet, unless it’s for creative purposes.

When it comes to color temp matching, using three, four, five strips of a Full CTB gel often works better than using a full sheet of 1/2 CTB. The same holds true for CTO, etc.

Regarding Fluorescent lighting: avoid it like the plague. Gas lights bring forth a myriad of color problems. Personally, I enjoy lighting with fluorescents, but do so only with a color-accurate flicker free systems, like the Kino-flo.

If you HAVE to shoot in a situation with fluorescents, like in a warehouse, or a corporate location where the lights cannot be switched off, purchase some plus-green or minus-green gels from your photo store and use them over your own lights to match to the fluorescents.

If you must show the fluorescent lighting in the frame, I would also recommend you keep your shutter open longer than 1/125 (in the US) or 1/90 (in the UK) as this will allow all the bulbs to complete one cycle (60/50 Hz) during exposure.

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Here’s how it works: we’ll look at equal camera exposures of an identical object, but change the distance of the light from the subject.

You’ll see that the “falloff” is different in each image even though the exposure is the same. The way this was achieved is by changing the distance between the subject and the light while maintaining the strength of the light at the subject’s surface. This is somewhat difficult to do with your household lamp.

Here strobes were used because in order to change the “power” of the light. In the right image, the strobe is bare bulb and about four feet from the subject’s head at 1/8th power. In the left image, the strobe is about eight feet from the subject’s head at 1/4 power.

Notice something familiar? The “halves and doubles” of your camera work the same way as “distance of the light to subject” as well. In order to prevent the change of the “power” of the light when you double the distance, you can also (roughly) double the power of the strobe.

Now look at circles B and B2. A great way to determine the distance of a strobe from the subject is to look at the specular highlight, seen here on the eye.

You can plainly see that when the strobe was closer to the subject it created a larger specular highlight on the eye. When the strobe was moved away from the subject, even though the exposure did not change, nor did the values of uniform areas, the specular highlight became smaller.

Look at the background. You’ll see that the exposure on the grey background has not changed at all. Since there is only one strobe, this was not achieved by a trick of the light, only by changing the distance between the background and the subject.

When the strobe’s distance from the subject was doubled, the distance between the strobe and the background must be maintained in order to maintain an equal value on both exposures (if you were to keep the power of the strobe constant, which was not).

A visual perspective on all this information:

Again, you should be able to see easily that while the distance between the subject and the light source has changed, the distance between the background and the light source has not changed.

If all things remain equal (the power of the strobe) then the wall’s exposure relevant to the camera will not perceptively change but the values on the subject will.

This is an important concept because if you are using a model on location, in an alleyway perhaps, and the values of the wall behind her are too low or too high, you can move the model and the strobes together towards the wall and maintain everything about the exposure (stop, shutter) but change the relevant values of the wall.

A Key Concept to Remember: the “hardness” or edge quality of a shadow is directly relevant to the distance between two objects and the light source.
If you have a strobe four feet from a model, and four feet behind her is a wall, when you decrease the distance between the model and the light source (and move only the light, not the model) you will soften the edge on her cast shadow.

If you increase the distance between the model and the light source, you will harden the edge on her cast shadow.

The same is conversely true, increase the distance between the wall and the model, while maintaining the distance between the model and the light source and you will soften the cast shadow edges. Decrease the distance from the model to the wall (while maintaining the distance between the model and the light source) and you will harden the cast shadow edge.

Why does shadow falloff matter? When you use multiple source lighting, it is harder to “hide” a shadow inside another if the edge quality of the shadow is hard. When the edge quality is smooth, you can light from two directions and by using a close ratio, hide one shadow within the light from the other source. This is how bilateral lighting can be achieved without having that hideously amateur “multiple shadow” result.

One more note: You MUST gray-balance your images. For the studio photographer, or aspiring studio photographer, I HIGHLY recommend your first purchase be a Gretagmacbeth color chart.

One side of this chart is 18% Gray (or, “mid-grey”) and the other side is a swatch chart with multiple colors and a gray-scale. They cost around $100 for the full paper size chart, but come in multiple sizes.

If you are on set, and have a chart that you can shoot (after you have set up your lights) then you will save yourself a world of pain later in the process. This isn’t as critical for closed system work (meaning from capture to print, you control the process) but if you plan to deliver your images to a client that will print them on their own, or deliver them to the printer, you want to make sure your images are color correct.
Some of this process is done in post with the posting facility (matching color “true” items, like products, or fabrics in the image, to the “real life” counter-parts).
Color temperature is described in the Kelvin scale, and is basically (in photography) a sliding scale between “orangish” (or commonly, CTO “Color Temp Orange) and “bluish” (or CTB or “Color Temp Blue”). More about this here.

You must also consider different types of light source, like gas-electric lights (that have a flicker, and a PlusGreen / MinusGreen cast to them).
One of the most common and most hideous examples of color issues is the indoor portrait with a window in frame, looking outside.
When you use a digital camera with the “AWB” balance function on, you end up with hideously orange people inside, and a Smurf blue outside world in the window. It looks like garbage, so pay attention when you choose the location of your portraits.

Go see part II

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