articles/Location/surfergirl-page2

Surfer Girl - Location Lighting with Multiple Strobes Part 1 - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Craig Minielly Published

'm going to use sculpted lighting on my model, bringing in "light intensities" to the shadow areas of her presentation, allowing that sculpted light to create the drama, clean up the colour cast of the shade, and blend in with the harshness of the background illumination.

My lighting is actually fairly simple - two accents from either side - one slightly behind on camera left, the other off to a high angle on camera right .

I have another strobe lower, closer in and on the left. I have it bouncing into a gold reflector which should add a nice subtle warmth to the fill from that side - I would normally use the flash covered with its fitted amber gel, but I couldn't find my gels, so did a quick improve on the fly.

The last strobe involved in this, is sitting on top of the camera - the handy one built into the D200 Body. It is set so as to be a fill, but also as the trigger for the other strobes

I'll explain the letters and their significance next

Here we see the setups viewable on the camera's menu ( left ) and on the strobes ( right ).

I have here, the ability to control the outputs of the individual strobes right off of the camera. With TTL finesse, the balance of the strobes is setup off of the cameras menu, and here you can see that I have set the A Strobe to fire at 1/3 over my main exposure, my B 's to be at 2/3's more, and my on-camera to be at 1.7 less than the main exposure .

The only settings necessary on the strobes are for their A, B, or C Grouping, and the Channel that the trigger signal is received with. I can also control the spread of the flash with the zoom function .

I use coloured rubber bands on the strobes so I can easily tell from a distance what group they're set for, and have the colour coding on the back of the strobes as well ( visible above) . The built-in flash on the camera may not be up to heavy duty usage - but it will almost always trigger the strobes that are, and act as an effective fill as well ! Of course you could use another SB800 mounted on camera, but while in travel mode, it's nice to have the option of uisng the built-in flash.

Setting up the camera to control the strobes in "Commander Mode", is done by accessing the Bracketing / Flash option off of the main menu, then selecting the Built-in Flash, setting it to Commander, and then finally entering the balances you prefer ( as shown above).

If this is starting to sound a bit technical, fear not... My whole approach to my prep work is to get a few things setup up ahead of time, and then work with the camera's auto functions and wonderfully accurate meterings so that after a couple of quick histogram checks - I just spend my time shooting and forgetting about all the complexities of exposure calculations that the camera is handling invisibly!

• Surfer Girl - Location Lighting with Multiple Strobes Part 1 page 1
  
• Surfer Girl - Location Lighting with Multiple Strobes Part 1 page 2
  
• Surfer Girl - Location Lighting with Multiple Strobes Part 1 page 3
  

There are 54 days to get ready for The Society of Photographers Convention and Trade Show at The Novotel London West, Hammersmith ...
which starts on Wednesday 15th January 2025