Lighting How To

The trend of using continuous light sources for portraiture that I saw at last year’s WPPI show continues unabated with Westcott’s Two-Light Daylight D5 Softbox Kit being the latest offering. The kit uses fluorescent bulbs as a light source, although that word barely appears in Westcott’s early press material for the kit. Part of the reason may be that when it comes to photographs of people, fluorescent has a negative connotation but nothing could be further from the truth.

Beautiful lighting, in many ways, is what photography is all about. And as our readers proved with this month’s submissions, if you want great lighting, all you need to do is look outside your window. While it’s not entirely surprising, our 10 favorite photos from this month’s assignment are all bathed in natural light. The results are simply radiant.

Studio lighting hardware is going through the biggest change—a paradigm shift, really—since the flashbulb was invented in 1929. There are many trends and fads with LED’s popularity seemingly having equal parts of both. LED lighting also appeals to DSLR and mirrorless camera shooters who want to capture stills and video.

Understanding exposure is an important part of the route that leads to creative photographs. Exposure in nature work is perhaps more challenging because there is no cookie-cutter approach when it comes to the outdoors; each moment is unique, as seen in this photograph of the moon (#1). Being able to expose the moon perfectly made it possible for me to focus on the task at hand—capturing one single bird flying across it.

Light is a precious commodity in close-up and macro photography. The closer you get to your subject, the more light you lose through lens extension. Move to within inches of the subject and your camera or body may block the existing daylight. Also, the closer you get, the more depth of field you lose, so it would help to stop down. All of this translates to a need for additional light—in other words, a supplementary light source. What’s more, when shooting live critters and wind-blown plants, we may also need that light source to freeze subject movement, or at least provide shutter speeds that are fast enough to contain movement. To meet these needs, I’ve often turned to a macro ringflash and, alternatively, a macro twin flash. An economical alternative is an LED ringlight.

Low light photography requires technical discipline to get the kind of pictures you want. Obviously artistry is also part of the equation, but shooting when the light is reduced presents technical problems that can only be dealt with using technical solutions.

When the folks at Fotodiox asked me if I wanted to look at one of their FlapJack portable LED studio lights, I told them “no.”