Answering Questions

Before I get to what this update is about, you may have noticed the Help Our Wounded Warriors link, under my pic, on the right side of the page. Give it a click and check it out. Reach into your pocket and make a donation. Feel good about yourself and add some karma points to your scorecard.

A lot of you have written to me since I began this blog. Many of you did so because you had a question to ask. Often, these questions revolved about lighting models. I try to answer every email in a timely manner. And I try to do so with an easy-to-digest answer, assuming I have one. It's always a nice stroke to my ego that so many of you seem to value my understanding of light, lighting tools, and the use of those tools. It's also been a valuable education for me, i.e., to know the sorts of things shooters want to learn about lighting and other aspects of pretty girl shooting. Since I'm a guy who is producing a DVD and will be promoting workshops designed to help photographers better understand the techniques that will, hopefully, improve their pretty girl shooting photography, your questions have been a great help in determining what the content of the DVD and the workshops should be.

Probably, the most-often asked question has to do with lighting ratios, usually the ratio between the main light and the accent lights. (Or edge lights, rim lights, highlights, whatever you want to call them.) These, of course, are those light sources often working either behind, above, or to the sides of the model, separating her from the background and adding some sexy punch and wow-value to the images.

When I'm lighting a model, the first thing I meter is the main light. That's my starting point. Personally, I like f/5.6 or f/8 for my main. I'm not saying these are the ideal apertures for pretty girl shooting. They're simply my personal preferences. Shutter speed isn't important at this point as long as it's within the camera's sync speed range. I usually begin by setting the shutter speed to 125th. Later on, I might change the shutter speed depending on how much ambient I want effecting the image. A slower shutter speed allows more ambient to reach the sensor and a faster shutter does the opposite. Shutter speed has little or no effect on the level of exposure created by your strobes. Why? Because, when they fire, the duration of your strobe's light output is faster than the shutter speed you'll probably be shooting with.

Next, I meter the accent lights. There are, of course, a few variables that come into play, hair color being a big one. Platinum blonds can be tough. Their hair wants to blow out. And yet the amount of reflected light I like seeing on their bodies is often too much light to keep the detail in their blond hair. Often, dealing with this becomes more a matter of controlling the light, that is, controlling where it strikes the model, rather than adjusting the light's output.

For me, adjusting the accent lights is part science and part subjective decision making. Back in the film days, it used to be nearly all science unless you were shooting Polaroids first. This is one of the cool things about digital: You get to preview the image before you decide things look like what you want them to look like. (Note: Learning to read histograms can really help you out here.)

Anyway, I usually begin by adjusting the output of these lights so they read, on my meter, .2 to .3 hotter than my main light. Example: Main light reads f/8.0 and the accent lights read f/8.2. That's the science part and it's a good place to begin. Once I've done the science, personal taste comes into play as well as compensating for certain variables. These variables are why there's not an absolute, all-purpose answer to this lighting ratio question.

Since it is governed by laws of physics, light behaves in predictable ways and this is the point, when you're lighting the model, where those variables come into play, i.e., effecting how the light will behave due to its predictable nature. I already mentioned hair color as an observable variable. In actuality, hair color is simply part of the two, big variables that will effect how those highlights will be recorded on the sensor. The two big variables are angle of reflectance coupled with the reflective qualities of whatever the light is striking.

Entire books are written about this stuff, books like Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting. That's why it would be impossible to cover this subject adequately in a blog update or in an email that attempts to answer your questions. My advice? Learn! Keep learning. Take the time to learn if you're not already doing so. Go out of your way to learn. Make learning a regular part of your development as a photographer.

Okay, I've given you a starting point in terms of the lighting ratio between the main and accent lights. That's all it is. A starting point. Play around with it. Experiment. Make mistakes and learn from them. Make successes and learn from them too. Ratios are simply one component of the process. It's not just about the output of your lights, but where you place them and where you place the model and how you turn her in and out of the lights. (Thus changing the angle of reflectance and bringing different levels of reflectance into play.)

Once again, I can't remember the name of the gratuitous pretty girl posted at the top. I shot her a few years ago in my studio. I do remember that she's from Brazil and that she was lots of fun to work with. Damn! Getting old sucks.