Category: Photo Tip

If you have been shooting for as long as I have, you have a cupboard full of old equipment. Often old gear is not worth selling. My old f mount 180mm f2.8 AF lens is a lens that people are not going to buy. Unless you have a camera body from that era or a pro spec SLR with a built in AF motor, it will not auto focus on the current F bodies, or on the Z bodies. For many that’s a deal breaker.

It is in fact a lovely lens and in the studio with modern mirrors bodies, using older classic lens is not really an issue. With an EVF and the ability to zoom in the viewfinder to get focus right, you can in fact get some great shots.

This was a set I took recently using hard light; its a single beauty disk over head, black background and the model wearing a black top and black trousers.

The majority of the shots were taken with a F mount 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, which makes a very nice portrait lens. I also used a 50mm f/1.2 for some of them.

So I suggest next time you’re shooting a set, as well as your usual go to lens for that situation, try something a bit different. If you own a current mirrorless camera then have a look around at old lens, you may find something you love.

I see on the forums, YouTube and general internet sources a lot of confusion about setting a custom white balance.

The main issue I see is that people are setting colour white balance using a grey card. This is potentially wrong. A grey card is calibrated 18% grey in order for you to get your metering correct. A colour checker card to set white balance has a neutral grey or white, ie the red green and blue channels are balanced.

Now you can buy 18% grey neutral grey cards, so these can be used for exposure and for setting white balance, but do not assume a grey card is neutral!

How to use also generates some debate. First thing is to get the lighting and exposure right. In the top picture, I was setting a fairly simple lighting set up. I had the model hold my colour balanced grey card white I tweaked the lighting and exposure. Do not take the white balance reading until you are setup, changing the lights and exposure can change the white balance. The picture here has a number of issues, but the biggest is that the cheap studio provided trigger is not syncing correctly with my camera thus the dark area at the bottom.

Step one, setup your shot, get the lighting, exposure all how you want.

Step two, take a photo of the subject with the colour checker, white balance card in the shot.

Step three – this is where we have some debate and it does not really matter. Either set a custom white balance using that shot in camera so that all your future shots are correct, or in your tethering software so everything looks correct. Or after the shoot most RAW software allows you to sync the corrected balance that shot to the other shots. Generally you edit that shot, do a custom white balance using the card in the shot, then sync the white balance settings across the other shots.

One last thing to consider; if like me you have custom import profiles that set a particular look, these may overwrite the colour balance, as may any other development profile you apply.

Oh and we are talking RAW, JPG bakes the colour temp into the file, it needs to be right.

What do I use and how? Well I have a couple of small white balance cards scattered across several camera bags as well as a A4 colour checker in my largest bag, so I always have something with me. As to how I use, well its naughty of me but I am not consistent.

When doing a shoot I am often in a manual white balance setting, using a card for important shots, then syncing things up at the end. It is an area I need to improve on.

Do you use auto white balance, let the camera get the exposure, or use a colour checker and grey card. Meter your flash carefully with your flash meter, or just guess by eye.

All approaches are valid but having a system that gives you a consistent base is in my opinion is best, its certainly what works for me.

That saying, getting things technically correct is not the be all of a great picture. Having a consistent base to work from makes life easier when you want to get creative.

In the picture above, I have tweaked the colour balance, saturation and added colour grading to the shadows and the highlights. The resulting image is certainly not ‘correct’ in exposure, white balance or colour but I find it a pleasing image.

I love high contrast Black and White but it can be quite tricky.

I find using the Tone Curve in Lightroom the best way of controlling contrast and then tweaking it with the contrast, highlight and white point sliders. Starting things off with a nice high curve and gently tapering it off seems to give the best results.

These were the initial settings I started with on the original colour image, I then took it to Photoshop to add a gradient on the background and touch up the skin slightly, then back to Lightroom for a BW convert and Orange boost and then I added some more contrast.

Broncolor, Profoto, even Elinchrom, get a kicking over their prices.

Mid-priced gear like Bowen’s, Godox, or some unknown Chinese brand is the way to go for many people. For the price of a Profoto D2 studio head you can buy four of the cheaper heads.

Some of the cheaper flash is built to a high standard and many photographers are quite happy with their choices, so why do the majority of professional photographers and photography rental houses, use and rent the more expensive gear.

One of the big things that I have struggled with in the past and mentioned on my blog before is colour consistency. The higher end gear tends to have better colour consistency so not having to edit the colour temp of every image you shoot. With the more budget flash heads, the colour temperature drifts during the photo shoot.

Something not talked about much is flash sync speed. Most high end cameras will sync at 1/200 second, medium format cameras even higher. The problem is flash duration, lower cost flash can often not sync correctly at very high or very low power.

In April as the studio’s reopened I had a maternity shoot. For the early shots I played it safe, shooting at f/8 flat easy lighting, lower cost flash heads at around 70%. I then started to setup something a little more challenging, shooting wide open with fast glass, getting the background to go out of focus and more dreamy. As I started to get ready I noticed I was getting the shutter appear in test pictures as can be seen above, it was only when I dropped the shutter speed of the camera down to 1/60 second or lower that it would sync correctly with the flash. This is not good if your working in a studio with bright window lights or over head lighting that can cause colour and light contamination of your shots.

Lastly radio triggers. Most triggers work on the 2.4 Ghz range. The cheaper models tend to all use the same band in this range that is free to use; the more expensive triggers will use less popular ranges and they have to pay higher licensing fees to use these bands. Some aircraft services utilise part of the 2.4 Ghz range and they pay very high fees to get exclusive use of this range. Flash companies like Broncolor and Profoto also pay very high licensing fees for exclusive use of a part of this frequency range. For every Profoto flash and trigger sold part of that cash is to buy the license for the exclusive use of the 2.4 Ghz range they use. This has to be licensed on a per country bases for every flash head. That is why the cheaper flash systems get miss-fires and you loose shots while the higher end flash seems more reliable, they have less interference.

So the question is can you afford the extra editing if your shoot is colour critical, and can you afford to have miss fires and miss shots. For a commercial photographer where time is money that question is no. For others it may not matter and there are lots of budget flash systems available to them.

In the studio I like to use tethering, it gives the models and if the customer or art director is present confidence as they see the results come in.

With the first few shots it is getting the lights in the right positions and the exposure right. For this recent fashion shoot with Sophie, it was a simple background and two lights with soft boxes each side. Once the lighting was right I gave the test images a good look round. The studio we were working in had Bowens lights, I had set the camera its flash sync of 1/250. Generally most high end flash gear will cope well, the mid range flash often has difficulty syncing above 1/200, and the cheaper gear often does not sync above 1/125. Most people do not worry about this any more with modern flash and cameras doing HSS, but HSS heads are still few and far between in most studios.

I soon spotted the familiar black bar of sync failure, so dropped my camera to 1/200 and the shots were clean. Once the lights are set how I like, for the first set f/8, I took a white balance reading from my target.

With the lights setup, exposure and white balance all set, I then set Lightroom to apply these consistently to all future shots.

If your seriously into tethered capture, then the camera manufactures often have their own tethering software which generally works well. The software CaptureOne is possibly the best tethering software available. These software packages are designed for tether capture and work fast and efficiently. Lightroom is several applications in one. Its a DAM (digital asset management) with its database making it easy to find photographs if you keep up with the meta data and keyboarding. The develop module which is basically a nice GUI around Adobe Camera RAW. Then the print module; Photoshop has always been very complex to print from. The print module in Lightroom with its profile support and custom presets you can setup, makes it one of the best places to print from. So Lightroom is quite a beast with lots of useful modules. It is into this tethering has also been added. It started off as a watch folder. You created a folder and set Lightroom to ‘watch’; you then used other software to get your images from the camera to this folder, once an image appeared it would be auto imported into Lightroom.

We now have real tethering in the last several versions, it has always been slow and buggy, and would drop the connection losing you a shot at least once during a shoot.

So how was the new Lightroom v11. Well its still slow, but it is useable, and I was pleased that it did not drop the connection or fail at all during the three hour shoot. So if you have Lightroom it is a option. I’ll test it some more, but it is working much better then previous versions.

As for the shoot, it went well and we got some great shots. Thanks to Sophie for her hard work and our two assistants on the day.

If you change the flash power, remember to check the next few shots carefully, are you getting flash sync errors, has the colour temp changed so do you need to do a fresh white balance. Its not just getting the exposure right.

When I am using studios with cheaper flash heads I often need to check these things or lose shots.

When you can shoot tethered it does make it easier to spot if things have changed.

When on location as in the shot above of the lovely Ivory Flame, I was mixing changing daylight with flash, in this situation having a flash you know you can rely on is definitely and advantage.