3 Point Lighting

3 Point Lighting

3 point lighting really should be looked at as the fundamental building block for all lighting in both photography and video. I do not make this statement as a judgement, in no way do I mean that the light setup shown here is “the best”. The best light is what is need for the image being created. But what I do mean is that these 3 aspects are present in all lighting setups and need to be considered whether you are using one light mounted on the camera or a 20 light studio set. In all lighting cases you will be working with and should be thinking in terms of Key Light, Fill Light and Background Light, your three fundamental lighting aspects. All other lights, hair lights, rim lights, kickers are just added fluff used to better define how the light falls on the subject and how the light separates the subject from the back ground.

A little bit of house keeping - the camera used was the Canon 6D with the 24-105 f4 L lens, the camera was located 6 feet from the subject on a tripod set to ISO 200 f8 1/160. The lights used were Canon Speedlites set to manual the background light was the 600EX-RT and the Key and Fill lights were both 430EX-IIs all three lights were set to manual. I include this information because a lot of people do ask about it - but really the equipment is not important, understanding how it is being used is what matters. If this is your first article on lighting I would suggest also reading Lighting Your Subject and Part II as well as looking at the resources linked in those two posts.

Key Light

Key Light, the Key Light is the main light in the lighting set up. While the methodology of studio lighting can seem intimidating when you first approach it the Key Light is really the only light you need to really understand. As long as you get the Key Light correct everything else really just slides into place. The Key Light is the main light falling on your subject and is also commonly referred to as the subject light. The Key light sets the direction and quality of the light in the image and in general will provide the mid-tones to highlights of your subject in your image. I say in general because not all photos use the full tonal range. Your Key Light will determine your exposure settings, even if you are wanting a very high key image with the background blown out you will determine exposure based on how your key light falls on your subject. In the example shown here the Key Light is a Canon 430EX-II set to camera right at 45 degrees from the subject, slightly elevated at a distance of 1 1/2 feet and sett to 1/16th power and 14mm.

Fill Light

Fill Light, in many ways the Fill light functions much like the Key Light but instead of defining the mid-tones and highlights it defines the shadows. While light defines your subject the shadows define the mood of the image. In the example shown here the Fill light is a Canon 430EX-II set to camera left at 45 degrees from the subject, placed at the same hight as the subject, at a distance of 1 1/2 feet, set to 1/32nd power and 14mm. Generally a Fill Light will be set somewhere between 1 and 3 stops lower then your Key Light, however there is no correct way to set it - there is only what is correct for your vision, let your vision guid both the placement and the intensity of your Fill Light. I frequently work with the fill light mounted on the camera or even set as far around the subject to be at 180 degrees from the Key Light. If I want the lighting to be quite flat the Fill will be set to almost the same power as the Key, maybe only 1/2 stop lower or if I want the image to have a lot of drama I may turn the Fill off.

Background Light

Background light, the background light does exactly what it sounds like, it lights the background. If you go back and look at the previous two lighting articles linked above you will notice that the background is lit by spill coming form the Key Light in those examples, in some cases it is lit quite a lot while in others there is very little light falling on the background. By adding a background light you can gain control over how the background displays in the image. The Background light was a Canon 600EX-RT placed directly behind and below the subject, gelled blue, at a distance of 12 feet from the wall, set to 1/4 power and 28mm. As you can see the background light is set considerable higher then the other two lights. This is not a hard and fast rule, it was what was need to get proper illumination of the background.

Above I mentioned that as long as you have control of your Key light all of the other lighting will slide into place. The background light can be the best example of that. In the images for the articles linked above the background light had not been considered at all. Only the manor in how the light fell on the subject was taken into account, whether or not the light also happened to spill into the background was not thought about or corrected. The easiest way to control spill is with  light fall off, by placing your Key and Fill lights as close as possible to your subject and turning the power down while moving your subject as far as possible from the background you can prevent most spill, the other option can be to use a flag (dark fabric or panel) to prevent the light from traveling in an unwanted direction.

In this post you can see that I have created 4 distinctly different images without changing any of the camera settings or even recomposing the shot. The important thing to take away from this blog entry is get your Key Light right. If you think about it all four of the above images were set and determined by the Key light, yes even the silhouette is set up by first determining the Key light. For that image I want the Key Light output to be zero and the Fill light to be less then that. Once I have a dark image I then just mix in the correct amount of Background Light to match my vision. That is exactly what happens with every other light whether you are shooting with one or 100, set the Key and then just mix the other lights in to the intensity and direction to create what you envision.

If you look at the images in An Introduction to lighting Your Subject you can see an example of how one light can be used to control all 3 aspects of lighting, all 3 points. It also helps demonstrate why the Key light firing from the camera directly at the subject is bad, it ends up functioning as fill and background light and there is no practical way to control all three aspects. However simple by turning the flash and bouncing it off of a nearby wall or ceiling you can then gain control not just of how that flash functions as a Key light but how much fill it provides and how it falls on the background.

** As an aside the lighting set up shown here is an excellent way to display products, I highly recommend it for your eBay photos, it is also a good place to start with lighting people for portraiture though for portraiture you want to pay a lot more attention to exactly where the Key light is positioned in relation to your subject and their pose. In both cases pick a background color that compliments the subject.

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Canon 430EX-II - Equipment Review

Canon Speedlite 430EX-II

The 430EX-II is the workhorse for the Canon Speedlite line. Designed to work both mounted to the camera's hot shoe or as a slave fired remotely the 430EX-II brings both power and portability to your lighting needs in a compact and economical package.

The 430EX-II offers full manual control and E-TTL II functionality. In E-TTL II the flash output can be adjusted through the exposure compensation menu and can be adjusted in 1/3rd stop intervals plus or minus 3 stops. In Manuel mode the flash output can be adjusted from full to 1/64th power output in 1/3rd stop intervals. On full power the flash is approximately equal at 6 feet to full sun. This allows the flash to provide adequate fill on bright days or fired in groups to provide enough light to overpower the sun.

The 430EX-II can operate as a slave controlled by EOS compatible cameras like the 60D and 7D with the pop-up flash or through the Canon wireless system controlled by a 600EX-RT, a 580EX-II or an ST-E2 controller. The 430EX-II can operate on one of 4 channels allowing multiple shooters to use the same system without interference and supports three different flash groups allowing the photographer to control a 3 point lighting system from the master unit. The flash can function from 14mm to 105mm of output angle and adjusts automatically to cameras with APS-C sensors. this along with supporting second curtain and hi-speed sync the 430EX-II provides the photographer with a lot of flexibility.

A couple of draw backs, the second curtain flash option is only available when the flash is directly attached to the hot shoe. The menu while similar to both the 580EX-II and the 600EX-RT is not identical to either and of the three is the one I find the most confusing. The easiest work around is to control all of the flashes through the camera menu. This of course requires a compatible camera, most of the current EOS and Rebel lines do support this. The other draw back to this flash, unless you mount the flash in the hot shoe the only way to control flash out put angle is on the flash itself. So while it is possible to control multiple flash groups from the camera some functions still have to be adjusted at each unit.

All in all the flash does exactly what it is designed to do, provide powerful flexible lighting in a compact affordable package. It's ability to work both from the camera or as a slave in multiple flash systems have made it one of the most popular flash units on the market.

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Canon Powershot SX50 HS - Equipment Review

Powershot SX50 HS

I had a chance to use Don's Canon Powershot SX50 HS, it proved to be a very good little camera for the money. He purchased it a few weeks ago for a trip to Europe. He took about 1000 pictures over ten days, so roughly 100 photos a day and was happy with the performance and battery life. Looking through his photos I noticed a number of images taken on auto with the shutter at

1/15 and the ISO at 1600. These images showed very minimal noise and minimal camera shake.

Using the camera on my own I shot several low light high ISO images and was pleasantly surprised with how well it performs up to 1600 ISO, ISO 3200 and 6400 did contain a lot of noise, but at 1600 the noise was very minimal. The camera uses the standard Powershot menus, so if you are familiar with the Powershot line it will be a very easy transition for you. Apart from full auto and manual modes the camera also has Av, Tv, P and two custom modes as well as the full compliment of sports, portrait, fireworks, et all in the scenes allowing for a lot of flexibility for shooters who are not comfortable in full manual mode.

The camera's built in flash performs adequately and switches on and off mechanically based on whether the flash is open or closed. This means that for the novice shooter, even in full automatic mode they can turn the flash on and off simply by popping it open or closed. In manual mode flash power can be adjusted from full to 2/3rds to 1/3rd power. The camera also sports a hot shoe allowing for the use of Canon or third party flashes. This camera does support TTL metering with evaluative, center weighted, and spot metering options. With the attached 430EX II, flash power can be adjusted from the back of the camera from full to 1/64th power in 1/3rd stop intervals. Second curtain sync is supported with both the built in flash and attached flash units. The only disappointing aspect of the flash system for this camera is that it does not support the wireless functions either through the menus or using the on camera flash as a master controller for the system.

The camera's built in lens features a 50x optical zoom giving you a wide angle of 24mm and a telephoto length of 1200mm. The one disappointment is the minimal range of aperture which goes from f4-f8 so the photographers choice of DoF is limited, and more so by the full range of aperture not being available for the full range of zoom. 

Powershot SX50 HS

A few closing thoughts. The movable LCD make shooting at odd angles much more convenient, however the cameras size is too large to easily tuck in a pocket but the frame is compact enough it can be a little tricky keeping your fingers off of the buttons when you don't wish to use them. The main control on the back also packs a lot of controls in a small space, something people with larger hands and fingers may find challenging. All in all it is a very good camera for the price point, it has a ton of flexibility something the hobbyist will enjoy, but particularly since it supports RAW, it has enough power, speed, and flexibility that in a pinch it could easily serve as a back up camera for a pro.

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Sunny 16

The Sunny 16 Rule is a guide that photographers can use to judge proper exposure settings in bright sun without the use of a light meter. The rule was developed several decades ago before there was reliable metering for cameras. The Sunny 16 Rule basically states that when using a camera in bright sun with the aperture set to f16 then the shutter and ISO should share the same reading. That is to say if you are shooting at ISO 200 you would set your shutter to 1/200th of a second.

This rule can be extended further to adapt to more lighting conditions provided you know your f-stops. For instance if you are shooting in the early morning after the sun has cleared the horizon but before about 9-10 o'clock (depending on latitude) you would open your aperture one stop to f11, this would also be your setting on hazy days. If you are photographing in the shade then the f-stop would be moved down to f8, if it is deep shade or the day is overcast you would be opening to f5.6. If it is an early morning with heavy cloud cover you may need to open the aperture as far as f4. If you wanted to photograph in BMNT or EENT then you would need a lens that could open to f2.8 or even f1.4 depending on how close you are to sunrise/sunset.

So why does a photographer that rails against the use of light meters and The Big 3 find the Sunny 16 Rule, a rule based on the exposure triangle, useful? I am glad you asked. Photography is all about understanding light. You are in fact creating an image out of light, that is what your CMOS/CCD/film plate does. I have noticed a tendency in photographers that rely on light meters and the exposure triangle to be controlled by these tools, instead of controlling the light. What I find happens is a photographer gets a reading that "tells them what the exposure is" instead of asking the question "is this how I want the light to act?" Remember that the equipment is metering for An 18% Grey World.

It is important to remember that light and shadow create mood. "Shadow creates drama" is a common expression among photographs, but it is only half true. If you meter for an 18% grey world and don't have much shadow then your picture, while it may be pretty, probably won't be very interesting. On the other hand if you deliberately over expose your beach photos by one stop, open the aperture to f11, then you can convey the kind of blinding light one frequently experiences at the beach. Or on the other hand you can underexpose a bright sunny day and then introduce light to your subject with the use of flash to add dram to an image, a common technique used in fashion photography today. 

Scott Robert Lim's Flash Calculator

Scott Robert Lim produced a guide for speed lights which will let you know how much flash to add for different lighting settings based on The Sunny 16 Rule, apart from mixing flash with existing sunlight it can function as a guide for you to use on your speed lights in studio as well. Understanding light in this way will allow you to open up your photography, giving you greater flexibility to use shutter to control motion, aperture to control depth of field, and ISO to control noise and still increase the kind of impact your images can create by controlling exactly where and how light registers in your image. In this manor you can use both shadow and specularity to add drama to your images.

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Lighting Your Subject - Moving the Flash Off Camera, Part II

This is a continuation from last weeks blog, in this installment we are going to look at how light direction effects your image. For this series of images I was shooting with the Canon EOS 60D camera with the 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 USM Lens set 44mm, the aperture was set to f8, the ISO to 800, and the shutter was set at 1/250th. The camera was placed on a tripod and located 3' in front of the subject. The subject was 6' from a white wall which served as the background. The flash I was using was the Canon Speedlite 430EX-II on manual set to 24mm and 1/64th power. The flash had no modifier, and was located 3' from the subject. These setting for both the camera and flash were constant for all six exposures, the only element that changes is the direction the light is falling on the subject. Sitting in for the subject for these images was "The Face" a plywood cutout I hacked together, though a clay mask or mannequin would also make a great subject. These objects are a better stand in when you first start experimenting because they do not move, ergo the only differences will be caused by the placement of the light.

Flat Lighting

This first image was taken with the flash mounted directly on the camera. As I mentioned in An Introduction to Lighting Your Subject, this is considered the worst way to use flash. Lighting in this manor is very flat and has the effect of making a person look heavier. This is just one of many factors that contribute to the belief that "the camera adds 10lbs". In actuality it is a combination of several common mistakes that cause this illusion. 

Butterfly Lighting

This second image is an example of "butterfly lighting", which gets its name from the small butterfly shaped shadow cast by the nose of the subject. This style of lighting is frequently done with a beauty dish and can be very flattering, particularly for young attractive women. This lighting style draws attention to the eyes and face, while emphasizing the cheekbones and jaw line. Unfortunately "The Face" lacks proper definition to truly display these attributes. The light was raised 2' above the camera and moved forward slightly to maintain the 3' distance to the subject.

45 Degrees Camera Right

This third image was created by moving the flash 45 degrees to camera right, in this image the flash was on the same plain as it would be when mounted to the camera. As a general rule portraits are not shot with the light positioned here as the shadow cast by the nose tends to make the nose look wider.

Loop Lighting

This fourth images is an example of "Loop Lighting", the name is derived from the loop shaped shadow cast by the nose. This style of lighting is very common in portraiture, it tends to be the most flattering for the widest audience, particularly if you use softer light and add some fill both of which will help to even skin tone, hide blemishes and reduce the appearance of wrinkles. It is also closely related to Rembrandt Lighting which I will cover In depth in a later blog entry.

Split Light 90 degrees camera right

Split Light 90 degrees camera right up 30

These last two images are examples of Split Lighting. In this style of lighting the light comes in to the subject from 90 degrees, effectively splitting the face into a lit side and a shadow side. 

It is important to note that for most of the lighting styles mentioned here the direction the light falls on the subject is much more important then the placement of the light relative to the camera. For instance, if you are stuck with a point and shoot camera and you have to use on camera flash, having your subject turn their head thirty degrees to the side and tilting their head towards the camera will use the on camera flash as Loop Lighting. This will add some definition to the shape of the face, with a little practice you can help your subject further by twisting their shoulders slightly so you can elongate the neck to eliminate excess chins. In this manor a photographer can make up for some of the limitations of having to use on camera flash. 

At this point some of you are probably wondering why I have written three blog entries on lighting but I have yet to talk about "proper exposure". In general proper exposure is considered to be exposure for the mid-tones, however if you are shooting low key photography most of your image will be very dark to black and little of the mid-tones will actually be exposed. Also, above I made general statements about when certain lighting styles tend to be used, but I have not referred to any of them as "proper" (with the exception of mentioning trying to avoid Flat Lighting), nor did I make that kind of judgment in the previous article on hardness. In all of these cases what is "proper" depends entirely on your vision as an artist, including the use of Flat Lighting. In all of these cases you should make it a conscious decision to use a specific style quality and intensity of light. 

I will say though, having sufficient contrast is important, that is the range from light to dark. What is a frequent mistake in photography, particularly in interior ambient light, will be the presumption that no flash is better then on camera flash. A person will opt to turn the flash off because there is enough light to shoot without it. But this is usually the case in buildings with lots of strip lighting. Everything is lit very uniformly and the dynamic range for the entire exposure may only be about half a stop. This lighting is ok for our day to day existence since we are seeing that environment with two eyes, but seen through the lens of a camera the image will end up being very muddy. Turning on your flash, using it at low power and letting it be a little bit of a kicker for an ambient exposure can do a lot to combat what would otherwise be a waste of a shutter release even though it is "properly exposed". Adding flash will add contrast which will ad pop to what would otherwise be a blah image.  

This should give you a couple of more tools to add to your photography trick bag. Good photography can be daunting, but if you break it down into digestible pieces you can really start to get a good handle on what you are shooting.

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Lighting your Subject - Moving the Flash Off Camera

I have frequently mentioned the importance of using light to control light and by extension to control exposure so that you can then use Aperture, Shutter and ISO more creatively. But to control light with light you first need to understand light and what element it adds to photography. For this post I am going to look at a particular aspect of light, hardness, and its contrasting aspect, softness. All of these photos were taken with the EOS 6D mounted on a tripod 4 feet from the subject. The ISO was set to 1600, the shutter to 1/160th, and the aperture to f16 and the lens was at 105mm for all of the images. The main light, or Key Light if you will, was a Canon Speedlite 580 EX-II set to 35mm placed 45 degrees to the subject on camera right and triggered by a Canon Speedlite 600 EX-RT. My subject was 8 feet from the white wall that served as a background. All of the above setting were locked for all of the photos. The light quality was changed with modifiers and distance of the light to the subject. The power output of the light was adjusted as well to maintain proper exposure for the midtones.

Let me just take a moment and go into hardness or softness of light before we continue on to the photos. What is Hard Light? The short answer is that hard light creates a hard edge to the shadows and soft light creates a gradient transition from light to shadow. If you have not looked at An Introduction to Lighting your Subject go ahead and take a moment and look that post over. The second and third images from that post show nicely the difference between hard light and soft light. For the photos below I sat in as a subject so that these differences could be easily observed on the human form.

Ok now we have an idea of what hardness means, how do we control it? The simplest way to think of it is that hard light is a small light source and soft light is a big light source. However the size of the light is not the only thing that effects hardness. Hard light is very uniformly directional. This is a by product of the size of the light but also the distance of the light and what type of modifier the light has in front of it. Perhaps the easiest way to picture this is to think of sunlight on a clear day. The Sun is huge which should create soft light - but it is very very very far away which makes it very very very small in appearance which is what makes sunlight so hard. On the other hand if you go out on an overcast day the whole sky functions as a soft box and shadows can almost completely disappear. What follows are a series of 4 images with a brief description on set-up.

This first image has the hardest light quality, the 580 EX-II Speedlite was mounted in an Interfit Strobies S Bracket with a 7” reflector and a honeycomb and was placed at 9 feet from the subject. The reflector and honeycomb make the flash effectively a 7” light source. The second image has the same modifier but is moved to 3 feet from the subject. It is possible to see a slight softening of the light between the two images, however the light quality still remains quite hard, this is because at 7” the light source is still smaller then the subject even at the closest distance. Another way to picture soft light verses hard light is, soft light is from a source that is bigger then your subject, hard light is from a source that is smaller than your subject.

Light 9' Reflector w/ Honeycomb

Light 3' Reflector w/ Honeycomb

For comparison the soft light from both the 3’ and 9’ distances is using a 36” square soft box. This is a much larger light than the reflector and honeycomb and the softening effect of the larger light is much more evident. In the interest of going from hardest to softest the 3rd images is of the soft box and 9’ and the 4th is with the soft box at 3’. The closeness of the light in the last shot makes it the largest light source in the series.

Light 9' w/ 36" Soft Box

Light 3" w/ 36" Soft Box

This is a brief look at lighting your subject with an off camera key light. A couple of things to point out. The first is that in the interest of changing as few elements as possible the hight of the light was not changed, only the distance to the subject. If you compare the 3’ images to the 9’ images it is easy to see that the hight of the light was much more appropriate for the images at 3’. As you start to experiment with light you will want to light your subject from a higher angle then they are. When you move your light further away the light will need to be raised in order to maintain that angle. Generally light from somewhat above is more flattering. The second thing to notice is that in both of the 9’ images the key light is starting to light the background. It is much more pronounced with  the 36” soft box because the light from that modifier is much less directional, it spills around the room and much more of the light lands on the background. As the light is moved from the subject the ratio between the subject and the light and the background and the light decreases meaning that enough light is starting to fall on the background for the background to expose in the image. I deliberately set up in front of a distracting background so that the use of a closer light source, not only to create softer light but to control light spill in other areas of the frame could be observed. One easy way to get rid of background distractions is to not light them. This is why ISO is not an effective way to control light.

At any rate this should give people a starting point for experimenting with light. Light can seem overwhelming when you first move from natural light and being locked into The “Big 3” and move into modified light. But if you break lighting into small easily understood pieces then you can start to build a skill set which will serve not only with flash, but will allow you to modify ambient and natural light as well.

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Learning to Shoot Without Photoshop

I see a common occurrence in emerging photographers, it goes like this. A person enters into photography, usually they start with an inexpensive camera. They discover it is a hobby they really enjoy. Their passion moves it from hobby to obsession. At this point they invest in their hobby, better camera, maybe some lights, and Photoshop. This all seems like a normal progression, and the end result, with time, is an improved end product.

So now you are asking what's wrong with this picture? The step that gets missed is an investment of time, time spent learning fundamentals of good photography. So while the end product may be improved, the photography itself is not. The real reason this is a problem is that photo editing is a destructive process. I will get into that more below, but first I want to point something else out.

What started as a fun hobby with most of a persons time spent taking pictures turns into hours spent at a computer correcting pictures to match the vision in the artists head. The artist sits there going, everything looks muddy, lets correct contrast in curves. The colors aren't quite right, let me adjust color temperature, aw-oh I need to shift tint too. I really wish the light had highlighted this better and fallen off to shadows, let me dodge and burn everything. This area is in to sharp of focus let me add Gaussian Blur, this other area should be in focus, let's see how well we can fool the eye by adding an unsharp mask and increasing edge contrast... All of these are important skills to have, but a person should not be spending their time performing emergency surgery on their photos. Rather they should spend that time shooting and creating great art.

In short the investment in time that gets made is not one of learning photography, but rather one of learning photoshop. This is an important skill set to have, but as I mentioned above, all of these manipulations are destructive. That is you go from having a lot of data for you photo to not having very much. This limits the amount of post manipulation you can do. Photography is always limited by technology, don't start it off with a handicap.

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