Dec 2

Dec 2 Strobist 102 Position Distance

I am continuing my education on lighting at The Strobist blog. If you are interested in learning to light I would recommend you do as well. I am learning a lot from the postings and exercises there and really enjoying it. This lesson was about distance and how it is another controllable variable in lighting and how the distance between the flash, subject and background can relate to each other and bring different effects to your photographs . Flash Tip: I have found that people don't enjoy sitting around and having you shoot off your flash in their face over and over as you try to learn lighting. This is where your child's toys (or yours) can have another life in your photography.

Let's look at Kid Robot's DJ Lance Rock from Yo Gabba Gabba! shot from ~6 feet, camera settings; 1/200, f/16, ISO 50, 135mm w/ 1.4x teleconverter (189mm), manual flash full ~3 feet 45 degrees camera left.

I think the shot came out nice but the lighting isn't very dramatic. Let's move the flash back to ~6 feet, keep all of the settings the same and adjust our aperture to f/8.0 for a proper exposure and see what changes.

This didn't seem to have much of an impact on the photograph. Let's see what happens if we move the flash much closer to ~6 inches and adjust our aperture to f/45 and stop our flash down to 1/16.

Wow! By moving the flash much closer to the subject you can see that we are changing it's relative distance to the background causing darkening of the background. My change in aperture also helped with darkening the background as well. I was using a white background to help learn the effect and make the impact more visible. If I wasn't trying to learn the effect, I would probably try to use a black background to help with isolating out DJ Lance. I took another shot with a black background and a second flash camera right 45 degrees at 1/16 for nice balanced lighting.