On of the most beautiful times to photograph people, or landscapes, or just about anything is around that golden hour of sunset. With portraits most of the time your first tendency is to shoot them with your subjects basking in that beautiful golden sunlight. It’s one of the things I always remember people telling me when I was a little kid, “have your back to the sun when taking a photo”. That is one thing I must have never paid attention to because using the sun as a backlight instead of a main light happens most of the time and can give you such a beautiful feel to the image.

One thing that I just love to do with portraits is turn the couple around and shoot right into the sun using it as a backlight. There are a few different things you with this type of backlight that will give you much different results to the shot. Sometimes if I want to keep that rich color of the background and have my subjects more defined i’ll set my exposure for the background and light the couple with a off camera light (or two or three). You can see a good example from this article (off camera lighting and sunset).

Many times thought I don’t want my subjects to be super sharp and instead want a very soft and romantic feel to the photo. I want the glow of the sun to just radiate in the image and don’t mind if my subjects are a little soft also. Then I won’t use any flash at all and let the sun be a strong backlight that gets a little blown out. Here are a few examples from my wedding work. This also works great for other types of portraits also, but as with everything make sure you match the lighting to the subject and style you are going for.

Depending on how much of the sun you have in the image that is creating flare this will change the light that is recorded on your subject, you can see here that just by moving in a little tighter in the frame the detail on the bride and grooms face comes through a lot more clear. Neither one is really better, each type really has a purpose but again should match the vision that you have for that specific couple or shoot. It all starts with our vision for what will show the true essence of the person you are photographing and then we match that vision to a certain type of light or technical skill.

A little tech info on those 2 images:
Canon 5d
Canon 70-200mm (top shot @70mm and bottom @105mm plus stepping a little closer in)
ISO 400
1/125th @f/4.5
no flash

Exposure is key with using the sun as a backlight

The most important part about getting a image like this is your exposure. If you let your camera average out the exposure the subjects will be very dark because the camera see’s the bright background as a predominant part of the image. The easiest way to get a accurate exposure is to zoom in on your subject skin and see what settings your camera gives you. Then set your camera to manual and dial in those settings. Now you will be properly exposing for your subject. The exact angle of the sun and where you are will play a pretty big factor in the look of the shot.

Because the angle plays a big part of how the light hits your lens try out a few different focal lengths and see how it makes a difference. For images like the first I love to shoot with a 70-200 and many times have it set around 150-200 on a full frame camera. Remember to take the lens hood off and let that light come right into the lens! The lower the sun and more your camera is facing towards it the more lens flare you will get. Experiment a little bit with your angle to see how that effects the shot, the best way to get a shot like this is try, try, try. The more you experiment the more you will know where to position yourself for the shot you are looking for!

If you have any backlit shots from the sun leave us a link in the comments!

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Review of the O-Flash Ring Flash Adapter for speedlights

A ring flash can give you many cool advantages compared to using a normal on camera speedlight. We covered some advantages of using a ring light for portraits awhile back and today wanted to review the O-Flash ring adapter that can turn any speedlight into a ring flash and is extremely affordable. Many other types of ring flashes can be fairly costly, something like the Elinchrom EL 20492 RQ Ringflash
can run you around $550 on Amazon and go up from there.

The O-Flash Ring Flash Adapter you can pick up for only $35 (O-Ring Flash Adapter
) and pops right on to your speed light. It’s very simple, the speed light connects to the ring light which really just redirects the light through the circular ring and using a system of internal prisms, reflectors and light-shapes the light distributes through the ring flash without using any electronics or additional power.

Buy the The Ring Flash Adapter at the Photojojo Store!

Because the light is redirected you do loose some light and also it changes the color of the light. It produces much more of a cooler light compared to normal flash so you have to adjust with a custom white balance or in your post production. Another thing that I noticed in most of my tests with this ring flash is it did give red eye. This shouldn’t happen with a normal ring flash and although it can be easily removed in post production it still is fairly annoying. The light that it produces does give you a shadowless look but still isn’t as soft as I was hoping. Here is an example and please don’t get scared by the model, my normal last minute fill in (my beautiful wife) wouldn’t allow any photos this day so I had to move to the other side of the camera which isn’t my best side

First a quick reference photo, these are both shot at ISO 640, 1/250th second at f/4. Flash is set to TTL and in the first shot bounced directly off the ceiling. Also the white balance is set to Daylight which I always prefer for flash to give a nice warm skin tones.

For the ring flash I did change the flash to be set at +1 which makes up for some of the light that you loose.

Also if you set the white balance to flash the skin tones will look much better, here is the same shot with a flash white balance and exposure corrected just a bit.

Overall the O-Flash gives you that shadowless look for a very inexpensive price. I really wasn’t impressed by the quality of the light though and would prefer something that has a softer quality, but for $35-$40 it works pretty well. Very quick and easy to setup, it uses your existing flash so nothing to plugin and the light is decent. If you are interested in trying out a ring flash to see what it can do, it’s a good way to get started without a big investment.

Also if you want to win a copy of the O-Flash ring flash head on over to our Facebook page. We are doing a giveaway this week and it’s easy to enter to win. Just visit our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/digitalphotobuzz.com and like the page. Then right under our cover photo click on the “Sweepstakes” button and enter your info. We will pick a winner coming up this Friday.

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For my wedding work I love to use off camera lighting and am always looking for ways to streamline my lighting systems. When you are on the go at a wedding and sometimes only have 2 minutes to quickly light up a shot, you have to use a very portable lighting system. Many times at a wedding I am moving from location to location and have to setup a shoot on the fly. When Canon announced the 5D Mark III last month they also announced a new speedlight the Canon 600EX-RT. With built in radio transmitter in the flash and a new ST-E3-RT Transmitter that you can use to control the flashes it looks like Canon provided a worthy upgrade to the 580. It does come with a hefty price tag of $620 but when you factor in the cost of pocket wizards or other radio controls for your flash it really isn’t that bad of a deal.

I haven’t had the time to really put a few of these speedlights to the test yet but will be doing an extensive review as soon as I can. Along with the radio transmission there are a few other changes to the 600EX including a boost to the guide number (now at 197′ at ISO 100). Also the zoom flash head now covers a wider 20-200mm range, and the updated AF assist beam is compatible with Canon’s new 61-point High Density Reticular AF.

In the meantime I found this video that gives you a good look at what the 600EX-RT Speedlite & ST-E3-RT Transmitter can do.

The Future of Speedliting – Hands on with the 600EX-RT Speedlite & ST-E3-RT Transmitter from Syl Arena on Vimeo.

You can also check out the 600EX-RT Speedlite at B&H here: Canon 600EX-RT Speedlight.

What do you think about the 600EX-RT Speedlite & ST-E3-RT Transmitter? Overpriced for a flash, or love it? Always love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Part of getting your lighting really nailed down is the simple fact of being able to really see the light. This can be tricky for new photographers to see though since when you are using flash you never really see the light stay on your live subject long enough to study what effect its having on them. I always suggest to people getting started with lighting to buy a few hot lights before strobes and play around a lot. Move lights up, down, left and right and see how every move effects the subject you are photographing.

Another really useful tool I recent ran across is the Virtual Lighting Studio. Besides having a really scary 3D person as a model this is a very cool way to learn how lighting works. You have the ability to add up to 6 lights to illuminate the subject and can perform most actions you would do on a shoot like move the lights around the scene, gel the light, change the modifier on the light and more to fine tune the lighting on the model. Start with one light and move it all around to see how the shadows change, then continue adding on lights to see how they can change the scene, it’s really fun and a great way to learn how light works!

Check out the site here: Virtual Lighting Studio
What do you think about this site? Let me know in the comments below.

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One thing that most camera manufactures haven’t historically done a great job in is the user interface of menus. From flashes to your camera navigating through menus to make quick changes aren’t always quick. Although I have used many different Canon speedlights over the years I still don’t find it easy to navigate through the on flash menu that Canon has. Setting exposure with the dial button is easy but certain actions that I rarely need always take way to long to thumb through various menus to finally remember how to do something.

Today I wanted to share a little tip that many of you might not know about, how to control all of your flash menu items from your camera’s LCD directly.
This feature isn’t available on all setups though. In order to use this you must have one of the following Canon speedlights:

and the following Canon camera bodies:

You can control anything you could on your flash right from the camera, this can be a great way to save some time and also help you learn all about your flash control. The buttons are a little different for every camera (which is really something I don’t understand why canon does, please create a universal menu that will work for everyone instead of different menus/buttons for each camera). For this post I am going to reference and provide screenshots for the Canon 7D.

First you can find the menu under the main menu at the very bottom under Flash Control.

Here you will be able to turn on/off the ability for the flash to fire and also access your external flash main settings and custom function settings. You can also access settings for the built in cameras flash but please, please, please never use the pop up flash on a camera. I’ll get into why in a later post, but if you only learn one thing from me about photography remember to forget your camera has a built in flash and try to get your external flash off camera as much as possible.

When you enter the external flash main settings you can control everything you have on the back of the flash but in such a easier to understand way. Most speedlights really are cryptic in how the menu is setup and this makes adjusting the flash really simple and easy. At the top you can adjust the flash mode from the options you have for your flash, with the 580II you can choose between E-TTL II, Manual and Multi flash. Depending on what you choose it will adjust the rest of the menu items on the page. If you are shooting on manual the next option you can adjust the strength of the flash output.

You can also change the shutter sync from 1st curtain to 2nd curtain or Hi-Speed. If you don’t know what these are I won’t get into this today but keep you eyes peeled for a article coming soon. Another very handy control is the zoom level of the flash, here you can quickly scroll through the available distances to zoom to. And finally you can turn on or off the wireless functions.

If you are shooting in E-TTL II mode then you will see different options. The FEB is a Flash Exposure Bracket if you wanted to bracket your flash exposure for any reason. With digital I don’t really see any need to bracket your flash, but it’s there for anyone who might need it. You can also change the flash exposure compensation (check out our guide on this here: Using Flash Exposure Compensation (FEC) as well as set the type of TTL from Evaluative or Average.

Another really cool thing is that you can access the custom functions under the External flash C.Fn setting menu. This was probably the worst menu on your flash. It gave you the ability to change the custom functions but no explanation on the screen at all, so you would have to refer to the owners manual to see what function did what. With 14 custom functions on my 580 EX II, I never remember what each Cf number is so its a hassle to bring out the manual to remember something. Here is what the controls of a Cf look like on a Canon 580:

I bet there are some settings in here that many of you didn’t even know about. For example did you know the Cf 2 lets you control how to enable a modeling light on your flash? Did you even know that your flash had a modeling light? I bet many of you didn’t and its a pretty useful feature especially when you are learning about light. Here you can see exactly what you are updating the settings to.

Pretty cool! I hope you learned something new about your camera today, now it’s time to get those cameras out and play around with your flash. I am working on a lot of articles coming soon about speedlights and how to get the best light from them so stay tuned. You can always stay in contact with us and make sure you don’t miss a post with any of the 3 ways to stay in contact with digital photo buzz.

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As I was flipping through all of the Oscar contending movies the other day I kept looking at the movie poster for the Artist. It’s a striking black and white image that really captures the feel of lighting that Hollywood become known for during a certain period of time. I have always loved the look of these images, they have such great contrast and with the deep dark shadows

If you want to learn more about what Hollywood lighting is check out an intro here: Hollywood Lighting .

Photo Credit: BartNJ

Photo Credit: DraperStudios

Photo Credit: Alex Strand

Photo Credit: TJ Scott

image18 by ShutterCraze

Also here are some classics from the master of hollywood lighting, George Hurrell. He was the head of the MGM portrait gallery in the 30′s and photographed all stars including Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo and Marie Dressler. See more of his work and prints for sale here: http://www.hurrellphotography.com/

If you are interested in learning more about this style of lighting and how to set it up just let me know in the comments below and I can create some articles.

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When most people start out with photography I know that once the light goes down you tend to throw the flash on top of your camera and start firing away. I am a huge fan of quick, portable off camera flash and have written many articles for this site on how to use off camera lighting for wedding and portrait photography. You can check out a few of our older articles here: An Intro To Off Camera Lighting, creative lighting for first dance photos, and Using off camera lighting for wedding photography.

Today I want to talk for a minute on why using 3 lights for portraits can give you some awesome results and how quick & easy it can be to setup 3 lights. When getting started with off camera lighting it can be a little daunting but with some practice you will get the hang of it quick, so don’t be afraid and start to experiment. First you might be thinking why 3 lights, won’t one be enough? One of the main reasons for adding additional lights to a scene is to add extra dimension to your images. Having extra lights to the side of your subject or behind will make the image look more 3 dimensional and give the photo more depth and pop. I’ll walk through what the lights all really did in this image and give you the tech settings so its easy to understand and for you to get out there shooting your own off camera lighting images.

First the final shot and a little about the gear used. I always love to share recent and real world examples so this was from my wedding a few weeks ago. It was a quick setup at the very end of the night to give the bride and groom something different from what we had shot earlier in the day. There is a awesome olive grove at the venue that they have lights strung throughout the trees. It makes for a pretty dramatic backdrop at night so I knew I wanted to do something with the bride and groom in there. Here is one of the tighter cropped frames so you can see the effect of the lighting.

Other than the lights in the trees the lighting is very dark. There is really no other ambient lights since the olive grove is out in the middle of a vineyard. Here is a view of the setting that I took when setting up the lights.

I wanted to sit the bride and groom on the ledge of the fountain and setup a very simple and quick lighting setup all with small speedlights. My lights are triggered by Pocketwizard MiniTT1 and FlexTT5′s. The main light I set to ETTL and was about 15 degrees to the right of the camera and up high on a light stand. Since I generally only have a few minutes to setup a shot, the ETTL does a pretty good job of getting the exposure correct. For this main light I used a Canon 580II speed light. The purpose of this light is to expose my subject while not overbearing the entire scene so I can still get the beauty of the lights in the background.

The 2nd light is to the left of the bride and groom pointed right at his right arm. This is setup to just give a little more dimension to the image. It should have been angled slightly more towards the grooms back though since it cast a shadow on the brides arm. This light was a Canon 550 set to manual and 1/16th power. It is meant to provide just a small kick to the side of the grooms body to add some dimension.

The 3rd light is setup directly behind them pointed at their heads. This is to give that cool backlight rim that shows around them. Again it just adds a little dimension to the photo and helps them to pop out from the background a little more.

Here is what the scene looked like without the bride and groom. Without having a test subject I used the main part of the fountain as a quick gauge on how I wanted the light ratios to look. Weddings are tricky since you only have a few minutes to setup shots and then have to roll with it.

Also you can see a quick lighting diagram here for more details on how the lighting was setup:

Tech Specs for the shot:

Shot with a Canon 5d.
Canon 580II, Canon 550, Vivitar 285.
Manfrotto Tripod
ISO 400
1/8th of a second at f/ 2.8
Canon 70-200 L lens set to 130mm

Another really cool thing about having a backlight setup is you can change around the angle that you are shooting to include a little bit of the light. Sometimes i’ll position the light just an inch over the grooms shoulder to create some nice lens flare or other times will include the whole light for a more dramatic look. Here is my favorite shot during this time when I just moved position a little to shoot lower and to the side so that the backlight comes into the frame. Remember to always experiment and move around, a few feet to the side or getting real high or low can sometimes make all the difference between a decent shot and a great shot.

If you are interested in learning more about off camera lighting check out this intro I posted awhile back: An Intro To Off Camera Lighting

Also I have a list of our Lighting essentials here: Digital Photo Buzz Lighting Essentials

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As many of you know I love to shoot a few portraits at my weddings at night. There is something about the blank canvas you have with a completely dark scene that really intrigues me and always allows for so much creativity. Another thing I really like about setting up a shot at night is it allows for something different in your portfolio that not everyone does. In a competitive environment it is key to have your portfolio stand out and doing things that are a little different from the rest of the crowd will always give you an edge.

This image was a fairly simple setup but one thing I had to focus on was not just lighting the bride and groom but also the building behind them. This location has a gorgeous front to the building and I knew that I wanted to use that for a image. When we shot this the only light really was candle light along the stairwell and a few ambient lights in the background but not really enough to give definition to the mansion. Here is the image without any lights and shot at .6 seconds at ISO 1250 at f/ 3.5 It does have a very romantic and beautiful feel to it however if we simply added the bride and groom in there the scene wouldn’t have enough light to expose them.

To light this I setup a fairly simple lighting setup with 3 lights. The Bride and groom were lit by 1 Q-Flash in a small soft box about 30 degrees to the right of the camera and up high. I first figured out the exposure for the background to be able to get the candles glowing which was 1/20th of a second at f/2.8. Then I adjusted the Q-Flash to be able to give just enough power to light the bride and groom from about 4 feet away. Although the shutter was slow the building would have still been pretty much black so there are 2 lights on the building, both up on the middle of the grass just outside of the frame. On the left was another Q-Flash powered way down and to the right a Vivitar 285 flash that was set to 1/2 power. These gave plenty of light on the house (actually a little bit too much for what I really would have liked) and really lets the house pop a bit. Since many times at a wedding the location is very important and means a lot to the bride and groom I like to include it in some of the images to help tell the full story of their day.

Also here is one shot where the light on the right of the building didn’t fire. You can see the difference that the 2nd light makes on the scene, it softens up some of the shadows but also does make the scene a little more flat. Are the shadows bad? They can be a little distracting but as with anything is really depends on the feel you are going for in the shot. Always remember with lighting to experiment and have fun! Move lights around and see how that effects the shot, add more lights and continue to expieriment!

The camera was set to 1600 ISO at 1/20th of a second shooting at f/2.8. I shot it with a slow shutter speed to get the glow of the candles going up the stairway and some of the ambient light inside the building. There are a few hotspots from these 2 back lights that should have been turned down just a bit, but that’s always the tricky part setting up a shot at a wedding in less than 5 minutes

What are some lighting questions that you have? Leave us a Facebook comment at the bottom of the page and lets start a conversation.

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One of my favorite parts of a wedding is the very end of the evening. For me it’s always a fun time to let the bride and groom take a 5 minute break and try to capture something that is really unique and different than what they are used to for wedding photos. It gives me a chance to get creative and also is a great way to make me stand out with my couple, their family and friends and also the venue. It’s not something that all photographers do and one of the main reasons why I like to, I think we always have to continue to strive to be unique and create images that are a little different every wedding.

What I like to do during the dancing is just take a few minute break and walk around the venue to see what is available that I can shoot around for a cool nighttime shot. Sometimes I will completely light up the scene with 2-5 lights or sometimes I look for some really great ambient light and just supplement that with 1 simple light.

My wedding last weekend had a really cool olive grove that was lit up with little twinkle lights. The setup for this shot was pretty simple, here is what gear I used for the shot a some of the technical info.

First gear used was pretty simple:

The setup is pretty quick and easy. I really want to capture the ambient glow of the lights so you have to really slow down your shutter to capture the natural light of the lights in the trees. In this shot I used an ISO of 1000 and shot in manual mode at 1/5 second at f/3.5. You have to get the bride and groom to stay pretty still so there is no movement on them. To light them I mainly used 1 light, the Canon 580 that was held up high about 30 degree to the left of the camera pointing down at them. For this I used ETTL but did have to slightly power the flash up a bit to get the correct exposure. In these cases when working fast i’ll take a test shot with the flash exposure set to 0 and then adjust up or down depending on how much more light I need.

I also wanted something in the background just to add a little more visual interest to the image and added the Vivitar flash to the background pointing at the bride and groom. A few shots I moved the camera to the left which hid the light but still gave a nice backlight on them. A backlight is always nice since it helps to separate the subjects from the background. Look at the sliver of a highlight on the grooms back here, it gives a nice separation and helps the image to have more dimension. I also many times like to include the light in the shot like I did here to just give some extra pop to the shot.

That’s it, 2 quick lights and about a 3 minute setup to get a fun shot of the bride and groom at night. This was shot with a 24-70 L lens but you can switch to something like a 200 and move in tight for a great shot of the bride and groom set against a wall of those lights! As always our only limit is our creativity so explore new ideas as much as you can!

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Last week I asked everyone on Twitter and Facebook what some things are that you would like to learn to improve your photography. The most common answer was lighting which was awesome for me to hear since I love off camera lighting and was just thinking of creating more posts about creative lighting. I have written a good amount of off camera lighting articles in the past, just click on the Lighting tab near the top of our site to look through some old articles if you want to get up to speed, and I have tons more that I will be working on shortly. To make sure you don’t miss out on any articles make sure to sign up for one of our alerts here: Stay in touch with Digital Photo Buzz.

In todays post I want to review a recent shot that is a good example of balancing light. Whenever I am shooting I am always looking for cool backgrounds or light to work with. At a recent wedding there was this great choir loft upstairs that had a cool stained glass window. There were a few rows of chairs in front of the windows and it was a perfect small nook to get a photo of the groomsmen. The church inside was very dark so in order to get the stained glass showing I knew that I would have to add flash to balance out the light. The first thing I want to do is find out what the exposure is for the stained glass windows themselves. An easy way to do this is take a few test shots and figure out what exposure is needed to get the windows to show up correctly. Once you have your exposure dialed in, set your camera to manual mode and enter in this exposure.

Here is a shot without the light showing the natural light of the situation.

Next all you have to do is add people and a little light. I have used Pocketwizards for years and do love them, you can read about the Pocketwizard here. Here I placed a light at about about 30 degrees to my right as high as possible pointing at the groom. In this case it was setup very fast so I used a Canon 580 flash with no umbrella or soft box. Normally though its a good idea to soften the light with a modifier. The flash was set to ETTL and using the Pocketwizard minitt1 you can shoot at any shutter speed.

I also like to use a backlight to separate the subject from the background a little bit. Here I placed a Vivitar 285 (a very inexpensive manual flash) on the chair behind the groom and pointed the light up towards the back of his head. Depending on how much light I need i’ll dial the flash at 1/4 or 1/2 power, here I set it to 1/4 power just to give a little separation and also some more overall fill since it was bouncing off the ceiling as well.

Here is the shot after we added the 2 lights in.

It’s a pretty quick and easy setup and with off camera lights the possibilities really are endless as to what you can create! If you have some great off camera lighting examples I would love to see them, post a comment below or an image to our Facebook wall. Also check out our recent, Intro to Lighting post for more info on the type of gear I use for travel lighting.

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