Joriana was one of the attendees at the recent workshop on flash photography that was held in Strerling, VA - and she was gracious enough to stand in as a model for us during the practical parts of the workshop. The workshop appears to have been a success judging by some of the response I’ve had after the workshop:

“It was great to meet you yesterday and I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop. I learned so much – I could have had an extra half day. I especially enjoyed towards the end of the session with the special lighting and effects. “

“Thank you for an AWESOME workshop! You are so patient and explain things so well. I will practice what I learned and hopefully improve my photography dramatically!”

Thank you to everyone who attended, and thank you to Mindy and Joriana Belcher for helping to arrange all of this.

Photographing people with fireworks in the background, is just an application of the technique known as dragging the shutter.

I had the couple in an area where there wasn’t much ambient light, so that I could light them mostly with flash. The strobe was a Quantum T2 with an umbrella.

My flash exposure was determined in that I wanted the couple correctly exposed .. but my actual settings were dictated by my choices made in how I wanted the fireworks to register.

For my fireworks exposure, I had to juggle the three controls again :
shutter speed / aperture / iso.

That particular photograph was 1 sec @ f6.7 @ 400 iso

You don’t necessarily want a high iso, because you want your shutter speed to be slow. Slow enough to record the fireworks as streaks of light. There is a lot of leeway here, and chimping will tell you whether you need to adjust your settings. Therefore your is range should be 100 to 400 iso. Then your shutter speed should be 1 second or slower. In other words, you need a tripod.

Recording multiple bursts of fireworks by blanking out the frame with a black card is a great idea. This photograph was a single exposure though.

By chimping other firework bursts, I found that f6.7 @ 400 iso @ 1 sec gave me enough firework trails and the fireworks itself weren’t over-exposed in the shot.

So using f6.7 @ 400 iso, I set my Quantum T2 to an appropriate power level, to give me that exposure. (Manual flash in this instance, since my subject was in a specific position in relation to my strobe.)

f4.5 @ 200 iso @ 2 seconds .. would’ve given me exactly the same exposure, but the firework trails would’ve been longer. There is a lot of leeway here, and you shouldn’t be bound by specific settings. But my suggestion would be to start at 1 second (or slower) and 400 or 20O iso, then then chimp to taste.

Rear-curtain sync would not have had any effect here, since the couple was static in the frame.

I was recently asked by Cory Parris to submit an article to his website / blog, The Wedding Photography Project. For my entry, I decided to present this tutorial.  Thank you Cory, it’s quite an honour to be featured amongst the very best wedding photographers out there. :)

I had someone email me regarding this image, which is one of the images I posted of a recent wedding :

Hi Neil.
I’ve just had a look through this weeks wedding favorites and noticed your image of the bride stood in the window. Would you mind letting me know how you produced this shot as I just love it and was wondering if you have used HDR on it as it looks like it has a massive dynamic range.
Many thanks, Charles.

Hi there Charles,

The key here is correct exposure – and then trying to capture as much of the range of tones as I can, by controlling the contrast during the image capture.  Lots of words there .. but what it means is that I used (on-camera) flash to control the contrast. So I was able to get that image pretty much as you see it there, directly out of camera without having to resort to HDR (High Dynamic Range) in post-processing.

What did help here is that the tree outside, wasn’t lit by direct sun. Of the four windows looking outside in this room, I chose the one where the entire frame would be filled with the tree, and not have bald sky appear

My specific settings are also important to note: 1/250th @ f5.6 @ 400 ISO,
   - and specifically, the 1/250th shutter speed. 

In using the maximum flash sync on my camera, I was able to 
1.)   better control the available light outside, since below the max flash sync speed, shutter speed has no effect on the flash exposure.
2.)   and indirectly, get better range on my strobe (which translates to getting more power out of my strobe for a specific scenario

Point 2 needs some careful consideration.  If the outside area is well exposed at 1/250th @ f5.6 @ 100 iso, then it means that it would’ve been well exposed at other shutter speed / aperture combinations, such as 1/60th @ f11.  BUT, that small strobe on my camera has a better chance of pushing out enough light for f5.6 than it would for f11 … especially since I was bouncing my flash there.

OK, so the 1/25oth shutter speed is dictated to me by the high-contrast situation.  I have the best chance of my strobe pushing out enough light, at my max sync speed. The reason for this is the most efficient setting for my strobe, would be max flash sync speed, since this is the widest aperture I can use with flash and thereby getting maximum output from my strobe.

(That last paragraph might need some mulling over to let the implications of it sink in. :) )

I then bounced flash into the room, upwards and to the left of me, to throw enough light on the bride’s dress.  The dress is partly lit by available light from outside, and partly lit by my strobe pumping out a lot of light. In this case I had my flash exposure compensation dialled up high, to force the strobe to throw as much light as it could.  I could also have used manual flash output, but sometimes it is easier just to ride my flash exposure compensation to the max.  Either option would’ve worked here.

Here are two images:
left:  The image on the left is from the raw file, directly converted to a JPG through Canon’s DPP software. This is what the JPG would’ve looked like directly out of the camera.  As you can see, there is a some highlights on the dress that are slightly blown out.
right:  The image on the right is as I edited it slightly in Adobe Camera Raw (using Bridge CS3).  I corrected the white balance a bit, and pushed the Fill-Light fader a touch in ACR.

The image on the right is the one I then edited further in Photoshop to add a soft glow and a vignette – producing the final image I posted at the top.

So, no HDR techniques where used (or needed). This was partially just luck in having a scene where the dynamic range wasn’t excessive, but this is also partially due to me using (on-camera) flash to bring the scene’s dynamic range within what would still look great directly out of camera.

Neil.

What The Duck is one of my favourite reads, with aptly funny comments on photography and the photography business. Oh, and photographers get skewered every so often. Check it out.