Another Ugly Room Made Beautiful

17 02 2013

We all have run into the situation where we have an awful area to shoot.

When I was a novice photographer, I would really freak out in a non-studio setting. Then I’d start moving furniture around to try to find a clean background that looked decent. And the lighting in the room would be typically be awful. Using flash made it worse. What I didn’t know then was that I could eliminate the surrounding room entirely, by simply using directed flash to eliminate the ugly room.

The easiest way to understand flash photography is to grasp the concept that with flash, there are actually two exposures going on; the first one is the “ambient” light, with a much higher speed “blitz” of flash as another simultaneous exposure. The neat thing is that you can mix the two independently so that your flash can “blend” with the ambient light, or you can make your flash relatively so powerful, that the ambient light disappears. This is especially handy when you have an ugly background!

In the example above, the first photo on the left shows where my model was. left, She is sitting at the bottom of a stairwell in a utility building. From that very spot, using only two speedlights and my Snoot and Lightsphere with color tabs, I was able to instantly create the dramatic images you see above.

I have been very very busy making instructional YouTube videos – right now I have over 9,000 subscribers and over 2.7 million page views. I’m all about making instructional videos because I so often see photographers who don’t understand flash, and therefore have use whatever light is available. With just a few pieces of inexpensive equipment, they could quickly create awesome results. I can make blue skies on cloudy days, and I can make a swimming pool look like a fiery red cauldron. In seconds!

Thanks for reading this far into my email – it shows you’re interested in this topic. So, as a thanks for your interest and support, please feel free to take 20% off of any purchase on my e-store at garyfonginc.com, just use coupon code YOUTUBE20 when checking out. And watch this video below. If you are open to changing your photography dramatically, I am pretty confident you’ll leap with excitement at what you can do!


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Categories : Beginner Topics, Indoor Flash

Unboxing The Lightsphere Collapsible Pro Kit

25 01 2013

Not only is this top-of-the-line kit a great value (as compared to purchasing each item by itself) but it is the best set of tools for the professional photographer to change or modify lighting, on-the-go, with the smallest bulk possible.

With the Pro Kit, you can change completely the lighting of any situation, including color temperature (in relation to the subject), shape and power. Watch this video for a glimpse at what you can do with it!

(if you watch until the end, there’s a little easter egg for ya!)


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Categories : Indoor Flash, Photography Techniques

The Complete Canon 600EX-RT Flash Tutorial

11 01 2013

Canon’s new top-of-the-line flash unit is a welcome update to the workhorse 580exII.  The power is the same as the previous unit, but there are two huge benefits:  1) It can employ radio OR optical (infrared) wireless modes, and 2) it has a much improved navigation system.  You can setup five different exposure groups for your slaves, and the navigation is pretty good.  It’s better than it was, so now it’s pretty good.

I could not find a good tutorial anywhere on YouTube that explained in full how to quickly use the features of the 600, so I made this one.  If you watch this video, there’s nothing you won’t know about the flash, and the video is only 15 minutes.


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Categories : Canon, Indoor Flash

Multicam Syncing With Adobe Premiere CS6

5 01 2013

Gary Fong Plural Eyes Adobe Premiere

I love love uploading info videos to YouTube.  It’s pretty much all I do these days for work, make YouTube videos.  I do random videos sometimes that have nothing to do with photography (like how to play Led Zeppelin guitar solos), and the reason I’m always putting up YouTube videos is for experience.

The more I do videos, the better I get.  And you can find how-to’s about everything on YouTube pretty much.  I learned how to play very basic violin on it, you can learn how to load a dishwasher, and through my channel, you can learn all about photography techniques, from the most basic (how to use a grey card, how to read a histogram) to really advanced techniques (using custom white balance to fool the camera in order to change ambient light temperature).

Every once in a while, I can’t find a topic.  So it takes me a lot longer to piece together how to do things.  One huge huge thing that I did late last year was I completely abandoned FinalCut ProX.  It is a terrible, ridiculous program that needs so many workarounds (create a “hidden” events folder to keep them from cluttering up your event catalog).  They claim that it has a multiple-camera sync function, and I wish that thing worked – but it never ever did.

So I switched to Adobe Premiere.  Did you know you can “rent” Adobe Software on a monthly basis?  For $29/month, I can get the entire CS software packages, which is incredible considering that Adobe Premium costs about $700.  Premiere is fantastic – FANTASTIC!  I also learned so much at lynda.com, which had great content.

But one thing that it can’t quickly do is match up multiple cameras automatically.  You can drop in “markers” and match the markers, but it won’t sync by sound.  A software called “PluralEyes” does, and so with the combination of the two, it saves me hours and hours and hours of annoying clip-matching.

And because this was a huge time-saver for me, and because nobody really taught how this works in a single workflow, I made this video for the relatively few people who would appreciate it.

But it’s just another YouTube upload under my belt.  And I got a little more experience having done it.  Here’s the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-t9JQz8cyg


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Categories : Video and Editing

Why DSLR’s Using Continuous Lighting Have Exposure Problems

29 12 2012

I’m often asked when we will be putting out a diffuser for LED Continuous Light Units.  The answer to that is, the problem with your images may have issues that have nothing to do with diffusion.  It’s the nature of continuous light sources.  They do not have metering!

If you have a continuous light source, when your subject moves closer to the light, of course your subject will be brighter.  To compensate for that, your DSLR will typically meter on your subject’s face, therefore it will instantly increase the shutter speed or close the aperture to make sure the face isn’t blown out.  When the camera does this, the background becomes dark.  That’s because the difference in the mixture of your continuous light and the background is greater.

Using continuous lighting is therefore preferable for subjects that do not move (as in, portraiture).  Additionally, the color temperature of your light will typically not match the background light.  You could use a warming, “tungsten” color filter, but when the camera’s auto white balance corrects the color temperature in, say, auto white balance, the entire image will look neutral balanced, or like it was taken outdoors on a cloudy day.  This will then no longer look like an indoor image.

This is the reason flash units are used by professionals.  Reason 1) TTL metering and the ability to “mix” your available light with your flash pop, 2) auto white balance using flash will produce a midway color temperature between the incandescent tungsten and your subject.


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Categories : Beginner Topics, Photography Techniques, Playing w/White Balance

How To Fix Underexposure In Snow

15 12 2012

Hi from Gary -

I got a great question asking why shots taken in the snow look so “murky”. Winter photography is bathed in bright white, and cameras are designed to expose scenes to middle grey. Most imaging situations can be accurately metered by trying to get everything overall to be in the middle, between highest brightness and lowest darkness. When you are shooting in show, everything is nearer the bright end of the range.

New cameras that do “face tracking” do a pretty good job of making the snow white because it is exposing for the person’s face. Absent that, if you just take a photo of white snow, the camera doesn’t know it’s snow (some advanced point-and-shoot cameras actually have a “snow” mode!) so the snow will be grey.

Overriding your exposure is something that has to be done only in special situations. Overabundance of white in the scene would typically call for an intentional overexposure override (+1,+2). Conversely, overabundance of black in a scene should be treated with a (-1,-2) underexposure, because your camera may think that all of that black should be grey, which would way overexpose the faces.

Here’s a little video that shows how this all works:


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Categories : Beginner Topics

Two Flash Shoot At Palace Trianon Palais (English Overdub)

14 12 2012

This is the english translation of a shoot I did at Versailles, France. I wanted to show how much I could do with only two speedlight flashes with one lightstand, a radio trigger, and Gary Fong flash accessories including the Lightsphere Collapsible Snoot, and the color domes. The original video is below, and doesn’t look like a Kung Fu movie


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Categories : Francais, Indoor Flash, Outdoor Flash, Sony

How To Photograph Tabletop Products

13 12 2012

Lately, I’ve been pretty much dedicated to using only 2 flash units off camera for everything I do. So when my friend asked me to shoot her ice sculptures, I was thrilled because it gave me another YouTube video to add to the library!

The key part to shooting the flowers inside the ice was the PowerSnoot. Using it, I was able to direct the spot right on top of the flowers, giving them saturation and form. In the video, you’ll see the available light images compared with the ones I did with two flashes.

DSC05724

 


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Categories : Indoor Flash, Sony

How To Turn A Really Drab Room Into An Impressive Studio

31 10 2012

This was shot in a classroom at the Calumet Store in London, England.  It’s a simple two-light setup, one with a PowerSnoot on a lightstand, and the second with a LSC Snoot (Black) with three different color domes.  The trick here is to make sure that your flash from the “spot” light (on model’s face) does not hit the wall behind the model.  This is why the Snoot is crucial for this purpose.  It directs light right on the model but not on the wall.  If I didn’t have the snoot on, the wall would be “contaminated” by white light and you wouldn’t see the beautiful halo effect behind the model.

Here is the lighting diagram…

The Powersnoot was on a lightstand.  The flash itself was set to E-TTL, and I had the subject face the camera.  There are two very important things to remember if you want a deep deep color on the white wall:

1) Underexpose the flash unit by two stops (therefore the camera with the color dome was set to TTL-2)  and

2) Make sure that the light from your main light does not spill onto the wall.  If this light spills onto the wall, this causes the color to “dilute”.  This is why the PowerSnoot is important.  It directs light in such a tight beam that you can have it light just the face, and not the wall behind.  Note where the snoot was positioned.  If you drew a straight line from the PowerSnoot to the wall, it would only hit the wall way behind the subject.

The light behind the model was on the floor, using the same little stand holder that came with the flash.

The camera was set on “M” (Manual) setting because the TTL will take care of the flash exposure accurately.  When shooting Manual, you can change the shutter speed up to 1/250th of a second.  When indoors, and when ISO is set to 100, having this fast shutter speed will obliterate available light.  When shooting outdoors, I use HSS (High Speed Sync Mode) aka “AutoFP” on Nikon series cameras.  This allows me to shoot at up to 1/8000th of a second, at ISO 100.  That makes the available light completely dark.  Changing the shutter speed and aperture in Manual mode, you can mix the background light and the flash lighting with a wide range.


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Categories : Indoor Flash

The Gray Dome For Accurate Exposure And Color Management

23 09 2012

Throughout the history of color photography, photographers have relied on gray cards for the most accurate color matching. When you have a need for the most accurate color matching, and exposure accuracy, nothing beats the good old-fashioned 18% gray card - until now!

My new Gray Dome is not for use on lighting equipment.  To think more outside-of-the-box, I created a great solution for portability, reliability and accuracy.  This dome is it.

The reason a dome is better than a flat gray card is because on the flat card, you cannot tip the card.  If you lean the card forwards a 1/2 inch, you may find that the card gets brighter!  And if you lean it forward, it gets no overhead light.

Think about this.  An 18% gray card absolutely offers great measurement of light and color – except!  when you need it the most (as in someone holding it for you.


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Categories : Playing w/White Balance

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