The Making of a Christmas Card
Note: I wrote this article in some personal interpretation of the English language to make it accessible to a broad audience. I do realise that this article will be packed with serieus insults to the language but as long as you understand the content, there's no need to mail me any corrections.
Why did I wrote this article?
As a photographer I learned a lot from many kind people that aren't affraid to put their knowledge on the internet. I always thought that I should give something back should I ever be in the position to have some knowledge that can be of any intrest to others.
I've always taken pictures but my professional background is in videoproduction and television. One of the reasons I started to take photography more seriously a few years ago, was my desire to learn more about lighting. These days, I still do videowork but photography became my main activity and lighting became a passion. Like many, I used to think that you can't create the light yourself without lots of expensive equipment. Websites like Strobist and Planet Neil opened my eyes. There are other websites that have great info about lighting but they use mainly expensive studio equipment. It took me a while to realise that you can create those same images with just some pretty cheap hotshoe flashes (that you may allready own anyway), some selfmade stuff and some logical thinking.
A while ago I started to post some images in the Flickr Strobist Group. Since then I received a lot of comments and questions about my lighting. To make things clear, I decided to write this article. A small fotoshoot of my family for the christmascards seemed like a good occassion to document some of my ideas.
Photographic Equipment used
- Canon Eos 30D with battery grip and 2GB Sandisk Ultra II CF card
- Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens. This is one of my favorite lenses for photographing people. It gave me just enough distance to the subjects for a nice perspective. A longer lens would have been impossible because I couldn't step back anymore.
- Canon 580EX flash (on manual) on a standard lightstand.
- Canon ST-E2 wireless infrared transmitter. With this transmitter on the hotshoe, I can trigger my Canon flash. The ST-E2 allows E-TTL metering with off camera flash, but for this kind of shoots I use the flash in full manual so a flash sync cord or another wireless trigger would be fine too.
- Sigma ST 500 DG Super flash. The good thing about the Sigma is that it has a build in optical slave. So when the 580EX flashes (triggered by the ST-E2), the Sigma fires too. The Sigma was used on manual too. I placed this flash on an old cheap camera tripod.
Lightpanel
After watching the Dean Collins DVD box on lighting I was amazed by what can be achieved with just some big frames and some sheets of translucent, white and black fabric. Collins uses commercial available equipment but I decided to make my own frame. After all, how hard can it be to make a frame? Pretty easy actually, even for someone with two left hands like me. I just went to a hardware store and bought some PVC tubing. There's an interesting PDF about panels and other lighting equipment online. But I decided to just follow my gut feeling to choose the right tubes, joints and the way to assemble it.
I wanted the panel to be easy to transport, so I decided to make it of 6 smaller pieces instead of just one big panel. I can set the panel up in just a few minutes. In the picture you can see the pieces and how they are joined to form the panel.
Piece A: This is just a straight piece of pvc tube
Piece B: This is the same tube as piece A but with a joint glued to it. Piece A can be attached to the top of piece B. You might have noticed the extra connection at a 45 degree angle. This is to put another piece of tube in to form a stand. I haven't made the stand yet but just imagine the 45 degree connections facing down, put a tube in each connection and join those two extra tubes at the bottom with another Piece C. I guess that will make a pretty sturdy stand for the panel.
Piece C: These form the top and bottom of the panel. With the 90 degree connections glued to the tube the vertical tubes can be attached.
note: I glued the connections to the tubes to minimise the amount of pieces for the panel and to eliminate the risk of losing on of the connections.
I experimented with some different translucent fabrics but I eventually went with a commercial translucent fabric made by Red Wing. A bedsheet or something simular would be just fine, but I choose the commercial one, because it wasn't that expensive and because I wasn't to sure how translucent a fabric should be to create even soft light.
My panel mesures 1 by 2 meters but I'm going to adjust it to 107 by 198 centimeters because that's the size of the translucent fabric. For now I just attache the fabric with some clamps to make sure it stays on the frame. If you are going to use a bedsheet or another fabric, you might want to build your panel to that size.
The Shoot
THE BRIEF
I wanted to create some images for my family's christmascards. I wanted to create a christmas feel to it without using cliché's like christmas lights or trees. We wanted to shoot some pictures outside but the weather was so bad, I tried to create something in my living room.
THE SETUP
Kids, and my are no exception, don't like to pose for a long time, so I needed a simple setup to ensure I could get the pictures quickly. It also make sense to allow for some posing freedom when working with kids. You can make a fantastic complicated light setup that works fine as long as your subject doesn't move an inch. But my kids even move when they sleep so I wanted to give them some space. A lightpanel is great for this since it creates a big source of illumination.
Let's talk about each element now:
Main light: This is provided by the Canon 580EX flash on the right. To soften the light, the panel was placed between the flash and the subject. The flash is about 1,5 meter behind the panel. To make sure not to much spill light would go past the panel onto the background, the flash was zoomed in to 50mm. If you want to light someone from head to toe, you might want to zoom the flash out, place it a bit lower and further away from the panel to ensure the panel is completely illuminated. But in this case I only neede the top half of the panel.
Fill light: I didn't have to place a reflector on the shadow side of the subject to reduce the contrast. The light from the panel has the quality that it almost wraps around your subject. Light bouncing of the table, ceiling and the curtains (left out of the frame) do the rest.
Background light: I started by just aiming the Sigma flash towards the wall. This gave me a pretty nice background light but it was a bit too clean and the picture could use a little more of the christmas feel. I took the lid of a cardboard shoebox and cut some impressionistic christmas trees in the cardboard to use as a gobo. This way I could project a christmas tree pattern on the wall.
The picture on the left shows the flash and the gobo. The gobo was placed on a professional bar stool and held in place by a very special piece of specialised lighting equipment: a candle. I played with the distance between flash and gobo and also with the distance between the flash/gobo and the background wall to create the desired effect. In the final pictures the shapes are less clear and can hardly defined as a tree, but I like the effect.
Camera position : I shot the pictures so that the panel was just out of the frame and I couldn't see the spill light from the 580EX that went past the panel . Because there's a cupboard against the blue background I had my kids standing on another professional bar stool so they could pose before the blue background. My wife stood next to them just out of the frame to grab them if necessary.
Settings : The main light (580EX) was at 1/4 power, the background flash was set to 1/32 power. The camera was set to manual on iso 100, 1/200 at f/8
Some Results
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 my lovely wife |
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 You had probably allready guessed where my daughter's good looks come from |
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 The family, picture taken by one of the neighbours (beats the self timer) |
Conclusions
This was only the third time I used the light translucent panel and I'm really pleased with the results. I'll be making some more panels soon to use a white reflectors and to block the light (a black panel can act as a flag to controle the spill light).
I know this pictures could have been better with more testing and refinements of the setup. But in my work it happends often that I have to find a quick solution to light somebody. So given the restriction of time and location, I'm pretty happy with the pictures. Using the two camera flashes (580EX and the Sigma) works great and there's plenty of power in these little units. The fact that they're lightweight, small and work on AA-batteries means that I always have a studio in my photobag.
I really do like to light a scene and I will continue to try out new ideas. The biggest disadvantage of the small flashes (to me) is the lack of a pilot light and the fact that they can be a bit difficult to controle. So I'm thinking seriously about buying a (set of) studio monolight(s). This doesn't mean I won't be using the small flashes anymore. I might even do most of my lighting without the studio lights, but I'm sure the pilotlight and controllability (is that a word?) of a studiolight will help me learn more about lighting.
I do not consider myself a lighting expert by far, but because I got so many questions about my lighting I decided to write this article. I hope it was of any use to you. Feel free to mail me with your comments and questions about this article.
© Bert Stephani 2006
feel free to link to this page but please ask my written permission for using (parts of) this article anywhere else)
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