Techniques used for Kaltern photos

Many of you TV Wohlen guys will probably see my pictures from the sports camp in Kaltern. Some of you already asked me stuff about why I did certain things while photographing. Here, I will give you some explanations about the techniques that I used during the sports camp.

Inidirect lighting

When I remember correctly, Angi asked me why I pointed the flash upwards to the ceiling and not towards the actual subject that I wanted to photograph. The answer is simple: Direct flash produces harsh shadows and reflections. When you e.g. look at a picture taken with a compact camera, you will see shadows of the face and body in the background. And you will see bright points in the face where the flash reflected (e.g. on the nose or on the forehead).
With indirect lighting, you produce a much bigger light source which provides softer light than direct flash. Studio photographers use big soft-boxes (= white screens) to get soft light. Of course I can't carry a soft-box with me. But I can bounce the light off a wall or the ceiling. Here is an example where you actually see the effect in the window reflection:

Gelling the flash

Somebody asked me (was it Reto?) why I used that orange foil on top of my flash. Well, simply spoken this is to match the color of the ambient (environmental) light. Tungsten light bulbs produce a somewhat orange light where a bare flash produces "white" light. Experts talk about color temperatures where tungsten has about 3500 Kelvin and Xenon flash about 5500 Kelvin.
The goal of the orange foil on the flash head is to match the flash light's color to the tungsten light to get a nice (neutral) colored light in the photo. Of course, with orange light, the image will be orange. But I can easily correct that in the post-production on the computer. Alternatively, I can set the white-balance on my camera correctly.

Spotting out the subject for a more dramatic effect

Look at this image:


Here, I set my camera to fully manual and the flash to automatic (TTL). The ISO, shutter speed and aperture were chosen to underexpose the background for a couple of stops (if you don't understand that, let's just say "underexpose a bit"). And with the flash I exposed Toni correctly. Actually I had not so much to do, since the automatic flash made the work for me.
Luckily, the bounced flash came from a direction where it made a more dramatic look on Toni's face. A bit of luck is always a good thing ;-)

Using flash off-camera

For more special effects or when I don't have a wall or ceiling to bounce the flash, I can take the flash head off the camera and put it wherever I want to. In the following example, I put the flash to camera right, directly on the floor. The harsh light (+- a point source) coming from the side provided a dramatic look on Reto's face.


This technique needed some more fiddling around with the settings since the off-camera flash must be set to full manual mode (because I have no TTL cable which are very expensive). So I had to set the flash power manually which needs some try-and-error.

Using fill-flash in harsh sun-lit scenes

Some of you might have scratched their head when I ran around with my flash on the camera as the sun was fully shining. But the following two images of our super-model Stephan should show you the difference. Of course I dialed down the flash output power since it was not my main light source. I just used the flash to lift the shadows a bit.

  
Left without flash, right with flash.

What else to say...

I hope you enjoyed my explanations. If you have any questions, please leave a comment, e-mail me, call me or whatever.
Thank you very much for the cool sports camp in Kaltern, I really enjoyed it! I would like to stay in touch with you all!

- bzzzzzzz