How I use light

My lighting style is largely defined by the environment in which I shoot.  If I were based in California I’d no doubt be trying to make best use of the brilliant sunshine they enjoy.  As it happens though I’m in Manchester, a rather less sunny place, but I still want the natural light to feature in my images.  This article explores how I’ve gone about exploiting the natural light that we do have and balancing it with flash.

My previous favourite location was a disused space at Islington Mill (check out the link, there’s some cool stuff going on there) this was a pretty dark space even on the brightest of days with quite small windows.  It was possible at times to use some of the larger windows as the key light such as this example

But more often than not the natural light was playing a supporting role such as in this example

To a great extent even these basic images were made practical by my choice of equipment.  I’ll be writing in detail in future posts about my equipment choices, but using a camera that works well at high ISO, wide aperture primes and an aversion to tripods all contributed to this developing style.

Over time I began to use natural light more creatively to try and distinguish my images from the norm and a previous post demonstrates how I used gels to warm up daylight in my images.

Laziness was another factor in my developing style  Up to this point I had been using mostly my studio lights within the studio at the mill.  The studio was on the 2nd floor, the disused space was on the 5th floor and there was no lift and the availability of mains power was variable at best.  Suffice to say that after a while the novelty of carrying up all my studio gear wore off (not to mention gallons of water and other kit for some shoots) and I sought out alternatives.  For me the most effective combination was a Quantum Q flash, a large 2 metre PLM brolly and a special flash mount to exploit the combination to it’s fullest.  I’ll be covering each of these in separate posts but the resulting light was ideal for full length yet still quite contrasty and specular.  Add a small amount of smoke and my images were now starting to look like this

In this space natural light was therefore used mostly to add notes of interest to the image with flash usually being the key light.

It was time for a change though and I relocated much of my studio shoots to another old mill.  This time with a much greater amount of daylight called Hallam Mill.  As you can see, daylight wasn’t really an issue here

The challenge now was the extent to which (if at all) I’d allow daylight to dominate the image.  This next example is shot in a similar place to the one above but dials down the daylight considerably

Natural light images also became much easier and I can use my preferred style of placing reflectors in front of the model reflecting daylight from behind thereby giving beautiful back-light on the models hair

As well as the Q flash I increasingly used speedlights and I’ve long since sold my studio lights in preference for battery powered alternatives.  Even in a traditional studio I feel comfortable exploiting the advantages of speedlights to give me the effect I want such as freezing movement.

For me one of the key advantages of battery powered flash is that they can go to very low power to allow them to be easily balanced with even the dimmest daylight with the use of ND gels the light can be even further diminished if needed.

I now teach this style of lighting to others enabling relatively low priced equipment to be used to create exciting images that not only replicate expensive studio gear but also have the potential to add something a little different to images.  Future posts will explore individual lighting set-ups in detail and others will consider my equipment choices but I hope you found this a useful overview.  Please use the comment feature below to ask any questions or to request specific areas to be covered in future posts.