I use two to four strobes for the room lights depending on size of the
room, height of the ceiling and other physical factors such as can I
locate the lights where someone won't bring one crashing down on their
head from 13' up.
The lights get balanced as close as possible to f/5.6 for the background
room light. I use a Sekonic L-358 as an incident flash meter and fire
the strobes remotely with a radio transmitter. Sometimes I have a
receiver on only one light and let the others fire from their built-in
optical slaves. Sometimes I use two or more receivers. It can be
somewhat time consuming but I can generally get two lights reasonably
well balanced in 10-15 minutes. By reasonable I mean f/5.6 +/- one stop
over the areas where I will likely be shooting, and the dance floor in
particular. I sometimes think it would be really nice to have the radio
remote control of power output that Alien Bees offers. But it's
necessary to haul the lights down and adjust their angles almost as much
as changing the power and the remote control can't do that yet.
With the room lights set I then determine how to set the on-camera flash
to provide a total exposure of, say, f/8 at a distance of 10 feet. I
may also determine flash power for a shorter distance, say, 6 or 7 feet.
I then try to stay that distance away from my subjects all the time
and zoom to frame. This guarantees good exposures without the vagaries
of TTL or auto modes. I typically change flash power using the manual
power control on the Sunpaks but a friend is quite adept at doing it by
changing the bounce angle of the flash head or popping the diffuser on
or off. It's fast and accurate (with a lot of practice).
The ambient light is probably more than two stops down from the strobes
and it takes a fairly long shutter speed to pick them up and bring them
out since I'm normally shooting at f/8 and ISO 400.
Chuck Norcutt
Jeff Keller wrote:
> Chuck, do you almost always use your Sekonic flash meter? Roughly how
> long does it take you to adjust your strobes' output? Do you use it as
> an incident meter, firing the strobes remotely or do you use it as a
> spot meter? I would think measuring the light in multiple places with
> a meter could be fairly time consuming. (TIA)
>
> Althought the second picture has noticeble directionality to the
> lighting, I like it that way. I don't notice any problem shadows nor
> anything with shadows going two different directions. I think that is
> quite succesful lighting.
>
> I guess since you are taking pictures of people, you try to get even
> lighting almost all of the time. With ambient light being 2 stops down
> from the strobes, probably mixed color temperatures aren't a problem
> for you.
>
> -jeff
>
> On 11/1/06, Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>In this shot there are two studio strobes off to the left
>>reflecting off the ceiling of the tent. The white interior of the tent
>>works very well here. But it still works well even with a less ideal
>>room. In this shot the background fill is much more obviously coming
>>from studio strobes at left.
>><http://www.chucknorcutt.com/weddings/img_5467.htm>
>>
>>Chuck Norcutt
>
>
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