By Request: The LumiQuest Softbox III

UPDATE: Lotsa good questions coming up on this in the comments. Doing my best to keep up with the answers.

Those of you who follow my Flickr stream already know that I have been playing with the new LumiQuest Softbox III for a few months now.

It was created in direct response to Strobist reader input, and is one of several upcoming lights and light mods that have been designed for us. (Oh, yeah -- there's some cool stuff coming. I'd tell you more, but I'd have to kill you.)

More details, pics, and how this look was created, inside.


Working Without Stands

One of the advantages of using speedlights is that you can combine good lighting with portability. And you can create pretty sophisticated light without a light stand, too. Which not only makes you more mobile, but also can avoid the need for permits when shooting in a city.

Permits weren't really a issue on our recent camping trip up to the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland where I got a chance to play with the new SB-III. LumiQuest had sent me a pre-production model to test drive.

It's about 8x9 inches on the front, and has an area of double diffusion that is designed to compensate for the hot spot in the center. It folds flat, and will fit perfectly in the back pocket of a Domke F-2 bag, the standard PJ bag over the last 20 years or so.

The SB-III attaches to your flash with the included velcro straps, or better yet, a speed strap. It is about as big a thing as you would want to attach to a flash. So my preference is to use either a second speed strap on the outside, an extra-long single (DIY'd) strap to make another trip around the outside of the mount, or a ball bungee. I am a little anal about that kind of thing -- I like stuff tight.

Whether you are using an off-camera flash cord, remotes or using CLS /eTTL, the flash/SB-III combo makes for a very easy setup to hand hold. If you use it on a stand, you'll want to bring it in close to your subject. You can always move the camera back and shoot with a longer portrait lens, but a light this size excels at close distances.

Why? Several reasons.

One is power: You can nuke the sun very easily in close, and a light that is running 8x9 inches looks a lot better than a bare flash.

Second, bringing it in close (~2 feet from someone's face) really does turn an 8x9" source into a softer source. And last, getting the light in close kills its penetration past your subject, allowing your BG to be controlled separately with ambient or a second light. Also, you can see that it falls off nicely as the light travels down Ben's torso. I like the natural vignetting.


Lighting Ben

The photo of Ben up top was done completely handheld, and very quickly. I shot him with a 50mm lens. I held the Softbox III/SB-800 off to camera left, with a 1/4 CTO on the flash to warm it up. I underexposed the (backlit) ambient scene by about a stop and a half, and set the SB-III flash to run at straight TTL -- using Nikon's CLS wireless flash system. (Pause as DWBell rubs his hands in glee...)

This turned the sun (coming from back camera right) into a separation light, which gives the portrait some nice, 3-D shape. As a little kicker, I let the on-camera (CLS master) flash contribute some fill.

On-axis fill is something I have really been trying to learn more about, and you'll be reading much more on that here soon. The on-camera fill was between 2 and 3 stops below straight TTL.

If this sounds complex, it is not. There are only two decisions to make here. First, how far are you gonna drop the ambient light? And second, how far are you gonna drop the on-axis fill?

The result is a crisp, 3-D look that can be made just about anywhere you have directional ambient light. For something done in full-auto TTL (for the flashes, at least) I think it looks pretty slick -- especially when you consider that you are completely handheld and mobile with the light.

It's a good look to pull out of your bag of tricks during the ugly light portion of the day -- just stick the sun in the back on the opposite side as your key light from the front. This photo was shot in early afternoon on a bright, sunny day. It's the knd of light I used to hate to have for an outdoor portrait.

But with this little softbox, I'd be happy to sked someone at 1:00 p.m. The crappier the ambient light, the better.


Without the On-Camera Fill

Here is an example of pushing the SB-III (no gel) against the ambient in a front-left / back-right crosslight scheme without the on-axis fill. Straight CLS/TTL with underexposed ambient. Looks a little less polished, but fine nonetheless.

I am guessing this would be preferable to some of you, who will not like the double highlights in the on-axis fill version. (They do not bother me at all.)


SB-III, On-Axis Fill with No Sun

Wanting to experiment with on on-camera/off-camera light without a directional ambient source, I shot my daughter Emily using the same technique as in the top photo above. The only difference was there is no ambient rim light on her shoulder, as it was a cloudy day.

Instead of an on-camera master flash, I used the D300's pop-up flash both to trigger the SB-III main light and fire as a fill light - I think the pop-up was set at -2 2/3 stops from straight TTL. The idea would be to see how this setup would work in flat light.

You can see the soft shadow of the SB-III on the bottom right of her nose. But it is being filled exactly as much as I want it to be filled by the pop-up flash, with is even closer to on-axis light than a shoe-mount flash so it leaves a hard, very close-in shadow of its own. I think I prefer the pop-up flash as an on-camera fill.

This is a sweet little technique for anyone with an SB-600, -800 or -900 and a pop-up flash camera that can act as a commander. Which is just about any recent Nikon pop-up model.


One to the Face at Point-Blank Range

LumiQuest chose the top photo of Ben for the ad for the SB-III, which means I'll be buying a big yacht soon. At least that is what I am telling the missus. But they also wanted a shot of me, showing the SB-III, to go along with it. The rest of the family was away for the weekend, so I pulled a Strobist Flickr Pool Special and did a tripod self-portrait.

I setup an on-camera flash in manual and bounced it off of the ceiling. After adjusting the flash's power level so my photo looked good at f/2.8, I closed down three stops to turn that strobe into my fill. Then I lit myself to my new working aperture with the SB-III at camera left. (1/4 CTO included, to help my cadaverous skin.) There was no ambient in the photo at all.

If any of you work at the Ford Agency, or maybe at Elite, you can reach me by leaving a comment beneath the post. I am doing my best to avoid that "underweight heroin" supermodel look, too.

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LumiQuest Softbox III's will be hitting shelves over the next few months, but they are already available at MPEX and direct from LumiQuest.

Supermodel not included.

Dean Collins - Live at Brooks Institute

Without a doubt, my biggest influence when I was first learning how to light was Dean Collins. He passed away suddenly at far too young an age, but we are very fortunate in that much of his material was preserved on video.

Cruising through YouTube the other day, I found a 6-minute excerpt from and old VHS tape of one of his presentations at Brooks. A similar Brooks presentation has since been released on DVD, the sales of which benefit Collins' family.

He was a wonderful educator. If this is your first taste of his techniques, you are in for a treat.

Video and links, after the jump.



This clip is from an older VHS version of Live at Brooks Institute of Photography, one of two Dean Collins DVD courses still in print. (From the comments, this clip is not from the talk used to make the LaBI DVD, but the content is very similar.)

Most of Collins' library of material is from the 80's, so you have to translate the film ideas to digital. (Not to mention the hairstyles and wide-collared shirts.) But his concepts and techniques are timeless.

I highly recommend his Best of Dean Collins on Lighting (full review) as well as his Live at Brooks Institute of Photography.

Got a few more mins? There is clip from the LaBI DVD at the Software Cinema site.
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Related Posts:

:: Full Review: Best of Dean Collins on Lighting ::
:: Channel Your Historical Mentors ::
:: Where to Rent LiBI Online ::

Lighting Q and A, 9/19/2008

Looking through the questions that have come in so far, at least a dozen people have asked about the process of shooting manual flash without a flashmeter. So we are going to hit that one in depth today.

Like a lot of pros, I have made the switch from shooting with an incident meter to winging it and chimping off of the TFT screen on the back of the camera. Hit the jump for the how -- and the why.

The condensed version is, it comes down to working by numbers vs. working by feel. Or rather, by sight.

People who work in studios -- or photographers who want highly accurate and repeatable lighting schemes -- tend to like the comfort of f/stops displayed numerically. Measured right down to a tenth of a stop, they offer precision and repeatability.

And, truth be told, if I were going to set up 27 catalog product shots in a day I would probably let the meter do the driving. It is a different kind of shooting, and a meter is very well suited to repetitive and/or studio work.

But as someone who tends to be more of a location shooter, my first thought is always what I am going to do with the ambient. So the ambient exposure makes a much more logical starting point for me than does some magic f/stop revealed by a meter after I pop my flash.

I cannot remember the last photo I made where I did not take the ambient into account. Even if I wanted to nuke it, I needed to know where it was before I knew where to expose my photo to be safely above the ambient light level.

So, what I usually do is to make a frame on aperture priority, at an f/stop that would be a good working aperture for my final photo, in daylight white balance. This gives me two things: An ambient exposure reference point and a light color temperature reference point. For example, fluorescent lights will look appropriately green on daylight WB. I want to know exactly what ambient I have to work with.

Then I chimp my exposure and see how far, if any, I want to drop the ambient down before adding my flash.

My next step is to move to a faster shutter speed and see what that does to my photo. It's just like the Nick Turpin walk-through last week -- the ambient is not there to be an end-all "proper" exposure so much as to establish the floor to my final lit, balanced exposure. The further I drop the ambient component (before I add flash) the more range and depth my photo is going to have after I light it.

So, as I drop my ambient exposure and chimp the results, I am looking at both the histogram and the image on the back of the camera. The histogram tells me if I am crashing into full-on black anywhere.



I may want to, I may not -- but the histogram tells me when it does happen by bunching a spike up on the left-hand side of the graph. In the photo above, the histogram tells me that the chopper is gonna go to a sillo, and that is fine. I am more concerned with keeping my sky in the lower half of the tonal range.

The right-hand side of the histogram tells me where my brightest highlight is. And that combination gives me the range of the ambient component of my photo.

But I am also looking at the image on the back, too. I am scoping that out to get an idea of the "feel" of the environment I am creating for my final photo. I also may shoot a frame on an incandescent balance, for example, just to see how the shifted ambient looks. Experiment. You are creating an environment for your lit photo.

Once I get my ambient tamed the way that I want it, I add the light. Chimping again, I can see how my lit subject fits in with the ambient I have laid down. Did I blow out any highlights with my added flash? The histogram will tell me -- and I would drop my flash's power or increase the flash-to-subject distance. (Or, close down my aperture and open my shutter to compensate for the ambient shift.)

In the chopper photo, I had pre-tested my flashes to look good at my shooting aperture before the helicopter lifted off. So all of my adjustments would likely come from tweaking the shutter and checking out the back of the camera. (More on that shoot here.)

Back to the process. If my highlights are okay, I am pretty much done with my histogram. In fact, in the photo above, the lit area is so small I am not even getting enough data to use the histogram to judge the lighting. I would judge it by camera screen alone.

I have chosen my ambient level, so now it is all about the image on the screen. It's just a matter of eyeballing the screen to see the relative range of tones between the lit and unlit parts of the photo.

Flash meters are all about numbers and precision. Going with the camera's display is all about feel and relative tonal values. And building your photo with the above steps is a quick and easy way to get right to the exposure balance that you want without wandering around your scene popping a Minolta meter. Just be sure to keep that histogram contained in the normal range. Unless you have decided you want it to fall off one of the edges for effect.

If you have some kind of a rigid recipe you are following, a flashmeter makes sense. But I get much more enjoyment and creativity out of "adding salt to taste," if you will. And that practice has made me a much more fluid photographer, too.

Instead of being married to f/stops and ratios, I now spend my time thinking about the feel of the photo's chosen ambient exposure level, and how I am going to shape and color my added light when I create my final look.
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Got a lighting question? Ask it here.

Betcha Can't Watch it Just Once

I always enjoy a good photo shoot video. You know, a little chance to see behind the scenes, the studio banter, some cool finished stills at the end. Nice way to spend a few minutes.

Several months ago, Chase Jarvis did a promo still/video shoot for the Kung Fu HD network. For various reasons, he has not been able to publish it until now. But I got an early sneak peak, and I thought it was killer.

So I watched it again. And again. And again.

How many times? I have no friggin' idea. I only know that I was watching the full, 1080p version via his server. So every time I hit the "play" button, it cost him about 35 megs worth of bandwidth.

Suffice to say, I owe Chase a beer next time I see him. An imported beer.

Fortunately, it's on YouTube now, so I can watch it without the guilt. It's cool as a moose, and I know at least 94 percent of you are gonna like it too. Oh, and yeah -- that song is in heavy rotation on my iPod now.

Enjoy. And head over to Chez Chase to read more and see the stills if you liked it.

(Credits, Superfad team: Will Hyde (Superfad Founder, CD) Dade Orgeron (Concept + Director) Rob Sanborn (Exec Prod) Stephen McGehee (DOP) David Viau and Luke Allen (Designers) Phiphat Pinyosophon (Sim Artist) Ryan Haug (Editor) Nate Barr (Producer) Kung Fu Master: Paul Gutierrez.

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Ghetto Studio: Compact Garage Background Support

I love it when a great idea just drops in out of the blue. This one is from Ray Dobbins, a bicycle collector who likes to take photos of his prized objects in his garage.

He is totally frugal on the light, using a pair of cheapo worklights as main sources. Brownie points for that, obviously. But it's the two small metal brackets he made that will certainly find their way to my garage.

When I get a garage, that is.

More pics, and a a couple of ways for Ray to kick his light up a notch, inside.


More for Less

Ray is wonderfully low-end on his whole setup, having just upgraded to a 4MP Kodak EasyShare camera. He is bouncing the two worklights off of the ceiling, and putting the bikes on seamless white, including a sweep to fill on the bottom. Further he fills with white flats on the sides to smooth out the light even more.



The genius in his setup is this small bracket, which he uses to attach white seamless paper to his garage shelving. What a great idea. Since he is shooting bikes, he does not even need to run the shelving up to the ceiling to get full height -- which is exactly what I would do.

He holds the paper roll in with to (retractable) bolts. What could be simpler?

I am almost certainly gonna have a neater garage (one day) because of this idea. Ray, my wife thanks you.


And since one good turn deserves another, let's take a few minutes to help Ray pimp out his lighting and image management -- while staying on his super-tight budget. (Not that Ray is a tightwad, either. He just likes to spend money on bikes, rather than lights...)

First, you are really going in the right direction with the white flats. Big, creamy highlights on the sides and floor make your bike's form come to life. Let's continue down that path a little more.

I would suggest using small pieces of black cardboard between the worklights and the bike in your current setup. This will kill any hard, direct light. So all of your light will be creamy bounce light. The net affect will be to kill small, hot-spot reflections in the tubing. As a bonus, it'll also kill hard shadows behind the bike.

Second, I see that at least one of your lights is a double worklight. Sweet. You can do all of your ceiling bounce with just one double light. Place it in the center of the garage and aim the two lights toward the respective sides of the ceiling. You just scrounged yourself a second light source to use for free.

This next idea is gonna sound a little fancy-pants, but it'll make those bike tubes come to life in a killer way: Get an old sheet. Queen sized would be ideal. Stretch it on a cord, so it hangs, clothesline style, across the garage just behind your tripod/camera position.

Stick your second work light a ways back, behind the sheet and aiming at it. You just made yourself a huge, on-axis ring light / soft box. Combined with the bounce light on the ceiling and flats, this light will sculpt your bike's form very nicely, with no glaring hot spots, either. Make sure to fill the sheet with light -- back the light up.

This will make your white background much easier to tame and keep smooth, too.

And, assuming you'd rather spend $600 on some obscure Campy seat post than a new copy of Photoshop, you can now do pretty decent image post processing online for free with Photoshop Express and/or Picasa.

Thanks to Ray for the background bracket idea, and to Jean for the heads-up about the lnk. And if anyone else has any good garage-studio ideas to share, hit us in the comments with words and/or URLs.

:: Ray's Bike Photo Setup ::

Time to Give Away Some Pocketwizards

I am slammed today, editing from a corporate shoot last night. So rather than do a full post on who won the August round of the Going Wireless contest, I am sending you over to the PW Blog.

Congrats to [find out who won]!

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Lighting Q and A, 09-12-08

This week's questions are all about gels. Hit the jump for the light-sucking, color-shifting details...




James, who would tell us where he lives but then he would have to kill us, asks:

"If you gel a flash, say a full CTO for instance, does the power output of the flash alter the color thrown? (I didnt know if it had the same effect as say dimming a tungsten bulb where there is a dramatic color shift between full and almost completely dimmed.)"


James, the color of the gelled flash will remain consistent. The only thing that is actually changing as you dial down a speedlight is the amount of energy that is being discharged through the tube. The tube always flashes at (almost) exactly the same color.

For those who have not yet discovered the color shift in incandescent bulbs, take note: If you are trying to balance tungsten ambient up with a CTO'd flash, crank those ambient lights up. They only balance well at full power.

But if you want a deep, ambient red (for effect, say, in a candle-lit room) dim the lights down as far as you can stand it. Awesome colors that way. You can eyeball it, too, as you get close to low power.
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Cheryl, from Toronto, Canada asks a related question:

"How much light does my CTO filter soak up? I would like to know how much to raise the power on my flash to compensate."


Excellent question, Cheryl, and if you memorize a couple numbers, you can really help yourself.

A full CTO gel costs you 1.1 stops of light. For all practical purposes, I think of it as one stop.

Which is to say that if your flash (at 1/4 power) is giving you the proper exposure at a given distance, and you slap on a CTO gel on there, you'll either need to open up a stop or move up to 1/2 power. The partial CTOs follow the trend: 1/2 CTO costs a half stop, 1/4 CTO costs 1/4 stop, etc.

The CTBs are a little less efficient, and weirdly nonlinear: Full CTB = ~1.5 stops, 1/2 CTB = ~1 stop. And a typical fluorescent (green) conversion gels cost about 1/2 stop of light loss.

For the most part, if you remember that CTO fractions equate to lost f/stops and FL greens cost half a stop, your flash workflow will be much more intuitive. A basic familiarity with light loss numbers will help to save you lots of exposure chimping during a shoot.

You can get full light-sucking information on all of the gels made by Rosco on their site. The RoscoSun numbers, for instance, are here.

If you do not know your CTOs from your CTBs, you can get more info in the gel sections of L101 and L102.
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Tim B., also apparently from no fixed address, asks:

"About bouncing strobes off the ceiling - I did this at a recent wedding reception and the light was nice. But the ceiling was somewhat yellow. I wonder if there is a way to set custom white balance on the camera to match the color of the bounced light. Have you ever done this?"


That depends upon a couple of things, Tim. First, how much is the ambient contributing to the photo? If you are nuking the room by bouncing several big flashes into the ceilings, you can shift the whole scene easily in post-processing to compensate. This, of course, assumes your ceiling is at least reasonably close to neutral. If it is chartreuse, your screwed.

If you are shooting RAW (which for a wedding you should be) grab a bounce light shot of a grey card, white sheet of paper, bride's dress, etc. Correct that item to white in your RAW importer and use that color setting for all of the pix in that scene when you import.

But if you are mixing in ambient with the flash (which is done by your chosen shutter speed, of course) then you got problems, my friend. Because when you shift the picture to fix the off-color bounce light, you'll move your ambient color in the opposite direction, too.

Here's the best fix I can offer: Keep a full set of Rosco sample gels in your bag for each flash. Grab the color the most closely complements the color shift of the ceiling. For instance, if the ceiling was a slight yellow, you might blue your flashes just a tad. Maybe a 1/8 CTB. Then your flashes will help to compensate for the ceiling color somewhat and you will not have to correct nearly as far.

This is not en exact science. But you can set your camera on daylight and do a quick test pop or two with your flash and see how much you are helping yourself with the gels.

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Thanks for the questions. Please keep them coming in the comments of this post, or here.