Portable light, lights for portraits?

Something I have little information about is lighting. Other than the flash in my camera.

This is for travel. I want something I can put in my carry on bag and fly somewhere.

Is there a way to get some kind of lighting without spending all my money? I am not a pro.

I wont get my money back by selling photos. What I will do is take photos of my friends when I fly to

Guatemala or Colombia or Peru.

 

Somewhere I read an article that said something along the line of.

So you think you know how to take a portrait using natural lighting?

Yea, get a light.

Well it was a lengthy article and well written. But that is what it said.

 

Maybe I will get a couple of good tips on some affordable lighting.

Learning to use both natural and artificial light is the key.

 

As to speedlight/flash recommendations, Godox TT-600 is a good general purpose workhorse and very affordable.

 

Improvise light modifiers from your environment, bedsheets, cardboard etc.

 

All flash gear has the same problem when travelling though, weight. I really notice the extra weight when I add a flash to my bag.

#Strobist blog? That guy explains working with speedlites on stands. Not overly expensive, depending on what you are shopping for. Batteries and chargers might become a significant part of your budget.

Are you seriously pondering continuous lights instead? - I wouldn't recommend them. - In general they are comparably dim and urge you to shoot at noisy high ISO and insanely wide open apertures either relying on image stabilization or risking camera shake.

Below the class of flashes recommended above is a smaller one utilizing just 2 AA cells. if weight is an issue: go for it! Drawback: Longer recharge times.

Improvise light modifiers from your environment, bedsheets, cardboard etc.

Might be too much hassle for a tourist abroad? Better do it the other way round; buy white umbrellas, to improvise against nasty environment with your light modifier.

 

What camera are you using? Does it have a hotshoe or such, to trigger external flashes at all? And a fully manual mode, to shoot in?

I didn't completely figure out the TT-600, but I think it can remote trigger off some cameras.

 

With remote trigger, two or three of them, and white umbrellas as reflectors, and stands to hold

them and the TT-600 up, you should be able to do pretty well. I am not so sure about finding

umbrellas and stands to fit in a carry on bag. I think it is possible, but maybe not so easy.

The only travel-portable lighting that puts out enough light to be useful is a battery operated flash - i.e. a speedlight.

 

Unfortunately, this has the drawback of not showing its effect until fired. Well, not strictly true; some have a 'modelling light' function built in, but it's usually a very flickery light that's not terribly strong.

 

So, the answer is to practise, practise, practise. Until you have a good idea of exactly what result you're going to get while working 'blind'.

 

Soft light is the most forgiving type of lighting. Unfortunately again, a small speedlight won't give you soft lighting without modification, and small clip-on diffusers of any sort are useless on their own. You need to 'bounce' the flash. That is: reflect the light of the flash from a white or light-coloured surface. This isn't difficult to do with a bit of practise.

 

A consequence of 'bouncing' is that a fair amount of light is lost in reflection. So you need a powerful speedlight to begin with. Do not buy cheap and stint on power.

 

As mentioned above, the gear made by Godox and YongNuo is of a good standard while being affordable. Both makers offer a range of speedlights with various features. From basic, manual only models to those that offer full remote control and exposure automation.

 

Personally, I find manual control or at most 'Auto Aperture' mode gives me all that I need, but these need some experience to implement. Therefore I recommend you buy something that offers full TTL exposure control with whatever make and model of camera you have.

 

Also, take a good look at the 'Strobist' website for some good pointers on setting up flash for portraits. There's also a very good video by Jack Reznicki called 'One light lighting'. He uses expensive studio lights in the video, but the principles shown can be easily transferred to smaller and simpler equipment. He also explains very well the difference between 'hard' and 'soft' lighting.

P.S. to the above.

You don't need a pure white surface to use bounce flash. Almost any light tinted surface can be used. The colour can be easily corrected using the Auto White Balance setting of a digital camera, or by setting a custom White Balance.

 

You can also convert colour shots to black&white, which is often very effective for portraits.

All great tips so far.You mention one article but there are many more on the web on how best to use natural light for portraits. As an amateur photographer, I take 'news portraits' that appear in the local rag along with articles. They definitely won't win any prizes. But I do try to make the most of the lighting in different situations.

 

IHMO, the most important investment you can make is to learn how to make the best use of the natural light sources that are available. That and making the best use of your exposure settings and PP opportunities. You usually have some flexibility about where and how you take portrait shots. In 'directing' the shot, you make the best compromise between location, background, where people are standing, which direction they're facing, where you're standing, etc. For interior shots, this includes things like which curtains are open/closed, which interior lights are on/off, etc. My experience has been that 'directing the shot' is - initially - more important than thinking about extra lighting.

 

Often, the 'directing' gives you 'good enough' lighting. I occasionally use an on-camera 'fill-flash' (with a plastic diffuser and/or bounced). A remote flash would be even more flexible. I also have a collapsible reflector/shade which I hardly ever use. But it's light and portable and gives a more natural fill light than a flash.

 

It's also worth thinking about when and where you'll be taking your portrait shots and how much time you'll have to set up before people get bored (and show it).

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mike

 

PS. I suggest taking all your shots in RAW. Then you can tweak the exposure and white-balance in PP.

 

Something I have little information about is lighting. Other than the flash in my camera.

This is for travel. I want something I can put in my carry on bag and fly somewhere.

Is there a way to get some kind of lighting without spending all my money? I am not a pro.

I wont get my money back by selling photos. What I will do is take photos of my friends when I fly to

Guatemala or Colombia or Peru.

 

Somewhere I read an article that said something along the line of.

So you think you know how to take a portrait using natural lighting?

Yea, get a light.

Well it was a lengthy article and well written. But that is what it said.

 

Maybe I will get a couple of good tips on some affordable lighting.

I'd add that black and white can be a very useful fall-back when you're confronted with terribly mixed lighting you can do nothing about.

 

I'm thinking of innumerable venues (restaurants are serious offenders) where there is an unholy mix of fluorescent, tungsten and 'daylight' LEDs that you can't go around switching off, nor can you start blasting the place with flash to overpower the ambient, so you just have to make do.

Thanks gents

I will look at the strobist. and the rest.

I figured out that pp is post production.

Does ttl mean through the lens?

Not much of a texter.

 

Practice practice practice. Best advice.

 

Godox TT-600, YongNuo, video by Jack Reznicki

Edited February 29, 2020 by chrismitchell

Does ttl mean through the lens?

It does indeed.

TTL, specifically in the case of flash, means that the camera fires off one or more low powered pre-flashes, evaluates the result (through the lens, I assume using the camera's metering system) and calculates the amount of flash power required to give a correct exposure.

 

eTTL, I believe, also takes camera to subject distance into account, drawing that information from the autofocus system, so it only works with autofocus lenses, though may still work if the lens is manually focused?

 

In my (limited) experience, some TTL flash systems work better than others and it's not that difficult to set things manually. I could see TTL being useful if you're in an environment where there really are huge changes shot to shot, but that's rarely the case.

slowly I figure things out.

Soon How to use a light for a better photo will be my practice for the day

That is a nice photo. It has soft light because it was either an overcast day with no hard shadows or it was around sundown also with no hard shadows.

Outdoors by day a reflector might be handy. Drawback: They are best used held by an assistant.

That is a nice photo. It has soft light because it was either an overcast day with no hard shadows or it was around sundown also with no hard shadows.

 

 

Every now and then I do something right. Thanks. Most likely it was an hour or so before sunset.

 

If I remember right¿ Her name is Lily. She sells home made belts in Guatemala. If you do not need to buy yet another belt, she stands in front of you and smiles until you do need belt #13. If and only if you buy just one more belt you can take her photo as many times as you like.

Outdoors by day a reflector might be handy.

Drawback: They are best used held by an assistant.

I watched the video thanks.

The guy said he does not like gold reflectors unless you are taking photos of golden brown sun tans on a California beach.

 

I am going back to Guatemala in a couple of weeks. With about 80 photos of Ekaterina, (below), and her friends in their mountain village. They have waited about 11 months for their prints. And no there is not a place to get a print even remotely nearby. Not on a machine made this century. I don't think I will have a new light before I head out. Any guess as to which reflector could help improve photos like this. No photoshop and no grey card. Correct color is hard with the Mayan people. I expect to have a dozen or more assistants.

This is not supposed to be the best photo in the batch or anything. Children love to play with cameras. Many people have an old one just sitting in a box. Nothing to lose,

 

Maybe 4 years before I took this photo, I let the at the time 4 year old Ekaterina borrow the same Kodak you see in her hand. When I could not find her, and not wanting to stay out after dark, I took a bus 12 miles to the next village where I was staying, without the kodak. She traveled alone and after dark and found me 2 hours later, I had already given the spare batteries and the charger to her aunt.

 

Before the civil war a women named Rigoberta lived in the house you see as a

backdrop. Recuorda Chajul

Edited March 2, 2020 by chrismitchell

Get a small or medium sized pop-up reflector disc, cost next to nothing, weigh nothing and take up no room in your bag. I have a small Lastolight that I've had for the last 20 years, you can even get the model to hold it for a headshot.

photos of golden brown sun tans on a California beach

Sounds like your genre? (with a bit of geographical ignorance). Sorry, I honestly have no clue. My own collapsible reflector, a cheapo by Neewer, came with a diffuser on the ring and a cover, offering either black (as a negative reflector) & silver or gold & white.

Not using gold might be common sense, since as long there is direct light too that would mean mixing two different whitebalances (which rarely leads to great results. Sorry, I haven't shot portraits using the reflector yet and also avoid color work, whenever I can.

I'd buy something 1m or bigger

Any guess as to which reflector could help improve photos like this. No photoshop and no grey card.

Maybe bracket your exposures?

All I see wrong with that shot is that it's simply too dark. The soft lighting is fine as it is.

 

I took the liberty of just lifting the tone curve using the editor on my (Android) smartphone.

The shift of exposure puts more emphasis on the face, IMO, and takes the eye away from the camera, which is the brightest object in the frame.

I suppose the highly reflective camera fooled the metering for that picture above. brightening the face with more light would of course have been an option but you'd have to be careful to not hit the (prop) camera with that light.- why not pick a less reflective prop to avoid the hassle? - Autoexposure wants to preserve highlights, no matter where those are.

I might learn something today. From the 80 prints at 15 x 20 cm I found only 6 I wanted to print at 30 x 40 cm.

 

Rodeo joe. For some reason I thought the bracketing did not use in camera noise reduction as a single shot does. I thought wrong I just discovered. Maybe it was the v1 from a few years back, or maybe I read the wrong web page. Bracketing does use in camera noise reduction I now know. Continuous shooting loses high iso noise reduction. Bracketing loses nothing.

 

Bracketing does not work with flash. With flash It only takes a single shot regardless of the setting.

I most likely used aperture mode and center exposure. If the little green box did not find her face, Auto exposure may have been on her brown shirt.

Or maybe I moved back a couple of steps without increasing the flash?

Bracketing does not work with flash.

That depends very much on the camera.

Regardless, a bit more exposure on your second example shot wouldn't have come amiss.

 

Alternatively, you could shoot RAW, which would allow quite a margin of error for exposure alteration in PP.

Bracketing does not work with flash. With flash It only takes a single shot regardless of the setting.

That is probably refering to the built in flash that would simply need way too much time to recharge to take 3 shots of the same subject?

Auto exposure may have been on her brown shirt.

Or maybe I moved back a couple of steps without increasing the flash?

I'd rather blame the prop camera. it is angled to directly reflect flash back to your shooting one and a metallic surface. even built in flashes are on auto - pre-flashing ETTL (or whatever they call it) these days - and most likely programmed to not burn out highlights.

And "yes" to

depends very much on the camera.

Alternatively, you could shoot RAW, which would allow quite a margin of error for exposure alteration in PP.

I advocate RAW too in this case meant the other way round; i.e. if your camera is fairly modern: Shoot RAW + JPEG! Praising my Fujis I must say: I came home from vacation and basically trashed all the RAW files I took there, being sufficiently pleased with JPEG result but with anything exposure wise slightly off a RAW is nice to have. And it would take a really huge amount of bracketing /pre- & re-shooting (with histogram chimping), to nail perfect JPEGs in the field or an ever changing studio, with external flashes in use.

I don't advocate Photoshop / Lightroom rentals. As much as it is state of the art and industry standard software; its not cheap (<- Would you rent a home all year long if you only live there for one weekend?). OTOH: Most cameras come packaged with a free RAW converter and there is the free stuff from the Linux realm Darktable, RAWtherapee & GIMP for the others. If you like a picture enough to call it "promising", it should feel woreth the few clicks it will take to make it shine.

Gents, thanks for your help.

This is the photo I thought was good enough for a large print,

 

and also this one got a large print

Auto white balance does not work well with the Mayan people.

The first photo with camera in hand, I thought was closer to her actual skin color than the rest of the bunch.

Most likely I used a white balance card. The second photo here in close to the correct color. They have naturally rosy cheeks. At least some of them do. Is this one also to dark?

Edited March 3, 2020 by chrismitchell

Etiquette?

This is a real concern. Etiquette is far more important to the Mayan people than to a gringo like me. Now the first picture with a horse in the background, I paid the model. We came to an agreement. If I buy a belt that she knows I do not want or need, I can take a few pictures. I figure the photo is mine to do with as I please.

 

The other 2 girls are my friends from a mountain village. I spend a little time teaching them English, as they teach me to speak Ixil, their first language.

 

Did I betray their confidence in me by putting their pictures on the internet?

I promised to return with prints for their mothers, as gifts.

I did not pay for the photos.

 

I am not selling their photos, no, simply trying to learn something. Clearly there is room for improvement in my portraits

Etiquette?