Nikon School - Guide to Creative Lighting

I have just finished watching a DVD by Nikon School called Guide to Creative Lighting. The current exercises on artificial lighting in the course has piqued my interest in these tools, and I thought this DVD would inform me on how the Nikon Creative Lighting System (a Nikon term for its range of lighting equipment, accessories and software) works and what can be achieved with it, along with general tips on the use of light in various types of scenes.

The DVD starts in a studio setting, using a single speedlight mounted on-camera. This gives unsatisfactory results due to the hard, specular and frontal light hitting the model; so there is then a progression of improvement utilising the three facets of light management:

Direction - The angle at which the light strikes the subject.

Quality - Hard specular light, or soft diffused light.

Colour - Often modified using colour gels attached to the speedlights, and changing colour balance.

Deciding on which form of each of these facets is used is dependent on the subject and the environment, although this DVD dealt mainly with environmental portraiture - studio, ballet class, bride, and fisherman.

In terms of direction, the flash was mostly used off-camera, at a high 45 degree angle to the subject. This causes an interplay between light and shadow creating a 3D effect on a 2D medium (paper or screen). Other speedlights and reflectors were then used to fill in the light on the shadow side of key areas such as the model's face. This gave multidirectional light that could be adjusted to create the effect the photographer had in mind.

The quality of the light was usually diffused through a white, translucent material. There are many tools available to do this, from a simple small diffuser that fits over the head of the speedlight, to umbrellas, handheld diffusers, large stand-mounted diffusers and even large bedsheets. Diffusers work by making the original light source bigger, and the bigger a light source is in comparison to the subject, the softer the light. The sun, although a huge entity in space, appears as only a small disc in the sky from our perspective. This therefore makes it a small, hard light source. On a cloudy day, the clouds make this small light source into a very large one, which is why overcast days produce such soft shadowless light.

With available light, the colour changes with the time of day, which means waiting for the light that you need. With artificial lighting you can change the colour of your light instantly with coloured gels that fit over the speedlights. Light picks up the colour of the material it passes through, or reflects from. There was an interesting example of this in the DVD where a macro shot of a small pocket watch was being taken. The photographer was using a second small speedlight to light the background due to the quick falloff of the main flash making the background dark. It was decided to use this second light to change the colour of the background to create a more interesting separation from the subject. A blue gel fitted over the front of the speedlight achieved this. Another interesting example of changing the colour of the light is when a reflector with a golden surface is used, often from a low angle, to bounce fill light into the subject's face. This serves to fill shadows under the eyes, nose etc caused by the main, high, speedlight, and the gold of the reflector makes the light warmer which is very desirable for a lot of portraiture.

On the DVD there was a big emphasis on supplementing the available light with speedlights, but also modifying this light in terms of direction, quality and colour as per the examples above. I think bearing these three fundamentals in mind, and manipulating them acccordingly, whether using available or artificial light will make huge improvements to my future photographs.