Hi Inder,

Thank you so much for this excellent question.

> Did the speedlight 580 EX not influence
> the lighting from the camera point?

In fact, it did influence the lighting. With 1/128th of its power. And I made it so on purpose.

You know there are two schools of lighting such portraits: One is about maximizing contrast, the other is about preserving details.

On the one hand there are photographers, who let dark shadows sink into complete black, with no detail at all in the shadows. And those photographers like, that the overall contrast of their photos is pretty strong. The great Helmut Newton comes to mind. Or nowadays the awesome Moshe Brakha, who says “I am a dirty light - that's what I call myself.". Their photos look contrasty, powerful, crisp and often really dramatic. They please our eye even at the first glance.

On the other hand there are photographers who are lighting in a way that even on the darkest shades of their subject there is still enough light so that you can see details if your are looking close enough. Sasha Hüttenhain is a great example of somebody doing this with excellence. I also saw a lot of examples of this lighting in Albert Watsons work. Photos lightened like this sometimes look like they lack a little bit of contrast. Especially when you see them online in low resolution or on a mediocre screen. But if you see them printed big hanging in an exhibition, boy, they just shine. They are super interesting because they offer so much details that the viewers eye can explore and find when looking at the photo long enough.

Both schools of lighting are great. However, in my photography I always go for the latter one. I am preserving all the detail of my subject. Even in their darkest shades. That’s why I quite often I use the on camera flash to throw a tiny little bit of light onto my subject. This light then fills in the dark shades of the subject in a way, that they are still nearly black (around RGB 30/30/30) but in fact, the detail is still recorded. So in a way I am then using the on camera flash to dial the contrast of my exposure down to a healthy value. Masters like David Hobby alias The Strobist use a ringflash adaptor to perfection this method. However, for me this adaptor is too bulky. If I just want a little bit of fill in light from the on camera flash, then I really don’t need it.

In this particular shoot, I had my two main speedlights working at 1/4th of their power. The on camera speedlight was going at 128th of it’s power. You see, it could only add a tiny little bit of light. And chances are that it’s not even visible in low resolution online versions of the images. But it’s all I need in case I print the images big.

You know, if I want parts of my subject to be really really black (which I very rarely want), then I can easily do that in postproduction with Lightroom or Photoshop. To make something that is nearly black completely black is a piece of cake.

But the other way round, to bring back detail into a shade that is completely black (RGB 0/0/0) – well, that is impossible. At least for me.

> Is there an option sync
> without emitting light?

Yes, there is. Like so often with Canon, the way to set it up is not very intuitive. This is like you do it:

Use the zoom button on the speedlight in order to toggle through your settings. You have to press the button a couple of times and watch the display of the flash. Usually when you press zoom for the 4th time the little “Light ray symbol” in front of the “speedlight symbol” starts blinking. Now you can use the dial wheel of the speedlight in order to switch the light emission on and off. The feedback in the display tells you whether it is on or off.

When it is off, then the on camera flash is supposed to emit the ETTL trigger impulses that makes the other flashes go off. But it should not emit any flash that contributes to the exposure.

I personally have used this option quite a lot of times. But it did not always work. Even in cases where I had a lot of other speedlights doing the actual exposure and where I had the shutter speed set to a pretty fast 1/200 of a second, I sometimes could spot that the lighting was influenced by the on camera flash a little bit.

So what I do when I really don’t want the on camera flash to contribute is these two things.

1.
I set it up not to emit light during the exposure like explained above.

2.
I turn the flash head away from the subject. If the little bit of light that the flash still contributes has to bounce off the ceiling or a wall, then it really does not add to the exposure anymore.

If you trigger with a flash that has not such a sync option, then simply set it to it’s lowest possible emission value (1/64th or 1/128th usually) and turn it’s head away from the subject. That should do the trick.

I hope this helps a bit.

I wish you good light!
-- Michael

Hey Miro!

Excellent question (he said while switching back to English). Is it fine if I answer in English? I promise to weave in some German accent. With that said, yes there are CTO gels on the speedlights. It's Lee 204 filters that I got from eBay. In Germany Musikhaus Thomann might be a nice and groovy alternative, as they offer the complete Lee sample packs at a very reasonable rate.

The reason I used the filters are on the flashes in the above photo shoot is ... well, actually...to be perfectly honest... there is not much of a reason.

The complete exposure of my image comes from the flashes. I am not mixing tungston light with flash here. So having the flashes geled and using tungston white balance on my camera, provides me with the exact same images that I would get if I would leave away the gels and use the flash white balance setting.

However, there actually IS a reason. I will speak about it in my next video. But as a "preview", the reason is simply this: I did a couple of different photo shoots on the day we recorded the above shoot. Some of them involved mixed light with tungston. If I would take the Lee gels on and off for those scenes, sooner or later I would forget the one or the other gel on a flash. Or I might forget to adjust the white balance or something. Or adding and removing the gels a number of times might wear of the scotch tape so that the gel falls off the flash while I am shooting. So many things that could fuck up the exposure.

So I decided to put the gels on in the moring, set the wb to tungston and stay with this setup for the whole day.

There's a lesson to learn here: If you are lazy (like myself) or if you tend to forget a lot of things (like the strange photographer in that video, I forgot his name), then choose settings that work for you in all the situations that you are going to shoot. Try to go with a lighting and with settings that you don't need to change and adjust too much. It makes life a whole lot easier.

I wish you good light!
-- Michael

Hi Martin!
I hope you can make some really cool photos of your fiance so that she and you can be really proud of it!

Excellent question Mark! The situation was like this: while I shielded the back of the umbrella completely, I still left a good portion of the front open. That was not because the shield was not big enough to go completely around the umbrella.

However, the line of sight between the master and the slaves was not very direct. There was at least a bit of the black wrap in the way and furthermore the slaves sensors where pointing straight down to the floor.

But they still picked up the master signal absolutely reliable. I had no drop outs or anything. That's because we were in a simple, not too big and not too bright hotel room. The master signal is bouncing off everywhere in the room. Even if I had hidden the slaves completely they would still work reliably because they can get enough trigger signal through the shoot through umbrella.

In other videos on this blog you will often see me hiding the slaves completely behind diffuser material and they still work like clockwork. The important thing for the slaves is that they see a clear difference between "ambient lightl" and "flash master signal". They don't decode the "absolute brightness", they decode the "delta" between flash and no flash. Thus, the darker the ambient light of your set is, the more you can hide your slaves from your master.

I loose control over my slaves the moment that the area is getting very bright. I had to switch to radio in cases where we had a room with a glass roof, letting in bright daylight. Another occasion when the optical triggering failed was when we filmed a photoshoot on bigger video cameras and threw 3000 watt of tungston video light into the scene. That sort of overpowered the master signal.

I wish you good light!
-- Michael