Controlling the Sun
I spent quite some time yesterday working on the shot to the left (click for a larger view) at Northington Grange in Hampshire, and as it seems to have generated a bit of interest, I thought I’d write a few words on how I put the shot together.
For quite sometime, I’ve been wanting to try out overpowering the sun with my speedlights, and a mid-day, outdoors shoot, coupled with a very bright day, provided the perfect opportunity. I’d shot Monika before, so knew she was likely to have some patience while I worked this shot, so having all the ingredients, decided to give it a go.
A scout of the location (Northington Grange near Alresford, Hampshire) uncovered a small fountain with rolling fields behind, and that seemed like a perfect backdrop for the shot.
The first job was to get the exposure for the ambient light (i.e. the sun) at a level which would give the feeling of a deep blue sky, sometime after sunset. 
The base exposure before any adjustments was pleasant enough, but I really needed to kill off that sunlight, so I knocked the shutter speed right down to 1/8000s, and reduced the ISO to 100 from the D3′s usual 200, which at around f4 (for a narrow-ish DOF) gave a result which felt about right. 
Next, I started assembling the lights, and with Joe McNally’s desert shoot from last year in mind, put together 3 speedlights on a single stand, all clustered together using Justin clamps (thanks to Charles Jackson for capturing the shot of the lights – totally forgot to do that myself!) I would have used a couple more speedlights to lighten the load on them, and give a bit more flexibility, but I didn’t have anything else to hand to attach any more… Not quite as many as Joe’s epic construction, but hopefully it could start to achieve something similar.
So, here we go… SU-800 fitted to the camera to trigger CLS, and all the speedlights set to CLS mode on the same channel. I needed to use CLS to do this as I needed high speed (FP) flash sync, and without CLS, I’d have been limited to 1/250s exposure, which would have been far too slow to kill off the sun. All three lights were zoomed in to the maximum (105mm for the SB-800s, and 200mm for the SB-900) to focus down the light, and give the biggest punch. Finally, I placed them as close to Monika as I could without them coming into frame.
Test shots showed that even when firing at full power, the lights weren’t providing quite enough power, so I needed to reluctantly open up the aperture to get more bang from the flashes, with the side effect that the ambient would increase a bit, but sometimes you’ve just got to roll with it 
To get an acceptable level of exposure from the speedlights, the aperture ended up being too large, giving me too narrow a depth of field, so I upped the ISO (to around 320 if I remember rightly) so I could keep the aperture at a fairly useful level for my desired DOF.
Next, I dropped a full cut of CTO gel on each strobe, as I could then run with a tungsten light balance, forcing the sky into deep blue territory, giving me a good mix of almost primary colours across the shot.
For a couple of finishing touches, we added in another SB-800 (at 105mm) firing from behind the fountain (in optical triggered SU-4 mode), to try to pick out some of the water drops as they fell (thanks to Charles again for that idea). The difference here was almost imperceptible, and may have been more noticeable with another SB-900, but the SB-800 had to do. Finally, a reflector on the other side of Monika bounced back a bit of fill light to finish things off. Shot done. Also grabbed another, more humorous perspective of Monika whilst I was setup.
Whilst this all sounds like I was thinking figures throughout, that couldn’t have been further from my mind; I simply sorted the ambient out first of all, then went for a first approximation for everything else, and just fine tuned until I got what looked good.
As I’ve said elsewhere, thanks to Monika for being so patient through this – whilst it was bright and sunny, it was still very cold, and she was physically shaking at times – what a trooper!
For more information, see David Hobby’s post on balancing sun and flash.
If you liked this post, you may also like:
Subscribe to this blog
Follow on Twitter
