Off-camera Lighting

   Erin McMullin is one friend I can always count on to model for me in a pinch. I've been spending a lot of time doing portraits lately, and in this post I'm going to show the process I used to get the above image from this:

   We shot it in a parking garage of the LDS Institute of Religion at Utah Valley University. As you can see above, there was a lot of warm natural light coming from the entrance to the garage, and I probably could've got a nice portrait just with the available light and the proper exposure. The above image was using my EF50mm f/1.8 II lens with an aperture of 11 (because that's the depth of field that I wanted), and a shutter speed of 1/3 (hence the reason why it's so blurry). I had my camera on my tripod later, and could have easily got a crisp image at that shutter speed, but it's not the effect that I was looking for.

   I increased the shutter speed significantly to 1/25 so the ambient light would be considerably darker in the frame, but maintained the aperture at f/11. I framed the scene in a way that I was pretty sure I would finish up when I had my model in frame.

   Now it was time to start adding the lights. I was using two ProMaster 160A Studio Flashes, the first at about 1/4 power blasting on the back wall for depth:

   And the second light was at about 1/8 power with a diffusion umbrella at camera right:

  Add a model, without the lights it looks like this:

   And with the lights you get this:

   I cooled down the lights a little in Photoshop in the background, but other than that, it's straight from the sensor. Super easy way to get great depth, and nice lighting. Thank you Strobist. If you liked this little tutorial, pass it on.