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Also known as doing it differently.
My first use of light for portraiture was in the back yard in British Columbia when I put the wet grey haze at my back. Everyone had a soft, even look.
Then to Western Australia where the midday sun in summer panda-eyed everyone. A different style of photography emerged - you can tell the two periods distinctly.
News reportage and then wedding candids with on-camera flash were pretty successful - as long as you kept the same distance from the subjects and didn’t change the camera settings. It was commerce - not art.
But the acquisition of three studio strobes started the real lessons. Of course two, or even one light would have done the trick as well, but you learn to juggle faster with three chainsaws than one.
The real lessons were not in the Elinchrom heads as such - they were in the reflectors, dishes, softboxes, umbrellas, and concentrators that fitted on the front of the tubes. Lighting books were read, classes were attended, and friends besieged to act as unpaid models…and in the end most images came out the way I intended them to.
Moral? Buy good gear - once. Use it as it should be used. Then use it in ways it was never intended for - and discover new insights.
This bore home when I needed video lights but baulked at the prices. Bunnings sells LED security lights that are mains-powered. They plug into a standard socket or extension cord so you are legal to connect them yourself - and if you have a studio full of light stands and a shelf full of reflectors and light shapers, it is just a matter of making some way of connecting the light to the dish.
Don’t give me wry looks - it works. Each light sits on a Phottix umbrella mount - a very good swivel kit for experimenting - and can shine continuously through the
older Elinchrom accessories. The lights are all by one maker and are likely to be working at the same colour temperature - but they operate in a cool and quiet fashion.
Videos are fun to do if you can dance or sing or talk sensibly. I still have ambitions to be able to do one out of three…
Text by Richard Stein
