by Rolando Gomez
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Often I’m asked to critique images, and for the most part I’ve seen them all, from good to great. But in most cases, I see “minimalist” color in the "light" of many images—traditional boring light without dinstintctive color.
Many "shutterbugs" are content with just-plain-ole-white-light, or “clear” light our eyes learn to subconsciously accept. Our minds work in the "automatic" mode, accepting colorless horizontals pictures as the norm, and our eyes and minds run stale with the lack of stimulation often found in verticals and color-laced great photographs—successful photographers know how to stimulate the eyes and wake-up your conscious.
One method professional photographers predominately use to stimulate the mind is they tend to shoot more verticals than horizontals. Other methods of stimulation come by the use of various techniques, such as the proper composition and use of leading and implied lines, especially imaginary diagonals and S-curves. There are many methods, but with the evolution into digital photography, professional photographers can now add color to the light of the image—on the fly.
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While these photographs of (L to R) Talya and Wendy are surrounded by "colored" water, the main lights for the models faces are balanced at 5400K. The key here for the warmth in the images is that the camera was set at 6,000K white-balance and the source light was 5400K, fooling the camera to add warmth to the entire image. The water was lit with an orange gel on the left Dyna-Lite studio flash head, and a magenta gel on the right Dyna-Lite flash head--both lights are sitting off the the sides of the pool, behind the model with one person stationed by each flash head to secure them from falling in the water--think safety first when working with electricity and water. |
Digital photography makes it easy for everyone to use this “add color” to your image technique. Though some professionals will shoot in the “raw” mode and add color balance in postproduction, others, like myself, will do as much as we can in the camera so we can see the effect at the time of capture.
One of the beauties of digital photography is the ability to use practically any light source to illuminate our subjects and “get away with it” unlike conventional film. Two main reasons are that digital cameras have more “latitude’” or room for error, in the shadow areas and digital cameras automatically adapt the camera to the color temperature of the light source via the white-balance function of the camera. While it’s hard to change a camera’s capture capabilities for shadowed areas, it’s not difficult at all to change the color temperature of the light in an image with the camera white-balance functions.
In traditional film days if I wanted to experiment or adjust the outcome of my images to various light sources, I’d have to slap a filter on my lenses or change film emulsions if I were shooting anything other than outdoors or indoors with camera flash. One of the problems photographers often faced with film is that special films are usually slower-speed and if you used filters you lost light through the filter, sometimes two full-F/stops or worse. In both scenarios you’d often operate with slow shutter speeds to offset the loss of light or slow speeds of film. Not with digital.
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These photographs of (L to R) Hillary and Heather are shot with the Olympus E-1 Digital SLR and an Olympus, Zuiko Digital 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens, 1/100s @ F/8. Lighting for Hilllary is a Dyna-Lite 1000WI studio power pack, 3 fan-cooled 2040 heads. Light Modifiers--(2) Larson 48-inch Soff Strips for side-lighting and (1) Larson 3 x 4-foot Soff Box as the main light. Black scarf filter technique. White-balance set at 6000K internally on the E-1 Camera for both images. The lights for Heather are the same Dyna-Lite heads and pack, but two lights are behind Heather shooting into the back of the black foam-core board, and one straight-on with a 10-degree grid placed on a 20-degree on top of the flash head as the main light. |
With digital photography you can use your table lamp, window light, or even the fluorescent light overhead and increase your “film speed” to provide acceptable shutter speeds and apertures to work with, and still get color-balanced images—with traditional film you’d usually record real red to yellow images from your table lamp and green images with your fluorescent lights—but in digital photography, setting the camera to “AWB” or automatic white-balance will provide color-corrected images with higher shutter speeds.
There is one problem though with AWB, what if I do want that warmth in my images typically found in that West Coast, “Golden Hour ” or that last hour of sun? Or even the subtle warmth when the sun rises if I’m on the East coast?
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These photographs of (L to R) Apryll and Chasity share similar skin tone warmth, though the image on the left was shot during the "Golden Hour." The image on the right was shot indoors with Dyna-Lite heads and pack. Dyna-Lite is balanced at 5400K, so the camera was white-balanced at 6000K to mimic the more golden-hour effect. |
Well hopefully you have a digital camera that allows you to custom white balance your camera—like I did with this image shot with the Olympus E-1 digital (DSLR) —I dialed the white-balance at 6000K or 6,000 Kelvin. My light source was a Dyna-Lite 1000wi studio pack and 3 heads with Larson Soff Boxes. Dyna-Lite is typically set at 5400K, so by telling the camera that the light source was 6000K, the camera was “fooled” into believing the light was “cooler,” thus it compensated and added more warmth to cancel the “cool” effect of the light—the camera added more (color to the light) reds and yellow naturally to the model’s skin-tone and overall image.
I sometimes use special “cool” looking warm cards. If your camera has a built in custom white-balance feature, you too can use these special, calibrated-cards from WarmCards.com, which will recreate the Golden Hour for you consistently at any time of the day—works great in the studio too. The warm cards come with a true, 100IRE white-card on each side of the four levels of warm cards, and they're laminated and inexpensive to boot. The key with the warm cards is they provide consistency.
Incandescent mode is closer to tungsten, which is red/yellow or warm light, around the 3,000 to 3500K range, thus the camera will add blues, green, or a mix of the two known as cyan to take out the warmth. A cool trick is to shoot photos at dawn outdoors in this mode to create the “Hollywood” blue-night, light look.
Florescent mode obviously takes the green out of the image, so the camera adds the opposite, magenta, which is a “purplish” color for those that don’t understand color theory. Try using this mode with when shooting a sunset for deep magentas.
Standard Daylight mode is set for light sources around 5000 to 5200K. Actually, this setting rather boring, experiment with others, though try using this indoors with your table lamp and you’ll get a much warmer-toned image.
Flash mode tends to be slightly cooler, so some cameras are balanced around 5400 to 6000K, adding just a tinge of skin-tone warmth to the image to compensate when shooting with 5000K light sources or on bright sunny days. This is the mode I prefer to shoot under normal daylight conditions to add warmth to my glamour or portrait type images.
Cloudy mode is set more toward the cooler range of 7,000 to 8,000K, so the camera adds the reds and yellows, or warmth, to cancel the blues. Try this setting with flash or during the middle of the day to warm up your images too. This setting is fantastic for deep warm saturation in sunsets too.
The key is know your camera, after all, it’s digital and if you don’t like the results, just push delete—definitely less expensive than conventional film. Experiment with your camera, don’t be a minimalist. Color your light in your images and make them stand out from the rest of the crowd.
©2004 Rolando Gomez
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