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Room lights to help the ambulance lighting
- Thread starter ndwgolf
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- Elliott
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Those flickering Ambulance lights are a real pain
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- wayne clarke
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Most studio flash model lights turn off during the exposure so they dont add any colour cast to the shot. If your studio lights dont have modeling light, but you need some light, maybe a decent daylight ballanced light masked down as much as possible, just enough to see and be safe.
Gav.
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Are you looking to use the light in the image or just for AF/set up use?
I've seen you like f1.2, that will pick any light much quicker.
(I could be talking utter rubbish)
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- Neil Williams
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Gav I was seeing it they will increase the overall ambient light but they really didn't do anything to the overall shot.
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- Simon
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This!
Check the histogram, too. You may think that the ambient isn't doing anything but you may find that it adds a colour cast to the shadows but not the highlights, That's difficult to fix.
LEDs have a few other peculiarities too; take more than one test shot to make sure there's no frame-frame variation.
sk66
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- Steven
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This can be quite relevant...
A pixel requires a minimum amount of light, and any amount of light less than that will not show in your test image. But if your settings are such that the ambient light is barely below the minimum, then it won't require hardly any added light for the pixel to register.
E.g. let's say the pixels can register anything from 10 to 100, and you have your exposure set so it only receives 9 (a black frame starting exposure)... well the first recorded level (10) will be made up of 90% ambient and only 10% added (9+1). I.e. darker parts of an image (shadows, not blacks) may be dominated by the ambient light. And that can be problematic if it causes a mixed white balance situation.
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- Neil Williams
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I think/know that I get quite confused with getting the initial ambient light settings. ie in my studio/bedroom (no window lights) when I take a test shot at say f8 1/250 ISO 64 without any flash I get a complete black image even with 2 ceiling lights on), so I start messing around with the aperture bringing it down all the way to 1.2 sometimes just to get get something in the frame before adding strobe lights, I know that (well I think I know) the correct way to change the ambient light is shutter speed but anything below 1/250 Im worried about blurred images due to camera shake/ model moving................a lot of the times I feel its like hit and miss for me, but also know that it shouldn't be like that.
sk66
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There isn't really any single right answer... if you want to affect ONLY the ambient light, then you change the shutter speed. But that doesn't mean you can't/shouldn't use aperture or ISO instead.
And using aperture/ISO has the benefit of making your strobes more powerful at the same time(in effect); which means you can run them at a lower power, which has the benefit of a faster T0.1 time (modern IGBT lights).
And if the image is largely controlled by the added light, then the T0.1 time is what determines frozen motion or not, not the shutter speed (think of photographing lightning in a dark environment... the shutter can be open indefinitely).
As for the initial exposure settings... think of it more as taking a natural light (ambient) image, and adding light to correct things you don't like (e.g. fill heavy shadows); OR taking a selectively illuminated image (all significant light recorded is added, start from black frame). The only benefit to adjusting settings "just to get get something in the frame before adding strobe lights" is if you don't have enough lighting power available; and in that case it raises the WB/mixed lighting potential issue.
Think of using strobes as recording a double exposure... ambient + strobe; whichever of those two exposures is stronger/brighter will be "on top" and dominate the resulting image.
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- Phil
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Hi Neil
Given what you've read here that those ambient lights are capable of adding more problems than solutions - why not stick w f8 and know they're not going to cause those issues?
I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to achieve.
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- Simon
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It'd help if you try to have a clear idea of what you want to create before you start. That'll tell you what the aperture and the lighting should be; everything else follows from there.
Admittedly, sometimes that will be impossible & you'll have to adapt.
A black frame is a good starting point for working with flash. Leave the settings where they are and adjust the lights, not the camera.
Mixing flash & ambient is invariably more difficult than using just one or the other.
With someone posing for the camera you can usually get away with 1/125.
Admittedly, sometimes that will be impossible & you'll have to adapt.
A black frame is a good starting point for working with flash. Leave the settings where they are and adjust the lights, not the camera.
Mixing flash & ambient is invariably more difficult than using just one or the other.
With someone posing for the camera you can usually get away with 1/125.