Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Studio Photography
absorber in a plastic frame. You can light through this and turn it into a huge softbox, bounce off of it to
bring the contrast ratio closer to that magic Kodak 3:1, or take it outside and have an assistant hold it to
filter the sun. Another essential item is the disk reflector (e.g., Photoflex Lightdisc) which stores
compactly but springs open to a large round reflector with a steel frame. I usually buy them white on one
side, gold on the other.
The most important word in studio light control is "gobo". Hardly anyone knows what it means, but you
can't beat the mysterious sound. It actually is short for "go between" and refers to anything that you stick
in between the light and the subject to cast a shadow, diffuse the light, or whatever.
More: see the Photoflex Web site for a wide range of standard professional products and/or the Calumet
catalog. If you really want to understand the art of lighting, read books written for film makers and also
look at old black & white movies (before they had color, they used lots of interesting gobos to add
shadow patterns on white walls and other boring surfaces).
Flash Triggering
If you have hot lights, you don't have to worry about this; they're on all the time. If you have strobes, the
camera has to tell the strobes when to fire. This is traditionally done with a sync cord. Sync cords come
in many lengths and are available coiled or uncoiled. The one thing in common that they all share is that
they suck and you will trip over them and probably break something very expensive. It is much better to
use a wireless trigger of some kind. Personally, I use a Wein Infrared SSR kit (about $200), which
consists of a small on-camera hotshoe-connected flash with a filter over the front that only passes IR
light. The other half of the kit plugs into your strobe powerpack and waits for the IR pulse from the oncamera
unit, then triggers the flash. There are various radio slaves (e.g., Quantum) that also perform this
function, possibly better in a large studio or outdoors.
I'm so high on a fully wireless studio that I also bought a Wein slave trigger for my flashmeter (see
below).
Flash Metering
Unless you have a very unusual camera (e.g., certain Rolleis and Contaxes), you will not be able to
meter flash exposure with a through-the-lens in-camera meter. Virtually every professional carries a
handheld flashmeter. This is a $500 device that measures ambient light, light ratios, how many pops of a
studio strobe system you'll need to shoot at f/64 with your view camera.
Almost everyone uses a flash meter in incident mode. You stick a white diffusion dome over the meter
and hold the meter in front of the subject's face, with the dome pointing back at the camera. Then you
push a button on the meter and it triggers the flash (assuming you have it connected via a sync cord or
Wein system). The meter then reports the appropriate f-stop to use. This gives you a reading that is
independent of the subject's reflectance. In other words, if the subject is white the meter doesn't get
http://www.photo.net/studio/primer (7 of 17)7/3/2005 2:18:01 AM