On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 5:00 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jun 9, 2014, at 3:30 PM, Bruce Walker <[email protected]> wrote: > >> For the lighting: a Westcott 28" Apollo softbox as key, C-L and up a >> bit. Patri was rim-light from her left and right, slightly behind her, >> with two Apollo Strip softboxes with 40 degree grids, to control >> spill. I stood on a stool to get that looking down viewpoint. One >> Pentax AF540FGZ in the key light and Neewer TT560's in the two strips. >> >> I never have trouble with getting accurate exposure of black on black >> since I religiously use my light meter. [This, of course, being the >> tool derided by just about everyone as completely unnecessary and "we >> just use the histogram". Good f**king luck using a histogram in a shot >> like this, folks. ;-) ] > > Have you even tried doing it with the histogram? Set up the shot, take a > test shot of her skin, adjust the setting based on the histogram, then go > through and do it with the flash meter, and see how close you get.
Oh yes, I went through the whole histogram for exposure thing for years. That is why I have owned a flash meter for the past two years. ;-) Here is the histogram of this scene taken from the original raw frame, all Lr sliders defaulted: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2254722/PDML/CabaretRawHistogram.jpg No amount of peering at _that_ on the back of the camera will tell you what to adjust or which way. And staring at the too small (and inaccurate) preview image will not help much either. And if you take shot after shot trying to balance getting good skin exposure with the rim lights, you lose all the energy and spontaneity. The model will start checking her phone messages. And what if you have a black model? Or both, like my newspaper dresses shots? How to interpret the histogram then? In this series of shots, I positioned the lights, took two quick meter readings -- just below her chin and off her arm for the rims -- then started shooting. Every single shot is perfectly exposed. Not one over or under, and not one pixel is blown out. > It does look to me like the highlights on her left shoulder and right cheek > are blown out a bit, though you might be able to recover them in post > processing. Nope. In the original raw the brightest pixels are about zone 8. In the shot you see I had used Nik plugins to expand the contrast which pushed the highlights upward, but still not clipped. There are no pixels higher than zone 9. > I certainly don’t deride the flash meter, it obviously works well for you. > No matter what I calculate or come up with before, I always try to check the > results to make sure that something wasn’t missed. > > By the way, for separating black subjects from black backgrounds, I’ve been > having good luck with cheap ($20) optically triggered strobes that screw into > light sockets and come with various colored filters. I aim them at the black > background and get some nice effects. I haven’t mastered them, but they show > lots of promise. Thanks again, Larry. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
