High Key advice

[lawrie29]

afternoon all,

Now, if you've seen some of my posts and also my gallery I have done a series of DIY High Key shoots and have another tomorrow.

It will be a cloth background, with a peice of white melamime on the floor for some nice shadows.

I will be using three flashguns, 2 on b/ground and one on camera.

One b/ground flash will be on pc sync cord, and one on optical firing.

thrid flashgun on camera for the subjects.

Now I recall someone giving me a tip about dialling the exposure compensation up a couple of notches to balance that out, but if someone could clarify that would be great.

Also, I was wondering if people have a preference of shooting in shutter or aperture priority and also an prefered ISO.

I tend to shoot at 100 or 200 iso and in shutter priority to capture the action.

ALso , which metering mode do you prefer.

This is a real diy gig, and I will have a good play when setup, so not too concerned, btu just thought I would ask advice to make it easier for me.

Potentially my 2 kids and another 3 sets of siblings, so maybe shots of 8 kids in various groups to do for some friends, so don;t want to look to much like an arse or be too stressed.

Cheers,

Lawrie

 

[blazzar]

Hi Lawrie, in the situation you are creating you should be using the manual mode on your camera. The shutter speed you can set as fast as your camera is designed to work with your flash, e,g Canon 5d MK2 quoted at 1/200 (in practice I shoot this at 1/160), Nikon's can normally go a little faster. Next you set your ISO to say 100. I presume you are talking about a solid white background so get your background lights set to a say 1/2 power and your aperture at f/8 take a shot, you are looking on the camera lcd for it to be solid white, check the histogram and make sure the rgb channels are spiked on the right hand side of the display. If they aren't then drop you aperture to 5.6 or 4 and check again, if you cant get it white at f/4 try your flashes on full power. Once you are happy you have the background pure white you can move on to setup your third light. For a much better explanation check out Zack Arias's website and search for his seamless tutorial http://www.zarias.com