New studio tips required

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tfphotography

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Toby
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Hi!

I recently purchased some lights and a backdrop online, and have set it up in a suitable room in my house!

I'm really pleased with the products! In the end I chose an Elinchrom D Lite 4 kit with softboxes and i'm liking the results thus far.
As a new user of studio lighting (my first time) I had a few problems which I have overcome, mainly sync speed.. didn't understand why I was getting black bars on my images until i googled it. My first question is.. what is the general camera setting required on a Canon 5D mk3 and 24-105mm L lens?
I have taken some shots of kittens on the white background, and some of them are darker than others. My lights are 400W each and have a number on the back of them being '6' and it goes down from there. The number I presume is power.. so what power will I need them to be on? If I were to guess, I'd stick it on max and have the lights about 4 foot away from subject.. which from trying that seemed reasonable and successful.

Also, some of the shots i've taken aren't as sharp as others.. any reasoning behind this?

I would post some images on here but no sure how! :S

Thanks
 
and also what shutter speed will my camera go to before it exceeds the sync speed?
 
The theoretical synch speed of your camera is /1250th (I think, but I'm not a Canon user).
But that assumes the use of either a direct cable connection or a radio trigger that doesn't have any inbuilt delays, and as there is absolutely no point in using a fast shutter speed in studio conditions it's best just to set the shutter to 1/125th.

Nobody can possibly comment on unsharpness without seeing the problem, it could be caused by diffraction limitation (using too small an aperture) or focussing errors, or flare, or something else. Stick the photo on a website such as flikr, and link to it, we can then see for ourselves.
 
Hi,
If this is for your pet photography business, then I would suspect that you don't want your 4x400W flashes all on full power. It might scare/harm the animals?

Have you made sure that teh room is dark, and used modelling lights? If there is too much ambient, and the shutter is too slow, then this could be creating a motion blur, even with flashes creating a 'main' image.
 
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coldpenguin said:
Hi,
If this is for your pet photography business, then I would suspect that you don't want your 4x400W flashes all on full power. .
Click to expand...

He didn't say he had 4 lights - just that these are the 4 model (400w).
Either way, If you need all the power of all the lights to correctly expose the image then that's the right amount of power..
 
Ah, my bad. I could have sworn I saw somewhere on one of the threads that he had 4 lights.
The d-light-4 has a maximum sync speed of 1/250 I think from their website:
EL-Skyport Speed Sync Mode, for fast synchronisation up to 1/250 s
Click to expand...
What is the method you are using to trigger them, as the triggers may be slower, and also the sync delay might also slow the flash trigger down.
Is there a part of the image which is unexpectedly bright?

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/posting-pictures.523735/
 
coldpenguin said:
Ah, my bad. I could have sworn I saw somewhere on one of the threads that he had 4 lights.
The d-light-4 has a maximum sync speed of 1/250 I think from their website:

What is the method you are using to trigger them, as the triggers may be slower, and also the sync delay might also slow the flash trigger down.
Is there a part of the image which is unexpectedly bright?

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/posting-pictures.523735/
Click to expand...
As I keep saying, the synch speed has nothing whatever to do with the flash itself, it is dependent on
1. The camera
2. The means of synchronising the light with the camera, i.e. there is no circuit delay if using an optical trigger or a hard wire connection, there can sometimes be a delay with a radio trigger, as some of them are pretty poor and introduce a delay in firing which limits the max synch speed.
3. Synch speed is irrelevant for most studio photography, most of the time
 
tfphotography said:
Hi!

I recently purchased some lights and a backdrop online, and have set it up in a suitable room in my house!

I'm really pleased with the products! In the end I chose an Elinchrom D Lite 4 kit with softboxes and i'm liking the results thus far.
As a new user of studio lighting (my first time) I had a few problems which I have overcome, mainly sync speed.. didn't understand why I was getting black bars on my images until i googled it. My first question is.. what is the general camera setting required on a Canon 5D mk3 and 24-105mm L lens?
I have taken some shots of kittens on the white background, and some of them are darker than others. My lights are 400W each and have a number on the back of them being '6' and it goes down from there. The number I presume is power.. so what power will I need them to be on? If I were to guess, I'd stick it on max and have the lights about 4 foot away from subject.. which from trying that seemed reasonable and successful.

Also, some of the shots i've taken aren't as sharp as others.. any reasoning behind this?

I would post some images on here but no sure how! :confused:

Thanks
Click to expand...

Yoiu should be able to shoot at about 1/160th, but safer around 1/125.

Power of the lights and camera settings is PURELY down to taste.

I like shooting with the lights as low as possible and my depth of field as narrow as possible. Your personal tastes may vary.
 
X-sync on a 5D3 is 1/200sec, though Canon recommends longer for studio flash, to make sure all of the longer duration flash pulse is captured. 1/125sec is a good default for most things. Skyport Speed trigger can sync up to 1/250sec, but only if the camera and flash are up to it.

If the OP has two standard softboxes only four feet from the subject at full 400Ws power, that's a heck of a lot of light. Aperture will be around f/22-32 at iso100.
 
Garry Edwards said:
As I keep saying, the synch speed has nothing whatever to do with the flash itself, it is dependent on
1. The camera
2. The means of synchronising the light with the camera, i.e. there is no circuit delay if using an optical trigger or a hard wire connection, there can sometimes be a delay with a radio trigger, as some of them are pretty poor and introduce a delay in firing which limits the max synch speed.
3. Synch speed is irrelevant for most studio photography, most of the time
Click to expand...
I am not disagreeing with you that other factors will reduce the usable sync speed, I was just pointing out that the strobes themselves are a maximum 1/250 according to their specs. I assume that this is due to one light receiving a trigger signal, then the 'measured' time it would take for the other flashes to correctly respond to the flash of the first strobe, plus the estimated time it would take for that signal to arrive at the first flash.
If the OP has too much ambient light in their room (which I can understand if they need to keep track of an animal), then surely they wan't to reduce the shutter open time as well as minimise their aperture size in order to try and reduce the effect of the ambient.
But this is just guessing at what might be a cause for an unsharp image (too much motion on a 'longer' exposure).
I have just had a quick google, and assuming the OP saw the same posts, a speed of 1/200 to 1/250 seems to be suggested for cats. At this speed, if perhaps a no-brand (/slow) wireless trigger is being used, it could explain why they had the black bars on their images, even at a 'usable' speed.
 
coldpenguin said:
I assume that this is due to one light receiving a trigger signal, then the 'measured' time it would take for the other flashes to correctly respond to the flash of the first strobe, plus the estimated time it would take for that signal to arrive at the first flash.
Click to expand...
The speed of light (c) is 299,792,458 m/s, or 186,000 mps. So too is electricity, so none of this is relevant.
 
Garry Edwards said:
The speed of light (c) is 299,792,458 m/s, or 186,000 mps. So too is electricity, so none of this is relevant.
Click to expand...

Actually the usual drift speed of an electron in oversees cables is around 3 metres a year, however the internet still works.

I wasn't talking about how long it takes the light to get from one strobe to the other (1/463,700 s assuming the worst case in the OP's room), but how long it takes for that light to cause the optical trigger to react, plus the delays in the decoding of the RF signal if that is what is being used (as you well know).

Neither your information or mine makes any real difference to the fact that
the time between
a) receiving enough photons into an optical receiver to cause a cascade reaction in the trigger mechanism
b) the amount of photons being produced from the flash being considered an output

is a finite time which the manufacturer thinks should be less than a maximum of 1/250 ths of a second.

As you know, some flashes even have delays built in to them between the optical triggers and 'output'
 
How do people manage to make such simple questions so complicated?
 
CharlotteM said:
How do people manage to make such simple questions so complicated?
Click to expand...
They are always 'complicated', however, most of the time people use approximations.

i.e. 1/463,700 ths of a second, to most people is instantaeneous :)

1/250ths of a second is pretty quick too, but slow considering the speed of light.
However, if there is a black bar on half of an image, perhaps it was too quick given all of the components that are being used.
However, if there is motion blur (possible at 1/125), then perhaps too much of the speedy background/ambient light managed to sneak into the sensor before the shutter closed.


Edit:
What would be your simple answer to the simple question?
 
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coldpenguin said:
They are always 'complicated', however, most of the time people use approximations.

i.e. 1/463,700 ths of a second, to most people is instantaeneous :)

1/250ths of a second is pretty quick too, but slow considering the speed of light.
However, if there is a black bar on half of an image, perhaps it was too quick given all of the components that are being used.
Click to expand...

Hoping you're being funny...
 
CharlotteM said:
Hoping you're being funny...
Click to expand...
It was meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek, but to some people, in some situations, 1/463,700ths of a second can actually be quite a long time.

Consider, and a very basic analogy, but your computer probably made at least 6 or 7 calculations in that time.
 
coldpenguin said:
It was meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek, but to some people, in some situations, 1/463,700ths of a second can actually be quite a long time.

Consider, and a very basic analogy, but your computer probably made at least 6 or 7 calculations in that time.
Click to expand...

My point was, the OP was asking roughly what settings they should use. Not for a dissection of the speed of light and electronics which will most likely just totally confuse anyone looking for a similar answer.

The answer is almost certainly 1/125th sec. Because that's the time that a Canon camera and Elinchrom light combo almost always require.
 
Point taken. And that answers half of the question. (Hopefully to those looking for similar answers, they will accept the answer, but perhaps use the information as to why the sync speed is much longer (10x) than their camera can support to decide how to improve their setup in future?).

The other half of the question, which can only be answered with guesswork as we don't have an image to go on, is possibly due to too much ambient light, with too slow a shutter speed causing motion blur. Or any of the reasons Gary gave:
it could be caused by diffraction limitation (using too small an aperture) or focussing errors, or flare, or something else. Stick the photo on a website such as flikr, and link to it, we can then see for ourselves.
Click to expand...
 
If some shots are darker than others with the same lighting setup, then either your camera isn't in manual (a setting is changing, due to metering) or the strobes aren't fully recycled.

If some shots are blurrier, it is either due to subject movement/camera movement greater than the flash can freeze (somewhere around 1/300 equiv at max power, but I don't know specifically for those lights). Or the lights are not fully recycled and you are not getting full power (i.e. the darker images are also blurrier due to incomplete recycling). The same would happen if using a lower power setting.

The SS you use is important if you choose to use a long SS to capture more ambient combined with lower power settings... in that case you can have ambient blur due to low SS combined with the flash exposure. Because you are shooting animals that won't hold still, I would suggest you use the highest SS that doesn't cause the black bars. I would expect 1/160th; but Gary and Charlotte recommend 1/125 and they have more experience w/ Elinchroms. (I have none.) The higher SS doesn't help in itself, it captures less ambient and requires higher power settings.


Edit: I read "unsharp" as being "blurry" and not a lack of focus/detail.
 
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CharlotteM said:
How do people manage to make such simple questions so complicated?
Click to expand...

Because they're technical questions with technical answers.

Why would you want the simplest answer possible? You'd have the same questions being asked here without anyone really learning anything otherwise.
 
Hmm, I think that sometimes we (I) could do a better job of giving an answer appropriate the the level of question.
Sure, others could learn/benefit from a more advanced answer, but the OP may not. I'm not saying the answer should have been "1/160." I think Gary's reply was about right.
 
Q: How do I boil an egg.

A: molecular gastronomy dictates that 61.5 degree a better temperature due to.... You may consider sous vide to cook meat then flash fry in pan at the end to add a little extra.

Lighting forum sometimes feels like people showing off how much they know rather than answering a question.

A simple answer to OP is:

Camera in manual mode, set shutter to 1/125th shutter speed.

Turn lights down to minimum power.

Kill as much ambient light as possible.

Set ISO to 100

Adjust aperture as necessary.

Compare results and see if that helps. Post examples when you have done that if problems still there

Start with one flash and add second when you have a greater understanding of how one flash works. It's easier learning with one flash.

I agree more knowledge can be great for people. Why not write a tutorial on it like Garry does, which are great for those looking to expand knowledge rather than answer I a thread that can confuse the OP.
 
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It's a balancing act.
Simple is generally good, both in terms of explanations and in lighting etc. Some people don't have the ability (or self discipline) to understand a complicated answer.
But too simple an answer doesn't necessarily inspire confidence, a very short and simple answer is often wrong anyway, so really the answer needs to have a level of explanation built into it.
And then we should build into the mix that the answer will be looked at by other people too; some of those people will want a fair bit of detail, some will want none at all (although I don't have much patience with people who just want to be told what to do without caring why).

What I am sure of though, is that a forum isn't the right place for an answer that can only be understood by someone who has a physics degree...
 
CharlotteM said:
Because for most people who enjoy taking photographs, taking great photographs is more interesting than studying science.
Click to expand...
I agree to an extent but you can not truly master something that you do not fully understand.
 
Tunbridge said:
I agree to an extent but you can not truly master something that you do not fully understand.
Click to expand...

Depends what you call 'mastering' it I suppose. To me it's all about the creativity, the science is really just a way to solve some of the problems in being creative.

But anyway, that's as off topic as the highly scientific answers.
 
CharlotteM said:
Because for most people who enjoy taking photographs, taking great photographs is more interesting than studying science.
Click to expand...

That's a rubbish answer, the op asked a moderately technical question and received some fairly appropriate answers. It seems a little silly to be bothered by some more advanced answers in such a thread.
 
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