I’ve been having a lot of fun lately using only a single strobe and doing minimal lighting of subjects on black backgrounds. It’s a much different look than what I used to do when I first started with off-camera lighting (i.e. illuminate *everything*), and it’s a bit more challenging and interesting to limit light to specific elements in the image.
For the longest time, shoot-through umbrellas were my main light modifiers. They’re great for soft light, but light spillage is very tough to manage. To make life easier on me, I purchased a few goodies from Honl Photo: a 1/8 Speed Grid, a couple of Speed Gobos, and Speed Straps for mounting the grid and gobos to my flashes.
Here is a shot I did using a single SB-600 with the speed grid attached:
The flash is about 3 feet above my head and just out of frame at camera left. It’s aimed down at my face, and works a lot like a focused spotlight. This was shot next to my red wall, and, if I had used an umbrella, there would have been a lot of spillage behind me.
Here is a shot I did using two gobos to barndoor a SB-600:
The barndoored SB-600 is about 4′ directly to the right of me. What you can’t see here is I’m about 1.5′ in front of my red wall. The gobos blocked any light from hitting the wall and flaring into my 85mm lens (there was a bit of flare with a bare flash).
So far, I’m having a lot of fun with my new light modifiers. Yes, I could’ve made my own grid and gobos for far less than I paid for the Honl versions. However, I’m lazy and would rather pay for something that is well-made than have the ones I make look like crap and fall apart after one session. Also, the Honl accessories are very compact and will easily slide into my lighting bag.
Now I just need to get a boom, so I can put lights directly above my subjects. :)
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