Travelling Light: Using Light to Create a Dramatic Portrait (Part 1)

Ah, June. It should be raining with a welcome regularity any day now. Not that I don’t thoroughly enjoy the feeling of sticking to my chair, but I for one would like to bid summer goodbye.

As a parting shot to the sweltering heat, allow me to share my experience shooting portraits at twilight during my Bantayan trip.

If you’d like to know how I did it, then do read on.



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The Light and Shade: 
Using a Grid

Nice, even light is good. Most of the time, it is both pleasing to and preferred by most people. However, if you want to use light (aside from ambient) to create a dramatic photo, then the trick is to use it sparingly. Allow the darks and the shadows in the image to come into play, so that you create tension and drama.

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To get this shot (working in manual mode at ISO 200), I set my aperture at f/5.6, which kept my subject sharp and allowed the background to fall slightly out of focus. I then metered off the sky to get my shutter speed, but intentionally underexposed it by around a stop or a stop and a half, which gave me about 1/160 s. I took a few test shots and was pleased with the result, so I proceeded to set up the light.

I used one flash (triggered wirelessly) with a 1/4 CTO gel attached, which I then overlapped with a DIY straw grid. A grid restricts the light coming out of your flash, concentrating it into a tighter beam and preventing it from spilling wherever it pleases. (I was thinking of showing you a photo of the homemade grid, but it looks something like what a 6-year old would make during arts and crafts class, so just google one if you want to know how it looks.)

I started the flash at about 1/4 power at a distance of about 4-5 feet and had a VAL (introduced here) hold it slightly above the subject’s face (mostly on camera left). I took a test shot and saw that I was where I wanted to be exposure-wise, so I just had my VAL move the light either forward or backward when I wanted to adjust the amount of  light falling on the subject.

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It still astounds me how a bunch of black straws and some cardboard attached to my flash can produce such interesting photos. You can see more photos from this set here.

I’ll continue this series in future posts with other ways by which one can use light to create drama in a portrait. Until then, thanks for reading and do feel free to leave any comments and suggestions below.

Update: Part 2 of this post can be found here.