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We appreciate your business and look forward to this new chapter together.

We are thinking of you during these difficult times and hope this message finds you well.

Due to stay-at-home orders for Columbia, MO and more recently the state of Kansas, both of our locations will be closed until at least April 19th. At this time, we are not able to accept orders. Our customer service team is still available via email at info@mpixpro.com.

As business owners, we know that these uncertain times are stressful, confusing and disheartening. We’re in this with you and we hope we can serve as a resource about where to go from here. Our friends at PPA are sharing an early breakdown of the Coronavirus Assistance package and specifically how it impacts photographers.

We will continue to keep you informed as we navigate this evolving situation and vow to come back stronger than ever.

Best,
MpixPro

Selecting the right paper or surface for your image can be the difference between a good print and a great one. From paper types to Fine Art Prints and Gallery Wraps, your choices can completely change the overall feel and look of your image.

For more education resources, follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

From sizing to optimal resolution, your choices have a direct influence on how your images print. If you’re new to MpixPro and professional printing, this Photoshop and Lightroom tutorial will improve your workflow and show you some great tools available through OnOne, Inc.

For more education resources, follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

A simple color boost can make a world of difference in your photos. Whether your prefer Photoshop or Lightroom, Matt Kloskowski has some easy tips to add tasteful enhancements to landscape shots and portraits.

For more education resources, follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

In this quick tutorial, Matt breaks down monitor calibration and gives his recommended monitor calibration systems so you can get great color on your prints.

For more education resources, follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

Like it or not, Photoshop and Lightroom are important tools that can enhance your imagery greatly. In part one, Matt breaks down color space and teaches you how to get Photoshop and Lightroom to work together so you can take full advantage of each program’s capabilities.

For more education resources, follow Matt on Facebook and Twitter.

This series assumes that you have a basic understanding of flash, as I will focus more closely on its role in indoor portraits. For those of you who have missed our previous e-mail/blog post, you may read it here: Blending Natural Light & Flash with Indoor Portraits.

TURNING NIGHT INTO DAY

Last week we talked about one of the most common lighting problems faced by on-location portrait photographers: How to work with limited natural light at indoor settings and supplement it with flash for a seamless end-result.

Today we’re going to take that a step further, and tackle the extreme case of shooting in a windowless room. This may not be a common occurrence, but as a professional photographer, people will expect you to deliver beautiful portraits no matter what the lighting conditions.

As you can see in the example above, this apartment was dark.  I mean DARK. It was located at the basement level of a NYC brownstone, and while some of the other rooms in this home had narrow windows leading to the sidewalk, only the bedroom was fully finished. It was important for this client that we capture their family portraits in this room. It was up to me to make it happen.

A room like this presents numerous challenges. Not only does it lack any natural light whatsoever, its walls are painted with brown colors, which limits our ability to bounce flash off the wall directly.

So let us turn night into day.

 – Start with lamps – any lamps:  I’m a big fan of depth and ambiance. In fact, one of the most characteristic elements you’ll find in my indoor portraits is that I always try to use lamps already present to help fill the scene. Tungsten (especially when dimmed) gives off a deep amber light. This contrasts beautifully with skin tones, and the cooler daylight, which will come from our speedlights. Bedside lamps are my favorite. As you can see in the image above, I start my exposure by turning on those lamps, and making sure they’re not blown out (overexposed), and that they’re not throwing too much light onto the person.  We don’t want to mix tungsten with daylight when illuminating the face.

 – Available lighting?  A lot of times our clients will offer to turn-on all the lights in a room. People generally think that light – any light – is good for photography. Unfortunately, most indoor lighting is not diffused. This means that you’re often going to get numerous sharp sources of light, which results in harsh shadows, high contrast, and – to put it bluntly – just a flat-out lighting disaster. In this room, as you can see below, most lighting is recessed, which would translate to about a dozen different shadows going off in all directions. We’ll stick with the table lamps then.

 – Improvise

I am NOT a big fan of traveling heavy, even though Sophie and I drive to all of our newborn sessions. The last thing I want to do is turn our clients’ home into a movie set. A home with a newborn baby is a quiet, peaceful place, and we want to capture those uninhibited emotions that are running high in those first few days.  Rigging-up softboxes, plugging-in strobes – these mechanical contraptions take the focus away from what’s important – your client’s comfort. I limit myself to a single stand with a speedlight & umbrella. However, in this particular situation, a single light won’t do.

When I need a big, diffused source of light, I’ll often ask our client for a white sheet (I guarantee you, everyone has a white sheet). I have found that our clients are always happy to help.  Here I’ve clamped the sheet onto the brown curtain, and voila! I just got myself a 6×6 foot “natural light window”. As you can see, I put my speedlight on the ottoman, and bounce it off the sheet. This gives off big, soft daylight.

The problems with this setting.

By positioning my key light (you know, the sheet!) on the right side of the bed, I’ve ensured good definition and depth when shooting the bed head-on. Your key light should always come from the side, or a 45-degree angle relative to the subject.

But how do we minimize shadows on the left side of the face? There is no light on the left side of this room. Worse yet, what if the subject turns their head to the left?

In a studio environment, every pose can be crafted, lights can be moved around, and every little detail perfected. But during a lifestyle in-home session, lighting needs to accommodate a wide range of poses and angles.  I can’t simply tell a person (only look this way, and not that way!)

This is where a fill light comes in. And today, that’s where we’ll place our umbrella with the second speedlight:

One Speedlight, one umbrella.

Above you’re looking at the left side of the room. This is our fill light, and I’ve positioned it at a more comfortable 45-degree angle relative to the bed.

With my Nikon SU-800 Commander, I can control the power of both speedlights independently, and trigger them wirelessly. This gives me full control without having to run back and forth and fiddle with the controls on thespeedlights themselves.

A fill-light is generally 1 to 2 stops lower in power compared to the key light, depending on the contrast desired.

With our fill light in place, we have a comfortable shooting arc, where our subject can sit or lay on the bed, and freely move their head around without us having to worry about lighting.

The end result.

Well, there you have it!  Nice and simple, and the client was – needless to say – impressed with how natural the light looked. The following 30 minutes were spent on intimate portraits of Mommy & Daddy and their beautiful newborn girl.

Practice makes perfect

I urge you to practice at indoor settings (maybe even, your own home?). Getting the hang of using off-camera-flash (or OCF if you want to get fancy) can seem like a daunting task. Though as you’ve seen in our example, keeping things simple, and improvising with existing household items can bring light into any room, no matter how dark.

Follow Michael and Sophie on their blog, Instagram and Facebook.

EQUIPMENT

Ok, so I’m a firm believer that every photographer should have a Speedlight (spelled Speedlite if you’re a Canon shooter, also simply known as “flash”), and have a basic understanding of it. Knowing where and how to use one is essential, since relying solely on natural light can oftentimes leave you in the dark (oh yes, I said it!). I also believe that flash allows a photographer to better understand light’s unique properties like spread, diffusion, falloff and color. I say this because flash allows one to control ALL of these properties, whereas natural light does not.

Now, there are already countless resources available online (as well as in print) on how to use flash. If you’re unfamiliar with flash photography completely, I would recommend you read “Nikon Creative Lighting System Field Guide”, which is an excellent starting point for beginners.

This series assumes that you have a basic understanding of flash, as I will focus more closely on its role in indoor portraits. Here’s the overview of this two-part series:

Part I: Gear + Blending Natural Light & Flash

Part II: Using Only Flash to Light-Up a Room, Naturally (we’ll cover this topic in our next blog post)

Here are some basic items you’ll need:

• Flash + flash trigger
• Flash clamp (fraction of the size and weight of a full light stand; can clamp onto a household chair, door, and most furniture)
• A-clamp (has about a million and one uses; mostly, you’ll need it for just that one)

Here are some items you may want to consider:

• Stand + Umbrella (optional)

1.   So What Flash Should I Get?

Yes, the marketplace is littered with flash units ranging widely in price and offering many bells and whistles, many of which a portrait photographer rarely needs. I’ve been using Nikon SB-900 Speedlights (now discontinued) for the last six years, and while these tend to be on the upper-end of Nikon’s product lineup, you’ll get a similar performance from the smaller and more affordable SB-700. Canon shooters will find the 430EX II to be just as capable. There are also many alternatives offered by third-party brands. I personally prefer Nikon Speedlights, because they integrate seamlessly with Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS), which allows you to control (wirelessly) everything from your camera.

2.   Triggering

For triggering, I use Nikon’s SU-800 Commander unit. It’s a fairly small little gadget that fits right into your camera’s hot shoe, and lets you wirelessly trigger and control your Speedlights. I find this especially useful because I can adjust the power of my Speedlights without moving an inch. Canon offers a similar system for their Speedlites, and there are third-party options available as well (PocketWizard, RadioPopper).

3.   Stands, Umbrellas, Brackets…

Hey guess what, in most cases you won’t really need any of these! For most indoor portrait sessions, I only use ONE Speedlight. A cute little thing called Justin Clamp lets you attach your flash, and clip it onto a chair, or door (or a piece of furniture). It has rubber pads to ensure nothing gets scratched, and gives you the flexibility to position your flash pretty much anywhere. Who needs a light stand to trip on when you’ve got this ingenious little clamp?

Lastly, the final item on my list is the generic A-clamp. As we’ll discuss in Parts II and III, this is something you don’t want to be caught without.

4.   My Kit

While the kit above is the bare-bones version, I do bring with me a light stand and an umbrella. My preference is to bounce my flash off a white wall, but if the wall isn’t white (or worse yet, has a large mirror), you’ll want a white sheet or an umbrella to take its place. Remember, we’ll be creating the illusion of window light, and for that only a large white surface will do!
Manfrotto makes an awesome light stand (model 5001) that weighs next to nothing, and folds-up to only 19″ long.  As for the umbrella, a medium white one like this will do.

Just for the record: The above links aren’t paid-for by Amazon or B&H. I simply offer them for easy reference.

Putting It All to Use

With this minimal kit, which easily fits in a shoulder bag and will cost you no more than the average lens, you’ll have the flexibility of bringing “window light” with you to any home. So let’s take a look of how we can achieve that!

BLENDING NATURAL LIGHT & FLASH

So, do you really need flash?

In many cases, no. Natural light is often plentiful, as long as there are enough windows (and provided it’s not a particularly cloudy day). But what about those times when the room has only a single tiny window, or worse yet, NONE at all? As a professional photographer, your clients count on you to provide them with the same quality of images as they see on your website. No excuses!

Here are a few guidelines that will help you decide whether the use of flash for portraits is necessary in a given room:

• Does your exposure call for a very high ISO? Depending on your camera model, anything over ISO 3200 for pro models (and ISO 1600 for the entry models) should be frowned upon. Sure there are countless noise-removal plug-ins, and tricks to recover some of the lost detail. But a clean image is a clean image, period. Noise is ugly and yields a great loss of detail, namely in skin and hair.
• Is the available light coming from all the wrong places? A skylight is often no good (think dark shadows under the eyes). What about a window directly behind you? Shooting from the same angle as the direction of light yields featureless, 2-dimensional images. Your ideal light source should come from the side of the subject, or a 45-degree angle to your left or right.

So let’s look at an example: The Bedroom. In this room, my shooting arc is focused at the bed – head-on. A large window behind your subject creates a sense of depth and provides beautiful backlight that adds a nice accent. Here is Sophie, letting me get some light readings (ISO 800, 1/250 sec @ f/1.4)

The problems with this setting

For one, it was a cloudy day, so the light pouring into the room was dim as it was. I would have needed ISO 6400+ to expose her face correctly. Two, there was no other window, so the subject would be entirely back-lit. This means the back-light would’ve bounced off the walls in every direction, absorbing their color, and ultimately yielding a featureless, high-noise image with a brown color cast. Not exactly a professional result.

So let’s create a window where we need it!

One Speedlight that could

I’d normally just bounce my speedlight off a white wall to create the illusion of big, soft window light, but the walls here were brown, so that was a no-no. Using the equipment we’ve discussed earlier in this article, I’ve put up my white umbrella and a Nikon SB-900 Speedlight to create the illusion of another window. As you can see, I’ve positioned it at a 45-degree angle relative to the subject.

The most important thing to remember is M – for Manual: While many cameras have automated flash functions like TTL, TTL-BL, etc., I believe that the best way to understand flash is with full manual control. So set your exposure manually, and do the same with your flash. Your results will be much more predicable and consistent. I promise.

Balancing it all out

A good starting point is the original photo (natural light only, above). As you can see, I’ve set my exposure so that natural light provides just enough illumination. The window isn’t completely blown-out, and it plays nicely with the two side lamps, which are spilling minimal tungsten color on the subject.  At this point I wasn’t concerned about exposing for the face (that’s where flash comes in).

Luckily, flash is daylight-balanced (unlike those tungsten side lamps), so we needn’t worry about one looking warmer or cooler than the other. 

Using my Nikon SU-800 commander, I fired the flash at 1/16 power. My exposure was already set at ISO 800 and 1/250 sec @ f/1.4, and the flash provided all the key light that we needed. Here is the end result again:

The easy part is made in-part by the SU-800 Commander. If the flash was set too high, I can lower its power with a click of a button. This allows me to focus more on the subject instead of running back and forth adjusting my flash manually. It also makes the mom and dad more comfortable, as my focus is on them and not the gear.

Where to put the speedlight?

A good rule of thumb is, at a 45-degree angle relative to your subject, and never-ever mount your speedlight onto your camera directly (PLEASE!).

Practice makes perfect

I urge you to practice at indoor settings, maybe even your own home. Getting the hang of using off-camera-flash, or OCF if you want to get fancy, can seem like a daunting task. Though as you’ve seen in our example, getting natural light to mingle with flash is in fact not all that hard!

Today we’ve learned about what basic equipment one needs to create natural window light. We’ve further explored the approach I use in identifying proper shooting angles, setting correct exposure based off ambient light only, and supplementing it with a key light – in this case a single Speedlight, to provide a balanced lighting solution that yields a natural lifestyle portrait.

Stay tuned for our next blog post with MpixPro, in which we’ll approach a setting with no ambient light at all, and turn it into a beautifully lit bedroom.

Follow Michael and Sophie on their blog, Instagram and Facebook.

I used to hate photographing groups of people at weddings. I even heard fantasies about photographers who adopted the “I don’t shoot group formals” policy and wondered how I could pull that off without upsetting clients.

The problem with not photographing groups is that I neglect my duty as a documentarian at the wedding, recording who was there to support the bride and groom on their big day. While it wasn’t my favorite part of the wedding day, I always felt it was too important to neglect.

So I decided to get more creative with my posing.

Changing up the poses I’d use for my groups turned this more into a special event during the day rather than something I’d normally gloss over and rush through.

Here are a few little things I did that make a big difference:

1. Turn it around: Instead of having everybody “just turn in toward the bride” I’ll mix it up and have 1 out of every 4 turn the opposite way

2. Bring the couple out in front, closer to the camera: This little change takes the focus away from the entire group and let’s you know who the day is about. Showcase that hottie couple!

3. Keep shooting after the “shot is done”: The best moments happen right after a group finishes a shot.  Bridesmaids relax, and often times start laughing and chatting right after I finished the formal shot.

4. Stagger heights: Arranging from tallest to shortest is so blugh. In addition to that, sitting, squatting, leaning, and standing can be used together to make a more dynamic and natural image.

5. Don’t seek perfection: The longer you hold that group together, looking at every little detail (top buttons buttoned on guys’ jackets, bouquets at the same level, boutonnieres standing upright, etc), the less relaxed the group is going to be, and the more “stiff” your image will look.  Keeping it quick, light, and fun is your key to success.

Getting good at these will not only make your group shots a little more dynamic, but it will also improve your client’s experience (and I’m all about delivering a good experience!).