Bracketing with Studio Strobes . . .
Friday, February 15th, 2013
Product and other forms of commercial photography sometimes require the use of strobes. Strobes usually provide daylight color balance which helps with architectural photography as it allows a burst of light to light up a room, and use a time exposure to get the (daylight) scene outside a window so it looks like we see it. Otherwise, the sunlit exterior is blown out, or in some instances, it can look darker and drearier than the interior, if it is overcast outside. In the case of product, studio strobes are the powerful cousins of your on-camera strobes, and offer many advantages over the smaller units.
First, studio strobes are usually way more powerful, as they use very large batteries, 110v inverters, or wall socket power. Second, they are portable and don’t have to be mounted on the camera, and give a more pleasing look as they don’t “flat-light” the subject and can be made to mitigate heavy shadows. They are designed to work with many different accessories from umbrellas to soft boxes. They can use many different types of wireless triggers. They can generate more than enough light to shoot at tight apertures, allowing for deep depth of field. In product and architecture, I find that shooting with small apertures (f11 to f16) allows me to get everything sharp and in focus. If it is sharp in my original image, I can always create a shallow depth of field look in photo-editing software. However, the reverse is not true. Really soft images cannot be brought back into sharp focus even with the best of software.
All of the studio strobes I have used work with totally manual settings. I usually set my camera on a tripod at f11 to f16 at 1/100th of a second or slower. The strobe light burst lasts for a very short time. This eliminates most movement, but how do I bracket under those conditions, since I don’t want to change either the shutter speed or aperture once I start shooting? The answer is in the manual controls of the studio strobes. Once I get my best-looking exposure of all elements by shooting and rechecking the image, I plan on shooting a series of images bracketed on either side of that exposure by working the slides or dials on my equipment, usually in half-stop increments. I may be using as many as 3 or 4 lights at different angles, and each will need to be adjusted individually for each exposure. This gives me the same object at the same depth of field at the same shutter speed from a dark exposure to an overblown exposure. Why would I want to do this? I can then pick and choose the best exposed parts of the object or room and using an editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, I assemble them to make a perfectly exposed object with detail where it needs to be without any noise. I can also make an HDR image from all the exposures, if that gets me a better-looking image.
Being a commercial photographer means getting the best satisfactory image for your client. A commercial photographer having the right equipment and expertise means leaving very little to chance.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
We Shoot is a commercial product, food, industrial, and architectural photography team based in the Seattle area.
