Become Better Photographer: Make Real Rays of Light with Flash with Gavin Hoey

March 28, 2020

*For more information visit AdoramaTV YT page, and of course you can keep up with Gavin on Instagram.

Want to achieve that dramatic spotlight look but don’t know how to set it up? Photographer Gavin Hoey with AdoramaTV is here to help! In today’s episode we will be learning how to make real light rays with the flash.

Gavin shares: “I’m using the Xplor600 with a long focal reflector. You could do something similar with a standard reflector and a grid but what you’re trying to simulate is the look of the Sun. Now the Sun is 93 million miles away. Now sadly I can’t get my Flash more than a few meters away, so there will be a bit more divergence in my ray of light compared to the Sun but the further back you get it, the better it looks.”

“Now the first thing you need for rays of light is of course light but the next most important thing is something for the light to bounce off, so you can’t just see rays of light in an environment like this, you need to add some atmosphere. It could be something natural like mist or it could be something that you’ve added to the scene for example a smoke grenade would work really well, however today we’re at the Gatwick Aviation Museum in a building that’s about to be demolished but it still has electricity so I can use my trusty smoke machine. You can also use powder or dust but if you are doing this in an urban environment don’t kick up the dust in the room because you never know what’s going to be in there.”

“There’s two other things you need to make this work and the first thing is known as a cookie. It could be something that you’ve made but it’s going to block light and let some pass through. In my case I’m just going to use these windows which should work really well. It could be branches of trees that kind of thing. The next thing is a dark background. Think about it, if you make light beams, you need a dark background. Light beams, light background, cancels itself out.”

“So first thing I need to do is actually set the lights up, so let’s get a model in, let’s get some lights set, let’s get shooting. So to help me out today it’s great to have Beth back with us. Beth is going to be the model for this shoot and the first picture I’m actually going to take is no flash whatsoever.”

“I get not a completely black picture but a very dark background. That’s exactly what I want, so now I’ve turned the light on that’s outside the other side of this wall and I’m just going to take a picture of Beth. I’ve got it on about 1/8th power middle-of-the-road, let’s just see how this changes the picture.”

“Now straight away I can see that, that works really nicely but it doesn’t have that beam of light, for that I need the smoke machines, so let’s get that warmed up.”

“Now we have the beam of light covering the entire scene. I can adjust the intensity of that beam by adjusting the Flash power. So at the moment it was on 1/8 let’s take it up to 1/2 power, that should make that beam a lot brighter.”

“That works really well but as you can see there’s not really much light on Beth and that makes sense because the only light in this scene that we’re really seeing is coming through the windows so let’s add a second light that only lights Beth.”

“This is an Xplor400. It is in a small softbox with a grid just to put a little bit of directional light onto Beth, remember I’m shooting f/2.8 so I can quickly meter this just to see what we’re getting on Beth. Let’s add a bit more smoke into the scene, see how this looks.”

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Watch the full episode with Gavin Hoey and Adorama TV:

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