One rainy Saturday, my crazy, co-photographer, pseudo-colleague friend from medical school invited me to attend an advanced photography workshop about strobe lights. Being the curious boy that I am, you should know by now what happens next. The class was handled by Laya Gerlock. Strobe lights are those gigantic standing blackboxes in photography studios (shown in the photo below). They seem to be useless space occupying lesions, like Integrated Clinical Clerks in medical school. But, unlike ICCs in medical school, these space-occupiers make all the difference in controlled lighting environments. So here's how the workshop went.
Basic needs in strobe lighting. Basic white background. Black painted wall. Strobes or speedlights. Modifiers. Reflector. Black marble tile.
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| Here's the set up, strobe with softbox, reflector on an improvised music stand and strobe again plus the snoot. |
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| On a black marble tile, alcohol lit by flame produces this effect. The snoot was set to light the object. Set your camera to bulb mode. |
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| Hold on to a storage basket and speedlight through it to produce this type of background effect. |
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| Milk splash, you don't need anything high speed sync related for this! Just some translucent fluid on a contrast background. |
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| Switch to B&W on your camera. Pop the speedlight against the background. Set another one to light the subject. VOILA! |
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| The usual lightpainting with props from Google search. |
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| Look at that catchlight then imagine what props were used. Gigantic lighting. |
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| Reflections, easily reproduced by using the good old black marble tile. Pop the speedlight on a white background. |
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| 3 light setup |
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| Vintage Rolleiflex inside a lightbox, lighted with strobes from the left and right. |
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| This is a warzone. Lightpainting by Ian De Vera |
