Photo Recipes: Scott Kelby on how to blend light sources

In his series in Digital Camera magazine and Digital Camera World, the legendary Scott Kelby reveals some of the behind-the-scenes secrets of some of his favourite images.

This month Scott explains how to add just enough flash to enhance a portrait but retain a natural look.

Words and images by Scott Kelby. You can follow Scott and his work on his blog or on his live photography talk show The Grid. You can also find Scott and his KelbyOne team on their Facebook page and on Twitter as @KelbyOne.

This month I’m giving you a behind-the-scenes look at a groom shoot, taken on location with just one light. The whole key to this is making the light from your flash blend seamlessly with the ambient light already in the room.

For this shoot, I knew I would be shooting with the bride and groom in all kinds of lighting scenarios. In some cases, it would be all natural light; for some, I would have to pretty much light it all with strobes; and here, we mix room light with the light from a flash, which is something I know a lot of folks really struggle with.

You might be wondering why I would shoot with a strobe, with all this natural light pouring in? Well, you find out that while you’re standing there, looking this beautiful room, you think “I can just shoot this all natural” – but as soon as I brought my camera to my eye, I realised my shutter speed was going to be so slow that I would have to shoot on a tripod just to keep the shot from being blurry. There wasn’t nearly as much light as there seemed.

The other problem was that, although the windows behind our groom look white, they were actually yellow, and the light looked pretty awful on flesh tones.

In the position I wanted to shoot him, standing by the piano, not only was the natural light fairly low, it was pretty flat. I took one test shot and knew I would have to light it to achieve any depth.

SEE MORE: Scott Kelby on how to balance ambient light with flash

Step by step: How to blend light sources

1 The ‘existing light’ shot
If you look at the shot above, you can see what the scene looks like with just the existing room light (before I turned on the flash). Whatever light is present pretty much lights one side of his hair – which I thought was a good thing, because I wanted to use the natural light as my cheap ‘backlight’.

So I took a shot without the flash on just to see what the ambient light looked like. It was a little under-exposed, so I could work to make the ambient light brighter – right? I could change my f/stop or raise my ISO, but actually when I’m shooting flash like this on location, I follow a ‘recipe’ to get the right settings.

First, I turn off the flash and take a shot using just the existing light. I switch to Manual mode on my camera; I set the shutter speed to 1/125 sec, then use the light meter inside my SLR’s viewfinder to adjust the f/stop until I have a proper exposure. (When the meter reads ‘0’, it’s neither under- nor overexposed; it’s the proper exposure.) Easy enough.

Now, I darken the exposure by at least one stop – so now I’m intentionally underexposing. (So if my camera said that my exposure was correct at f/8, I would raise it to f/11 to darken it by a full stop.) I take another test shot.

The reason I’m doing this is that I want it to be my flash that lights my subject – not the ambient light. I want the ambient light to light the room around him and behind him, but I want to light him myself.

Once I can see that the room light isn’t lighting him too much, I start finding the right amount of flash to blend in.

SEE MORE: Photo Recipes – Scott Kelby’s killer one-light portrait set-up

2 Location gear 
Now I need to find the right amount of flash to look realistic and blend with the room light, and hair light coming through the window.

The behind-the-scenes shot above shows the set-up I’m using for this shoot. There’s one studio strobe running off a battery pack. It’s from Elinchrom and it’s called a Ranger Quadra. You can actually run two strobe heads off it, but not at the same amount of brightness. I normally just use one flash head with it.

The flash head is attached to the end of a monopod, which is held by an assistant here. This set-up is perfect for the ‘running and gunning’ type of shooting you have to do at a wedding: you don’t have to mess with setting up light stands and trying to squeeze them between pews and tight places.

The battery pack is incredibly lightweight so it just slings right over his shoulder – I’m amazed at how little it weighs.

SEE MORE: The best studio lighting for photography – 8 top options tested and rated

3 Flash power
Although I am doing this with an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra, you can do this same thing with hotshoe flash and a small 24in pop-up softbox – especially indoors like this, because the goal here is not to use a lot of flash. We’re trying to mix flash in with the existing ambient light – we don’t want to overpower it.

That’s why I generally start with my power down around 1/4 power as I take a test shot. I wanted this light to look like there was a nice big window to my left, instead of the stairway and bride’s dressing room that were actually there.

So now your job is to take a test shot and see how the light looks. Does it look real? Is it overpowering the window light lighting the backside of his hair or does it blend in? Does it look too ‘flashy’?

The biggest mistake I see is that the flash looks too bright and too obvious. Go for subtle.

SEE MORE: Scott Kelby explains how to shoot on location with two lights

4 Shutter speed
Now I have everything dialled in. The whole process only takes a minute or two thanks to that LCD screen on the back of your camera — you can see straight away if the flash is too bright or the ambient light is wrong. If you think the ambient light is too dark, all you need to do is lower the shutter speed.

Lowering that shutter speed from 1/125 sec down to 1/60 sec lets more natural existing light into your shot. You can go down to 1/30 sec or even slower as long as your subject isn’t moving — the flash will pretty much freeze minor movement, so you may be even able to go lower if necessary.

In this case, I was able to keep it at 1/125 sec for this particular spot. My aperture wound up at f/8, which keeps everything pretty much in focus from front to back.

If you really keep your eye on the power of your flash unit, with your goal to not look too ‘flashy’, you’ll totally nail it.

SEE MORE: Off-camera flash – how to stop fearing your flashgun and take control of lighting

Lens choice
I shot this with an 85mm lens with a low aperture rating. There’s a good selection of lenses with apertures in the region of f/1.4. But since I shot at f/8, I pretty much wasted any advantage an 85mm f/1.4 lens would bring.

I took this lens because I thought there would be enough natural light in this room to make the type of photo I wanted. As it turned out, I was wrong. Luckily, we brought location lighting too.

Changing lenses wouldn’t have helped me. Whichever lens I put on next would still have to be shot at f/8, because that’s what we had determined earlier was the proper f/stop for this look.

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