Garry Edwards
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The first two challenges called for a large light, close to the subject, that produced soft lighting (no clearly-defined shadows), and some of us have struggled a bit with that, so this challenge is the exact opposite – a small light, a long way away, with very dense shadows.
This is a very common technique with a lot of subjects, it’s used to skim across the surface of the subject, to reveal and emphasise its texture, which creates deep and dramatic shadows (which, if required, can be mitigated by using fill).
It does require a specific piece of gear, a honeycomb, but don’t let that put you off!
My honeycomb, called a grid by our American friends, fits into a standard reflector. It’s a bit special, I paid a fortune for it when I was working in a Manhattan advertising studio many years ago, it has an angle of either 2 or 3 degrees and they are no longer available at any price, but very cheap ones with a 10 or 20 degree angle are available, and will work just as well for this challenge, and maybe better.
And there are plenty of other options too. A snoot will have a honeycomb included, and so do most flashgun accessory kits, although the ones I’ve seen aren’t great.
What a honeycomb does is to direct the light through a lot of small tubes, this stops the light from spreading to areas where it isn’t wanted, and the side effect is that a lot of lighting power is lost in the process.
This is the first time I’ve used my honeycomb with my fancy new flash head, and I was disappointed to find that it doesn’t quite fit, which it should. China has managed to collect and bring back bits of the far side of the moon, so it’s a bit annoying that some Chinese companies don’t seem to be able to convert 7 1/8” to 18.1cm. . .
This quick iPhone shot illustrates the "tight fit" problem. The light was actually in the adjoining room, to gain a distance of 9', this distance was needed to minimise the light fall-off that the Inverse Square Law creates, so that there was almost equal lighting intensity reaching the subject and the reflector.
If you don’t have some kind of honeycomb then you can make one very easily to fit on a flashgun, you just need a few drinking straws and a rubber band or sellotape. The longer the straws, the more dramatic the effect. In a perfect world, straws that are black on the inside should be better than white. See post 14 in this thread https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/speedlight-grids.640566/#post-7641586
Most, if not all good pubs have these straws, and I’m told that ‘Spoons do too, and you’ll only need a handful for use with a flashgun . . .
If you have some kind of continuous light then the same workaround applies, although you may need a high ISO to cope with the very low light level, and you may need to be careful not to leave the light switched on for too long, to avoid overheating – and, if you’re using a studio flash with a modelling lamp, turn the modelling lamp off as soon as you can, again to avoid the risk of overheating damage.
Anyway, my subject here is a cactus, a friend gave it to me and said something about it being hard and prickly on the outside and soft on the inside, just like me, but I have no idea what he was talking about
As always, the first decision is about the effect we want to achieve. We then arrange the set – once again I used my ubiquitous bit of white shiny plastic (but didn’t bother to clean off all the bits of earth). It may not look very white, that’s because very little light reached it.
Having arranged the subject, we then arrange the camera position and stick it on a tripod. The position of the light is dependent on the camera position and angle, so the light positioning is always the last thing we do.
In my example, the light was placed a long way from the subject, at a distance of about 9 feet. The reason for this was that as distance increases, the effect of the Inverse Square law reduces, so if the light is too close the fall-off of light will be too rapid.
Here we are, with just the honeycomb
As you can see, the honeycombed light has really emphasised the texture, but has left us with one side that’s totally unlit.
So, I added a reflector, as close as possible and only just out of shot
The reflector was another bit of white plastic, supported by a slightly-opened book, but could have been paper, card, a mirror, cooking foil or anything else that worked. And, because the light was so far away, the reflector has balanced the light pretty well. I could have moved the reflector a bit closer to get slightly more lighting balance, it’s all about what you want to achieve.
What else could I have done?
Well, I could have changed the reflector angle a bit, and bounced some of the reflected light on to a second reflector, but that’s a complicated way of doing things, and the reality is that it’s easier and better to add an on-axis weak fill light if we want to, but the terms of these challenges limit us to using just a single light.
The setup shot below shows how this would be done
Honeycombs are also used to create hairlights, and are used whenever we want to emphasise texture, they’re ideal for creating an accent light when photographing any subject that has a relief, such as coins, carved items, leatherwork and so on.
They’re also very useful for backlighting, because as long as the angle of incidence is greater than the spread of light, they cannot cause lens flare – or, to put it another way, if it’s a 10 degree honeycomb that’s pointing 15 degrees away from the lens, no problem.
Here’s another of my examples, where only a honeycombed light was used
So, over to you – a cactus, or any other subject that has a textured surface, take your pick
As with all of these challenges, what matters is the process, not the result.
