Lighting skills of using flash and reflective umbrella in portrait shooting

No matter whether you use single lamp or four lamps, and no matter what kind of artistic effect you want to shoot, the studio flash that can accurately control the output and angle can help you get professional lighting effects. In this section, we will discuss how to use flash and reflective umbrella.

How to use flashlights and reflective umbrellas to distribute light?

The reflective umbrella is too low, which illuminates the waist of the model's handicrafts and has a shadow on his face. If you use a lamp to illuminate the bust, it is natural for the lamp to illuminate the upper body of the model, so there is the lighting method in the above picture: the flash is aimed at the middle of the reflective umbrella, and the reflective umbrella is aimed at the upper body of the model.

This is not an ideal lighting method, but from its effect, it can help us understand the lighting characteristics of "flash+reflective umbrella": the flash points to the middle of the reflective umbrella, so the light reflected from this part is the strongest, and the weaker the light, the more you want to focus on which part, so let the handle of the reflective umbrella point to which part. Understanding this feature is the basis for us to use reflective umbrellas well in the next step.

In addition, before introducing the use of flash, I mainly talk about white balance. Any light source has a certain color temperature. Only when the color temperature of the camera is set close to the color temperature of the light source can more accurate color reproduction be obtained.

The above picture shows the relationship between the color temperature of the light source, the white balance setting of the camera and the final imaging effect. Generally speaking, the color temperature of the flash is close to the color temperature of sunlight, that is, 5500 K-5600 K When using the built-in flash of the camera, the automatic white balance of the camera can be automatically set accordingly. However, when using an external flash, the camera can't judge the color temperature of the light and set it according to the ambient light at that time, so the automatic white balance will be invalid and the white balance needs to be set manually.

When shooting indoors with a flash, you can set the camera to "daylight" white balance. Of course, it is best to set the color temperature accurately by manual setting. Using the same set of lights, the color temperature will not change much, so once the setting is accurate, you can always use this setting.