In his new 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 careful attention to detail made all the difference to this boxing photo, which he shot on location with two lights. Below he explains how he created atmosphere in an ordinary gym setting.
- Aperture: ƒ/4.5
- Credit: Scott Kelby
- Camera: NIKON D3S
- Copyright: Scott Kelby
- Focal length: 78mm
- ISO: 200
- Shutter speed: 1/125s
Our shot this month is from a promo shoot I did for a Tampa, Florida gym called The Fight Factory. One of the shots they wanted was of a female boxer, so they arranged to have one of their clients as our model for the shoot.
Although we’d be shooting in very bright surroundings (in a well-lit gym with a mixture of tungsten lights and daylight), I wanted to be able to control the light, so I brought two flashes and a softbox.
I wasn’t sure how much access we’d have to power outlets and I didn’t want to string out a 100-foot extension cord, so I decided to take two Elinchrom Ranger RX packs, which are small strobes with battery power packs.
They let you shoot without having to be plugged in, and I can use my existing Elinchrom softboxes (the same ones I use in the studio) and take those on location.
It’s important to note that it doesn’t really matter whether you use hot-shoe flash or studio strobes with a battery pack. The look would be exactly the same: a bright flash of light through a soft box to soften it.
Shooting on location with two lights
1 Setting the stage
This is a simple two-light set-up using a 24‑inch square softbox in the front and a bare-bulb strobe with reflect in the back. To make the beam of light from the strobe in the back (labelled in our photo) more focused, I put a metal 20° grid inside the reflector.
It just snaps right in on Elinchrom lights, but otherwise we would have used gaffer tape to hold the grid in place over the front of the reflector (At least, that’s what we did before we got these Elinchrom grids.)
My assistant Brad Moore left the battery pack inside a Think Tank rolling bag. The battery pack is about 8kg, which isn’t too heavy if you have to move it a few times, but since we had to do a number of different shoots all over the gym, he thought it would be easier and faster to just roll it along, and it worked well.
2 Get a dark background
Here’s an alternative view so you can see the position of the lights from the other side. You can see I’m intentionally shooting upwards from a low angle to make the athlete look bigger than life, and also to give the view a spectator would have sitting ringside.
I set the shutter speed at 1/125 sec, a safe and very popular flash-sync speed. I wanted to keep the background somewhat out of focus, so I set the aperture to f/4.5. For the cleanest-looking image, with the least visible noise, I set my ISO at 200 (the native ISO for the camera I was using). My lens is a 70–200mm f/2.8 lens.
Now, your job as an on-location flash photographer is to intentionally darken the scene – under-exposing it – by at least a stop indoors. (I usually go at least two stops outdoors.) So, if you’re at f/2.8 (making the background way out of focus), you’d have to raise it a stop or two to make it darker.
This is the reason I wound up shooting at f/4.5 instead of f/2.8. I would have preferred f/2.8 as it would have made the background even more out-of-focus, but I had to raise the f/stop to f/4.5 in order to darken the ambient room light. This meant the flash was lighting the subject and not the existing room lighting.
3 The shot
Here’s the shot before being retouched. If you look back at the final version on the previous page, you can see that I cloned out the light fixture on the left side in Photoshop, and I darkened the area surrounding her even more to hide some of the distractions in the background. I also increased the highlights in the right side of her hair to make them stand out more.
4 Strobe settings
Here’s another final shot, taken inside the ring using the same two lights, just in a different position. The trick to making this all work is to find a power setting for the strobe that doesn’t overwhelm the ambient lighting in the room. To do that, you’ll usually wind up running the power setting on your strobe at less than 1/2 power.
I usually end up at around 1/4 power on the front light (the one with the softbox attached), and 1/2 power or higher on the light in the back, because it’s supposed to be stronger and brighter for this type of look.
In this shot, you can see the out-of-focus background much better. The main reason it looks so much better in this shot (since both were taken at f/4.5) is that I zoomed in closer – the tighter you zoom in, the more out-of-focus the background.
5 Placing the lights
Here’s the behind-the-scenes shot with the same two lights in basically the same positions. I intentionally put the back light further back from the subject. That’s because the further back you put the light, the harder and edgier that light will look.
The idea behind this two-light set-up is that the front light is close, soft and wrapping, and the back light is hard and edgy, and it’s that contrast that gives the shot its look.
I’m having to bend down a bit so I’m not shooting down on her. If you’re up high enough, shooting down on your subject can look great and very flattering, but shooting just a little down, a few inches, doesn’t do the trick. In that case you’re better off to lower yourself so you’re shooting her straight-on at eye level.
