Behind the Scenes - Using Gels to add color to your speedlights.

So, Cara normally does the majority of the posting here on the blog, or um... pretty much all of it... but I got inspired to do a quick post so bear with me. I recently wanted to start experimenting with colored gels for my off camera flash work so I did what I normally did and started googling my head off trying to find some high quality work or tips on how to use colored gels on the flashes for an artistic effect. To my surprise there is very little info out there on how to do this! There are some good articles on using gels for color correction, such as when shooting under flourescent lighting, but not much on using bright reds or blues in an artistic sense. I went ahead and purchased a gel set from B&H Photo Video called the SJ-1 color filter set. It included a good number of Yellow Gels, Blue Gels, Red Gels, Orange Gels and some standard tungsten and flourescent correction gels. Needless to say I was pretty syced up to try them out. So, 7:00 AM Sunday morning, before everyone else wakes up, I start putting together some test shots with a mannequin head that I use, (yeah it's a little embarrasing but more co-operative than the dogs :) ). I get a couple shots popped off and then I hear little footsteps coming down the stairs. he he he, a much better test subject! My 3 year old son Zeke comes walking down the stairs with a smile on his face! Perfect timing! He agrees to pose for a few photos and here is what I got... Here is the setup shot... I am photographing right in our dining room as the sun is coming up to the east.

Yes, quite boring looking but stick with me! Note the brown background and sunlight coming through the window, this is exactly how these photos were shot... and oh look! There's the mannequin head!

Here I put a Westcott TD5 into place to use as the main light, if I had a third Nikon SB-800 flash I would've used that instead. The Westcott TD5 is a continous light source that using 900 watt equivelent flourescent light tubes. They work great but need to be used rather close. You can see here that it is only about 3 feet away.

In order for me to get a proper exposure for all of the different lights I start with the Westcott lights. In this case I was getting 1/200th sec shutter @ f2.8 shooting at ISO 320 which I was pretty happy with. Then I set my blue gelled, (using 2 blue gels), background light to 1/16th power and I set the red gelled light, (using 2 red gels), to 1/64th power. I wanted the red light to add just a kiss of color to the side of Zekes face as seperation. All of my light are set to full manual mode and I am shooting full Manual on my camera, I just prefer that level of control. My Red Gelled kicker light is being synced from a Pocket Wizard Plus II transceiver which is then kicking the signal over to the blue background light which is set in SU-4 slave mode. Here is what those look like when they all fire...

And here is the resulting shot!

You can see that the brown background has gone completely blue and there is a perfect little amount of red kicker light on the side of Zeke's face. I loved the look of that shot!

Over the course of the morning I got a few other shots with slight variations. Here are a couple others...

For this shot I pretty much used the same backround light setup but ramped the power up to 1/4 power. I did away with the Westcott TD5 for this shot and used the other SB-800 as the main light. That one was set to 1/8 power with no gel and was shot through a 33" shoot-through umbrella that was about 2' away from Zeke. Shooting with only flash here I could get better depth of field on my camera. The camera settings were 1/160th shutter, f7.1 @ 320 ISO. All of these Shots were taken with a Nikon D3 using a Nikkor 24-70mm 2.8 Lens shot at about 70mm.

Zeke changed into some nicer church clothes and I got a couple more shots with Cara's help. Same light setup as above but just changed to use Red Gels as the background light instead of blue, this is still the same brown backdrop as all the other shots just turned red by the gels!

In this final shot I had a diffent goal. I thought it would be cool to try to make Cara look as though she was working in moonlight and candle light. Not an easy thing to imitate! This shot was taken right in our dining room as well. I am using an orange gel on the light to camera left and a single blue gel on the light to camera right. I desaturated the image slightly in photoshop.

One of the coolest things about this setup is that it only weighs a couple of pounds and can easily be adapted to almost all of our work. I think that we will probably be using this new tool in at least a couple of our upcoming shoots!

If you enjoyed this post or learned anything from it and would like for me to post more like it, (educational posts) just leave us a comment and let us know! I would be happy to make regular instructional posts if you are enjoying them :)

http://www.awakenedimages.com/ . David & Cara Williams . awakenedimages@yahoo.com