Adding Depth Strobist Style

When photographing conferences, sometimes I have more than enough light to work with on stage. Sometimes I don't. When I don't have enough light on stage, I pull out the portable strobes and set up lights, using all sorts of things I've learned from the Strobist blog. For example, my recent gig shooting at OnCopyright 2008, I lit all the speaker shots with with two Canon 580 EX strobes and CTO gels. The lights were set up in such a way to mimic the traditional theater lights that were in use at the show, but which were just not putting out enough light.

Here's a shot of Clay Shirky on stage at OnCopyright, totally lit strobist style:

At last week's Where 2.0 Conference, I had just enough light to work with, thanks to a proper lighting truss set up in front of the stage. Working with Chris Legrand, the lighting designer, I was able to nail in a good set of settings for shooting the conference while preserving the background lighting design and was pretty happy with the results. Don't get me wrong, I didn't have a lot of light up there. I was shooting 1/100@f/4.0 ISO 1600. But, it worked and if I had added my own light to the stage, I would have started washing out the colors on the backdrop.

Here's a shot of the mashup panel on the Where 2.0 stage using just the conference stage lighting:

When looking at these kind of wide shots of the stage, I'm always of two minds about whether I like the audience in silhouette. On the one hand, it's very punchy and graphical. On the other, the audience turns into a 2D layer and doesn't have any depth.

Seeing a possibility to do more, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could add some depth to the audience. I broke out two strobes and set them up on the right and left of the room and aimed them up at the ceiling to reflect light down into the audience in front of the stage, being careful not to push much light onto the stage itself.

Here's the setup in action:

As you can see, the result is depth in the audience and a different sense of layering in the composition. I'm still split on which way I prefer things to be, but I think that different shots will want different treatments. Now that I've sorted out how to do this, it becomes a choice rather than an enforced mandate.

A cool part about the setup I engineered is that I was able to use the same exposure whether or not I was pushing light into the audience. It took a bit of experimentation along the way, but after a couple of tweaks, I had things balanced just right, including using 3/4 CTO worth of gels to match color balance with the stage. If I was shooting tight and didn't have audience in the frame, I would turn off my PocketWizard transmitter and shoot away. But, when I did want to have light on the audience, all I needed to do was flip a switch.

Best of all, I was able to use this lighting setup to capture audience shots. I found all I needed to do was open up a stop to f/2.8 and I could work interesting shots at various places in the audience, such as this one:

Learning to light over the last few years has been a very enjoyable journey. It's a revelation when you turn the corner from thinking about lighting as a binary decision between existing light and not. But that revelation doesn't come all at once. Instead, it's like so much of photography in that it reveals itself in stages. A bit here and a bit there. Each little experiment helps open up a new range of possibilities.