{"id":2777,"date":"2014-06-23T04:16:08","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T08:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/?p=2777"},"modified":"2014-06-22T17:23:22","modified_gmt":"2014-06-22T21:23:22","slug":"side-light-from-an-umbrella","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/2014\/06\/23\/side-light-from-an-umbrella\/","title":{"rendered":"Side Light from an Umbrella"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Using an Umbrella to Fake Window Light<\/h3>\n<p>I caught about five minutes of Diane Cu (from <a href=\"http:\/\/whiteonricecouple.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">White on Rice<\/a>) on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.creativelive.com\/courses\/story-plate-food-photography-styling-todd-porter-and-diane-cu\" target=\"_blank\">Creative Live<\/a> the other day. She was explaining the direction of lighting in terms of a clockface. The light source was either at 12, 3, 6, or 9 while the subject was in the center of the clock. She showed several photos of the same subject with the different lighting and asked the audience which they liked better &mdash; the audience responded, almost unanimously, 6 o&#8217;clock. She was surprised, &#8220;but I always shoot at 3 or 9!&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>I agree with Diane! Side lighting is what gives shape to our flat pictures. My problem is that I have a very dark house until late afternoon at which point I get full head-on sun. That strong light can make for some lovely silhouettes but it isn&#8217;t so great for creating soft, dimensional pictures.<\/p>\n<p>I finally got fed up with my shoots being at the mercy of the light in our home. That is when I decided to take the plunge into off-camera flash. I wanted to be able to call the shots in terms of lighting. If I couldn&#8217;t take pictures at 2pm that day because I had to do carpool pickup, then I wanted to be able to take the same kind of shot later at night &mdash; which would be impossible with out flash.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Sunflowers-flat_1.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Sunflowers-flat_1.jpg?w=494\" alt=\"Sunflower behind the scene shot\"  \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So, for the sunflowers, I set up my giant umbrella (and I do mean GIANT!) to mimic a window. This gave me a lot of nice soft light coming in from the left. See all that light in the room? That is all from the umbrella. On the right side of the arrangement, I set up a large black tri-fold board, like those used for science fairs. This kept the light from bouncing around and gave me some nice shadows in the top and right side of the frame.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Sunflowers-flat_-2.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Sunflowers-flat_-2.jpg?w=494\" alt=\"Sunflower behind the scene 2\"  \/><\/a><br \/>\nMy &#8220;studio&#8221; is a bit cramped, but here is another behind the scene shot from the other side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Using an Umbrella to Fake Window Light I caught about five minutes of Diane Cu (from White on Rice) on Creative Live the other day. She was explaining the direction of lighting in terms of a clockface. The light source was either at 12, 3, 6, or 9 while the subject was in the center [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[117,10,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bts","category-photography","category-umbrella"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/sunflowersextraconstrat.jpg?fit=4190%2C2793&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2v9Qt-IN","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2777"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2797,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions\/2797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sienafallsmedia.com\/gems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}