The other week the lovely people at IPC Media, creators of the newly updated Amateur Photographer magazine invited me down to the Blue Fin building in the middle of a trip to Israel & a trip to Monaco to talk about shooting with one light. Very often when I am away I have to carry all the kit on my back or roll in a hard case. Being able to be comfortable using one single light is key for how I work.
For the article we looked at ways you can get different effects using a single softbox. In the studio, we used the kit they have, but wanted to shoot some extra images that were full length also as we only did cropped headshots for the magazine. You can use speedlights or strobe lighting for this or even natural light. It is all about working with the light and the kit you have.
The article is the in the first magazine of September (On sale now. 2014), I think…
You can check out the workflow used for this shoot on the DIY Photographer website that I used for these images also.
Soon after the shoot I was on the web and saw the Lightgreen 170cm softbox and decided that I needed a bigger softbox at home, next day the modifier was here and we set up a shoot ! Big thank you to the wonderful Emily Darcy Adams (@EmilyDarcyAdams) for modelling for me. We started out shooting some headshots like we did in the studio back in London then did some more interesting lingerie shots and wide shots. Emily did her own styling and wore lingerie Maison Close.
Above is the new 170cm Softbox from Lightgreen mounted on the small and lightweight 400w nano Monoblock (the Nano was to small to really hold the weight of the softbox, so I just ordered the larger Trinity Light, it did the job OK for this one shoot though.
The image below shows you how much light is added to the top image as it is just shot using the ambient light. We shot these images in Birmingham in the late afternoon with some strong light coming though the window, but we did have to wait for the clouds to clear when they came over.
The light out of the 170cm was so wide that it was super easy to shot wide with no fall off.
Balancing the ambient light was quite easy, I just took a reading frm the sky then added the flash back in to lighten up. Starting with the light power in the middle gives you room to go up and down, but moving the light forwards and backwards also has a great effect on the amount of light hitting your subjects. The big soft light gives you soft shadows, great for soft editorial style images when you want a simple set up. 
All of the images above had all the diffusion panels in the soft box in. To match the lingerie we wanted a puncher light, so we took of part of the panel to expose the silver lining f the softbox giving us a slightly harder edge. The difference is quite subtle, but gives us the edge to enhance later in Photoshop also.
More reading ? ….. http://www.diyphotography.net/world-single-light-set-ups-0/ Checkout this blog about shooting with one light which was written for DIY also.
