Setting a Mood with Gels

8/4/10 – Rebecca Getsfrid – Senior Portrait Photographer in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon

Natural Light

This is an industrial shop building in the Orchards area of Vancouver, WA. It’s nearing sunset on the opposite side of it, and this is how the natural light looks. Extended shade like this is the absolute best place to get nice evenly lit natural light photos, and it’s not too tough to do. Drop down the aperture, bump up the shutter, and your subject’s going to look pretty good.

Let’s give a natural light look a shot:

Natural Light

If you ignore the fat chick with the camera in the sunglasses, it’s a pretty nice shot. The problem is that if you turn to any other angle, you’re going to see the sky, and it’s going to look like this:


Natural light, exposed up in lightroom

Not pretty, unless you’re in to that whole blown out look. For the record, I’m not.

Instead, I’d rather hook up some some big powerful Alien Bees studio lights, and do something cool with it.

2x Alien Bees B800s, one with 1/4 CTO, the other with reflector only

Now we’re getting somewhere; but enough with the setup shots, let’s see how this actually looks.


1 Alien Bee B800 with 1/4 CTO key, 1 B800 reflector only rim

1 Alien Bee B800 with 1/4 CTO key, 1 B800 reflector only rim

Yeahhh. That’s what I like. Both the subject and the sky have good exposure to them, lots of color, and this industrial wall just turned into something bright and sunny.

Now let’s swap the 1/4 CTO for a Full CTO.

1x Alien Bees B800 with Full CTO

Look at that. Our industrial wall just became the outside of a shower cabana on the beach at sunset. Not enough color maybe? Let’s bring that second light low and gel it blue, drop the power a bit.


1 Alien Bees B800 with Full CTO key from left, 1 B800 with Blue gel from right

By keeping the power on the blue gelled light low, we can keep the shadows from going too dark without overpowering the key “sun” light. This brings in some color and just adds a little bit of flavor to make things “different”.

Enough with this wall though. We’ve got a sun relatively low in the sky and some portable studio lights that can nuke our subject like the Bikini Atoll.

Alien Bees B800 with full CTO from camera left

I love the lens flares I get with the Pentax 16-50/2.8. Really makes the sun pop in a cool way. Shooting at f/16 to kill as much of that sun-lit sky as I can and really bring out the blues in it, while the subject gives me that incredible open-mouthed smile. Mary Duprie over at Photographing Models made a comment about the open mouthed smile the other day, and I just can’t agree more. It just makes the image super fun.

Just because I’ve got the blue gelled 2nd light on hand, let’s toss it in to the picture and see how things look.

Alien Bees B800 with Full CTO Key from left, B800 with Blue Gel from right

Love it.

Lastly, because I haven’t used it in a while, I pulled out the ABR800 ring flash. Guess what? It looks like a ring flash.

Alien Bees ABR800 Ring Flash on lens axis

By using gels like this, you can really create some cool moods and effects at any location. A lot of it may be achievable with photoshop or just switching up your white balance, but doing it with lights makes sure you’re getting at least one step closer to the image you want long before it leaves your memory card.