AurumLight: Mixing Flash and Modeling Lights

One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn to be more creative and adventurous with mixing color and light. UK-based photographer Jarek Wieczorkiewicz's photograph of Jay Jessop does just that—using daylight flash, gelled flash and tungsten modeling lamps.

I love this kind of thing, and would like to evolve my lighting to the point to where I can have the confidence to almost never use just white light. Below, a full BTS video on how Jarek lit this image.
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Experimenting with Color and Time

Jarek is using time and light color to create in camera something that looks like he spent a lot of time in Photoshop to get. He is no stranger to the technical use of Photoshop, which you may remember from his Water Angel photo last year.

But this photo is done in camera, as if he was limited to shooting film with little to no post. Here is his BTS.

(Note: Vimeo, which is hosting the video, seems to be having some issues. If it is not displaying, you may have to check back in a bit. -DH)



The mix of flash and tungsten is cool and all. And especially making use of the fact that his tungsten modeling lights are very controllable because of the accessible Einstein light mods.

But what is most interesting to me is using the colored light as fill. He used a Lee green (but not window green CC) gel. I've been thinking about experimenting with my CC green gels in the same way. Mostly because they are always with me and that they can be exactly counterbalanced with the complimentary magenta gels.

As usual, my roadblock is not technical. It is that I have never had a good feel for color. And as such, I have no confidence in creating color that is not natural or literal.

It's a roadblock I am trying hard to get past this year. I expect to occasionally fail spectacularly—and you'll be around to see it! But I am willing to bash my head against the wall until the use of color gets to me more intuitive to me.

Jarek has a really nice and comprehensive post on making this photo, here. Hopefully, studying more work like this will help me get past my (sadly, almost literally) khakis and denim wardrobe approach to using color with light.

Then maybe I can attack the actual wardrobe itself. Sigh.