flash in front of stained glass

[Mayor]

I have a situation where I need to shoot some photos in front of a fairly large stained glass window and I'm wondering how to best approach it. I've not really had to worry about backlighting during formals in the past. (Just kind of getting started.)

My thoughts were to shoot in manual, zoom in on the subject for a reading, re-frame the shot and use ETTL on my 580. Does that seem about right?

I like to bounce my flash or use a diffuser of some type as well.

I appreciate any help you might be able to provide.

 

[Tiberius47]

I've shot the stained glass window at my parent's house. This is how I did it.

First, I turned my flash off. I used my camera in manual mode to expose for the stained glass itself. The wall around the window was very under exposed.

Second, I turned on my flash and (using the flash in manual mode) adjusted the flash power until the wall was correctly exposed.

Easy as that. Read the manual flash tutorial in my sig for more details on this.

Just make sure that you aren't going to get the reflection of the flash in the window. Off camera flash will give you more freedom here, but it is required to get good results.

 

[Mayor]

Thank you for the quick reply.

I apologize for not explaining the situation better. I need to shoot subjects in front of the stained glass ... creating a lighting problem for me. The stained glass will not be as important as a clean shot of the subject.

Sorry for the miscommunication ... but I will also look at the tutorial because flash is no always my friend.

 

[Village Idiot]

Thank you for the quick reply.

I apologize for not explaining the situation better. I need to shoot subjects in front of the stained glass ... creating a lighting problem for me. The stained glass will not be as important as a clean shot of the subject.

Sorry for the miscommunication ... but I will also look at the tutorial because flash is no always my friend.

His explanation tells you how to get the stained glass and the subject in focus.

If you're firing the flash directly at the stained glass then you may get a lot of reflection from the glass if your subject isn't covering the area of the angles of light from the flash. The only way to fix this is to position the flash outside of the family of angles from your lens and the light emitted from the flash.

 

[JerryPH]

Do you mean something like this:

I cheated here... lol.

No flash was needed, but a little fast glass. I also REALLY cheated because it's actually 2 pics... my niece and a stained glass window shot, then some greenscreen work.

I suppose it would be easy enough to set up with properly placed flahes set to a very low intensity and snooted to highlight just what I wanted for best effect.

Keep the flash off the window, though, or shoot into it when there is a lot of light streaming through it. The flash would be off camera for best effect.

 

[jcolman]

Take the flash off the camera and light from the side. If you can't do that, set up a big white sheet of foamcore or anything white, just off the the side of the camera. Swivel your strobe so that it fires into the white foamcore and bounces the light onto your subject. You want any reflections to bounce away from the camera, not back into the lens.

 

[Tiberius47]

If you are able to shoot with two flashes mounted off camera, use one flash and set up as I mentioned abouve (under-expose the wall by about a stop or so to avoid the background being too dominant) and then use the second flash to light the subject. A reflector will get a nicer look on the subject. To get the flash power for the subject, use exactly the same technique as getting it for the wall.