We got our 2025/2026 season well and truly started with a creative lighting workshop. Steven began the evening with a discussion of the lighting equipment available to photographers. This web site has a good introduction to creative lighting techniques: https://shotkit.com/photography-lighting/. Taking photos in low light usually requires a long exposure, which can blur your photos with camera shake. Adding extra lighting is a good way to improve portraits and still life photos taken in a dark place. This time we concentrated on portraits. We’ll spend more time on still life photography at our second workshop on 13th November 2025. There are two basic kinds of lighting available:

1. Flash. A flash creates an intense and very rapid burst of light. The burst is so rapid that it freezes any movement or camera shake. A disadvantage of a flash is that it can cast a shadow onto the background. Also, because the flash only fires briefly, it’s hard to see in advance where those shadows will be. Some flash units have a dim “modelling light” which shows up the shadows. Firing a flash straight into someone’s face can also cause “red eye”. If your camera has a built-in flash it will probably suffer from these problems. You can get a softer lighting and eliminate the “red eye” problem by attaching a flashgun to your camera and angling the flash upwards so it bounces it off a light ceiling. You can start to emulate a studio setup by adding “slave” flash units which synchronise with your main flash. Lighting your subject from the left and right side can give a softer effect with fewer shadows.
2. Continuous lighting. Continuous lighting allows you to see how your subject is illuminated before you take the picture. You can add as many lights as you like. However, these lights tend to be dimmer than flash, so you’ll find yourself putting up with longer exposure times. We demonstrated several different kinds of continuous lights at our workshop. There were some bright, mains-powered bulbs, a battery-powered LED panel and a battery powered torch.

Members tried out 3 main lighting setups. Ed and I had set up some of the club’s studio lighting equipment. This equipment consisted of two main-powered flash units combined with some modelling lights, a diffuser umbrella and a “beauty dish”. The equipment triggered each time it detected a flash. This combination was good at taking well-lit portraits with soft lighting. Derek had brought two contrasting setups with continuous lighting. One setup demonstrated how a single light from the side can create dramatic, high contrast portraits. The other setup had two lights with red and blue gels, which created colourful special effects. Steven showed how the battery powered lights can be deployed and removed very quickly, when the LED panel and the torch were used to photograph a rabbit who didn’t like the bright lights.

Next week (18th September) we have our first speaker of the season. Graeme Barclay of Midlothian Camera Club will talk to us about Street Photography.