Overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash is about creating a lighting ratio. This is a a popular and easy technique for contemporary senior portraits, editorial portraits, and outdoor fashion photography. San Diego Fashion photographer Emily Soto provided us with another behind-the-scene video clip demonstrating her superb fashion style and diffused flash lighting technique.

Pay close attention to how Emily uses diffused lighting ratios and depth-of-field and focuses the lens on the subject, while blurring out the foreground and background. Try this technique for your next senior portrait or outdoor editorial portrait session….it is not just for fashion anymore!

This time we see Emily using a Mola Softlight Dish instead of a beauty dish for overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash. And from what I can tell, Emily is still using an Alien Bee monolight and Vagabond battery pack. While a beauty dish can offer a similar diffused flash light quality, the wavy curves and distinctive shape of the Mola dish lends a softer light quality. For those photographers already using a beauty dish, I suggest diffusing your dish further with a sheet of ripstop nylon. Just drape it over your beauty dish and secure it with a few $.49 clamps from the local HomeDepot. You may find white ripstop nylon at your local fabric store for about $8 per sq/yd…it’s very inexpensive folks!

Overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash video example below.

I used one of my large 5′ x 8′ white ripstop nylon panels to further diffuse the 22′ beauty dish. The diffused flash to daylight lighting ratio is about 1:2, the Sunlight is about 1 stop brighter than the diffused flash exposure. No retouching for lighting at all!

I would like to point out that Emily’s success is not just about overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash and great lighting ratios. Obviously there is much more going on in her images such as styling and posing and location research. Emily has a concept and theme for each fashion story she shoots. She uses camera technique and composes her images to tell a story and photographs the wardrobe well. Fashion shoots include wardrobe and makeup/hair stylists and models. When I shoot fashion, the entire shoot theme is discussed beforehand so everyone is on the same page. In each case I email location scouting images and/or Google Maps links to the entire crew and models.

For Strobist portrait lighting using speedlights I have a different suggestion for overpowering Sunlight with diffused flash lighting ratios. The easiest and least expensive solution for creating a soft diffused flash light quality is by constructing a 3′ x 3′ PVC frame and attaching a white 3′ x 3′ ripstop nylon fabric to the PVC panel. I prefer the heavier 1 3/4 inch PVC over the 3/4 inch PVC as the heavier PVC does not flex in a mild breeze. PVC is about $3 for 10 feet and the corner joints run about $1.50 each.

I use 2″ elastic cloth bands in the corners to quickly secure the fabric to the panel. A sewing machine is required to sew the elastic fabric bands to the ripstop nylon. Don’t have a sewing machine?…….use Craigslist to find an affordable seamstress….simple as that.

ADDITIONAL TIP: The Strobist speedlight photographer may need to use 2 speedlights for diffused flash lighting ratios when overpowering Sunlight with the white ripstop nylon fabric. This applies to a fill flash lighting ratio….and may not completely overpower the Sunlight. It really depends on the brightness of the Sunlight, your flash power,  AND whether you are photographing full length or just 3/4. My experience from Brooks Institute photo school 20 years ago, the Vivitar 285 did have enough power for a 3/4 headshot using a 3′ x 3′ ripstop nylon panel with a panel distance of 4 feet to subject. As I recall, this worked quite well with my 4×5 film camera and ISO 100 sheet film with an F/stop probably around F/5.6 or F/8…..which is plenty for headshots and portraits on a digital camera with full-frame or DX sensors.

The diffusion panels can be attached side-by-side and used as massive softboxes. Below is a series of images I created with 3 panels and one 600w/s monolight. While I own 4 monolights, I primarily shoot with 1-2 lights 90% of the time.

One may certainly purchase pre-made diffusion frames/panels from Larson Lighting for several hundred dollars each…..or you can build your own for about $30 and a few hours of your time. There are many ways to construct the diffusion panels on the internet and there are just as many different suggestions for diffusion fabric. Walmart shower curtain material for $1.99 just looks like &#$% and may even cause you to have very ugly highlights in the eyes as several photographers have noticed. Spend $5 more and you get the real thing that lighting companies use.

Overpowering Sunlight with Diffused Flash is an easy technique to master with a bit of practice. I suggest that the photographer create a test of different lighting ratios. I might begin withe a 1:1, 1:2, and 1:3 ratio of daylight to diffused flash. One of the lighting ratios will look just right to your eyes. Now you have a lighting formula that you can repeat over and over again.

20 years ago I made 5 panels that are 5′ x 8′ each, complete with fabric for about $200 and one Saturday afternoon. The first set of diffusion panels I later sold to a very well known portrait photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, after assisting him one day. He just loved the diffused light quality and decided to use the fabric in his NYC studio.

I still have and use the diffusion panels for many of my commercial shoots today. Many…..many… professional fashion and portrait studios still use fabric panels because of the fantastic natural light quality they produce. Just because we don’t always see diffusion panels in YouTube lighting videos does not mean panels do not exist. I learned real lighting secrets by assisting great Los Angeles fashion photographers….and got paid to learn and see how they light and shoot ad campaigns.

Overpowering Sunlight with Diffused Flash is an excellent technique for giving your portfolio a fresh new look. The lighting tools are not very expensive and in most cases, we already own this lighting gear. Your only real homework is to test out the different lighting ratios and find one that works best for your shooting and visual style.

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