Light modifiers

[TimIngmire]

I've been thinking a lot lately about lighting in UWP and want to share some thoughts / ideas to get something going.


Many photographers often talk about their strobes as "taking a studio set-up underwater". And of course they are right! What is surprising is that we tend to use the strobes as just a way to get white light "down there" and very little else. I recall reading a comment by one UW photographer that a colleague of his mentioned that all underwater stuff looked the same; not suprising really because we aren't very creative when it comes to wielding our strobes.


In top side photography - especially studio stuff - photographers use a whole range of lighting modifiers in order to control the light and generate a whole range of really creative effects. Anybody that has followed my links to Strobist can't help noticing that a lot of these effects can be achieved using small speedlights / flashes -and that these small flashes can easily be triggered off camera - not a million miles away from what we do when we dive. And, anybody that has been following what Alex Mustard has been doing has seen that he has been using a remote slave fired flash to back-light certain subjects (in top-side this would be a 'kicker light'). Rob Cuss has also started experimenting with this.


So, what if we take this further. What if we truly tried to take a studio approach into our photography? I'm already thinking of a few ideas to try to get more creative and also improve our basic technique eg helping to reduce backscatter - all by controlling and modifying our light over and above the placement of strobes and adjusting strobe power.

My first project is a snoot and grid spot - nothing new and nice and simple.


Now, the other aspect of the strobist 'philosophy' is doing this stuff on the cheap and not spending more than we have to - afterall, what we do is expensive enough as it is! So, my modifiers will not be shop bought items but made by my fair hands. I'll create a thread for each project and show how I've done it. Hopefully I'll then be able to post shots taken. My snoot for example is being made from the carboard tube used to package a very nice bottle of Laphroaig single malt - a tube that fits the front of an Inon strobe perfectly and could form the basis of whole range of modifiers.


The other thing I'm going to do is post my photos to Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing and tag them 'strobist' and 'underwater' (amongst other things) so that they show up when you search for those terms.


I'd really like this to be a group affair and have everybody making and trying out all kinds of modifiers and posting the efforts and results. Not only should we be thinking of lighting techniques and tools but also - what the best subjects are for all these lighting techniques?


Now, a lot of this may turn to absolute rubbish with terrible terrible results and I accept that wholeheartedly! Gettting one good new technique amongst a pile of real failures will be a great deal of fun and a cause for a celebratory pint.

Anybody else up for this?

Tim