Minimalist and Compact Traveling Strobist: Traveling Light With Your Light

Hey all, sorry for the lack of update, I've been very busy lately and also I traveled to a lot of places extensively during this last couple of months. Today I want to talk about how I go about traveling with off-camera-flash setup, or what I love to call Minimalist Traveling Strobist. This is my version of ULTRA COMPACT STROBIST SETUP.

  

Why?

Say, you're going to visit a nice beautiful European village during a nice beautiful spring-sunny week during your holiday with your loved ones. You're now planning your itinerary and already checked out some crazy cool sceneries on Flickr or Google Image, and you want to have your loved ones photographed with those sceneries with the highest quality possible.

   

Now, people usually will just bring a camera and shoot. They will shoot with whatever light condition that is available at that time, and they think the better the camera/lens, the better the result is. Okay, you could always go natural/available light, and yes you could get some nice image provided that the sun is on the "correct" angle compared to the scenery. But if the sun angle isn't right, then you will potentially encounter backlit photographs. To compensate for backlit scenes, your camera needs to have such crazy dynamic range that you can pull up the shadow so much while keeping the highlights from clipping. But even so, with natural/available light, you'll most likely end up with underexposed subject, or blown scenery, so you'll have to really push things in editing carefully if you want to make the most out of it. That means hours of Lightroom development doing touch ups with the brush tools, pushing/pulling the shadow/higlight faders, endless adjustment using the radial filter, trying to crush overexposed sky/background, and finally cursing followed by keyboard smashing everytime the edge of your histogram clips.
 

See that grey sky? It's supposed to be clouds with a hint of a little blue sky here and there. I tried pulling the highlight as far as I could but it's just lost and turned into grey sky.

   

Sounds tiring?

That's where the strobist or off-camera-flash photography comes in. In short, it'll allow you to take perfectly exposed photo of a scenery with people in it; the kind of photos that is really suited for holiday photo. Strobist technique will allow you to control both the background(scenery) and the subject independently for the best exposure possible, regardless of the background lighting condition. This will save you a lot of time in your post production, and you will get a much more pleasing image that isn't backlit, or overly post-processed. Heck, you can even shoot JPEG with this technique if you feel ballsy about it!
  
I suggest you to check out www.strobist.com before we continue. Mr. David Hobby explained a lot of important basic strobist stuffs that you need to learn to understand strobist photography quickly. But basically, you will use a flash that's placed not on the camera to light your subject and you will control both the flash exposure and the background exposure until you get the right balance that you need for the photo.
  

Basics

Now before we continue, keep in mind that we're also talking about traveling. That means everything has to be very compact; keeping the gear weight as low as possible, because you are traveling with someone else with schedules that are mostly not photographic, and probably photography also isn't the main purpose of the travel. As with general travel photography, this means minimal gear, minimal weight, and trading gear quality with convenience at some level but for the purpose of producing reasonably high quality photographs that is still much better than your average travel photographs. I know, it kind of contradicts, right? Trading gear quality and high quality photographs? We're talking about traveling light with your light, bear with me on that...
  
Obviously, with strobist photography we are usually doing environmental portraits. That means, moderate-to-normal wide angle focal length, full-to-half body portraits with nice scenery as backgrounds. We are talking about 28mm to 50mm focal length on full frame equivalent on our lens here. We will very rarely do tight portraits during travel, because we want to include the scenery to better tell the travel experience for the photo viewer. We can always do the bokeh thingy later at home, there is no use of doing bokeh thingy during travel, it's a waste of nice scenery.
  
And there's a special note on the light that you must understand. As much as I love and adore soft light for the ultimate environmental portrait results, and even if the Lighting 101 on www.strobist.com suggests you to start with a shoot-thru umbrella as a soft modifier, we are NOT going to use any modifier at all. We are going to shoot hard light, bare flash, no modifier, straight into our subject.
     
I repeat, NO MODIFIER!
  
Ouch! This will contradict what you learned in www.strobist.com. However, whether you like it or not, we are going to learn to light with just a single hard light as our key light. Call me crazy, call me names, curse at me, and spit on me if you like! This might not be for you, but I've done it and to my taste the result isn't bad at all. Keep in mind: we are "traveling light with your light".
  

Gear

For our camera choice, ultimately we want a leaf-shutter-equipped camera like the Fuji X100 series, Panasonic LX100, or similar cameras. Most of them will have built in lens(except Hasselblad or Phase One medium format cameras), due to the shutter mechanism of a leaf shutter system, but these leaf-shuttered cameras can sync your flash at incredibly high shutter speed and make your flash appear more powerful in your images, so that's where the advantage of a leaf shutter cameras lies. But if you don't have one, no sweat, we can still find some work-around with the regular focal plane shutter to squeeze the most out of your light. It goes without saying that you need to have a camera that has a fully functional hotshoe, otherwise you can't conveniently use off camera flash on outdoor situation. For me, I personally use the Panasonic LX100 as my leaf shutter camera, but I do this kind of strobist setup also with my Panasonic GX8, Olympus E-PL6(already sold), and the good old Panasonic GX7 too, with little to no problem at all.
   
For the lens, as with all environmental portrait, we will have something in the range of 24mm to 50mm on full frame. Fix lens camera with single focal length like the Fuji X100 or Sony RX1 will do fantastic job as they both have 35mm equivalent lens. The 28mm equivalent on Fuji X70 will also be a good choice, provided that you are willing to get closer a bit to your subject or willing to have wider field of view. Panasonic LX100 also comes with 24-75mm equivalent lens built in, which makes it an even better option as you can zoom to alter your perspective and field of view, albeit with slightly smaller M4/3 sensor which isn't bad at all compared to APS-C offerings. As for the aperture, f/2.8 is the minimum if you are planning to shoot low light, but if you only shoot during daytime, then definitely f/4.0 will be enough. Even f/5.6 is still usable for bright daylight shooting, plus you get good depth of field at wide open already. I don't recommend anything tighter than 40mm because of the technique that we will use for this minimalist traveling strobist setup, which I will explain later.
   
For your flash to camera connection, I can only suggest wireless transceivers. OCF cords are big, bulky, and will eat some space/weight. Though they are highly reliable, they aren't necessary for what we're going to do. So just stick with wireless transceivers, and don't go for the big bulky ones even if the transceivers will have tons of features. Go with the smaller ones, as long as they are reliable, you are good to go. My personal recommendation are Phottix Strato Multi II if you have the budget. Or YongNuo RF603 II if you want to save some money. I'd lean more toward the YongNuo RF603 II, for a reason that I will explain below.
    
As for the light, I suggest find something that isn't terribly large, but with enough punch to fight the sun. No need to go for any High Speed Sync flash, or TTL-compatible flash, we don't need those features and you don't want to spend a fortune on them as well. A regular manual speedlight with decent enough output and good reliability will be more than enough to do the job. I personally use YongNuo flashes like the 560IV, 560EX, 510EX, which are all more than enough for what we do. I prefer the 560IV because it has built in transceivers inside, and this unit is compatible with they YongNuo RF603 II, thus eliminating the need to place a receiver unit on the flash and save some weight and space. If you already use the RF603 II, you are lucky! In case you haven't figured it out yet, that's the reason why I use the RF603 II!
    

My Personal Kit

As you already can tell from what I said previously, my kit consists of a Panasonic LX100, a pair of YongNuo RF603 II transceivers, and a YongNuo 560IV speedlight. Sometimes I need to decrease my depth of field, so I also carry a 3-stop screw on ND and increase my aperture to get the job done and to double as a video ND to get to my frame rate shutter speed. Alternatively, a 1 stop CPL will replace the 3-stop ND to act as a small-power ND if I don't need to kill that much light, and to double as reflection reducer. I just need to make sure that I don't forget to bring my step up ring for the filters, and those are all I need.
     

   
I can easily store these compact strobist kit in a small bag like the ONA Bowery. Or if I wear my short cargo pants, I'll store all of them in the pockets. I'll keep one of the RF603 II attached to the LX100 all the time, and another one just for backup. As I mentioned above, the YN560IV has the built in transceivers function that's compatible with the RF603 II, so I don't need to attach the other RF603 II to the flash.
   

     
Alternatively, I could replace the leaf-shutter-equipped LX100 with a regular focal plane shutter camera if I need to use specialized lens. I'm pretty sure most of you don't have a leaf shutter camera, so this setup will work for your current setup. On the picture above, I use a GX7 with 20mm f/1.7(40mm equivalent) instead of the LX100. A 3-stop ND filter is a must for this setup, because you will need to drop down that shutter speed to get your flash to sync with your camera with the highest shutter speed possible. Thankfully, the YN560IV is still powerful enough to compensate for the 3-stop ND, all you need to do is just increase the power of the flash by 3 stop.
     

 

     
And the picture above is my compact strobist kit, complete with an 8" Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 tablet for quick JPEG editing and sharing(thank goodness for the Wifi and in-camera-RAW in the LX100!!), a small notepad, some pens and writing tools, a pair of earphones, and a battery bank; all fits well in the small ONA Bowery, and all ready for some action.
   
BTW some quick tip, Lightroom Mobile and Photoshop Express are the best image processing apps for JPEG. If you need to edit RAW, then I suggest you to add the PhotoMate R3 for basic RAW editing, export the JPEG from PhotoMate, and further process the image with Lightroom Mobile and Photoshop Express.
   

Technique

Now that we covered all the gears required, it's time to discuss what matters the most: how to do it. I will cover this in three areas: Exposure, Light Angle, and Composition. Shooting with flash will require you to think of an image as a combination of two different exposures:
1. The exposure of the ambient light, affecting the background or the scenery that doesn't get the light from the flash.
2. The exposure of the flash itself, affecting the area that you point your flash at, in this case it's usually your subject.
     
In the next steps, I'm assuming that we are shooting during bright daylight when the sunshine is very abundant which is the time when photographing a subject with a nice scenery will be very difficult without the help of a flash.
   
First, we want to make sure that the combination between the two exposures are perfectly balanced, and that you are not letting any of these two exposures go way too high or way too low. You can of course slightly overexpose or slightly underexpose on purpose if you want, this might give you a slightly more artistic look that you want.
   
Furthermore, we are shooting without modifier, and in my experience, hard light doesn't go well with scenery that is too underexposed compared to the subject. Hard light doesn't have the quality that can add to the overall surreal element of the picture that is often associated with such underexposed-background image style. If you try to underexpose your background too much, it'll look more like an instant backdrop-photo-booth than a high quality strobist image. So, I recommend the scenery to be exposed perfectly at 0EV.
  
Second step, let's brush up our flash photography exposure theory very quickly.
1. Aperture affects both ambient exposure and flash exposure.
2. ISO affects both ambient exposure and flash exposure.
3. Shutter speed only affects ambient exposure.
4. Flash power only affects flash exposure.
(hidden rule: ND filter affects both ambient exposure and flash exposure, according to how powerful the ND is)
  
Next, if you are using a leaf shutter camera, then you will have little to no problem with getting the flash and ambient exposure to work together. If you have normal focal plane shutter camera, skip to the next section. Here's how I do it with leaf shutter camera:
1. Set your flash exposure on 1/8 power.
2. Set your camera exposure with ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/1000 second. During bright daylight, this will usually nail the exposure of the sky at +1EV according to Sunny 16 rule, but the surface will be right at 0EV, which is what we want.
3. Without turning on the flash, test the exposure on the camera first, and see how the scenery looks like. If it's too dark, change the shutter speed to 1/500. If it's too bright, go down to ISO 100.
4. Now turn on your flash, and shoot your subject with your flash aimed to him/her from 45 degree upper left or upper right at about 40cm away from your subject. Hold your flash using your left hand and aim as best as you can, or if you have someone to assist you, ask them to hold the flash for you. Check how the picture turns out to be with the flash being added. If the subject is too bright, dial down the power on the flash to 1/16, and if the subject is too dark, set the power to 1/4.
5. Alternatively, if both the scenery and the subject is either too bright or too dark, you can compensate by adjusting the aperture or ISO. Go to f/4 if everything is too dark, and go to f/8 if everything is too bright. Alternatively, if your lens can't go faster than f/5.6, go to ISO 100 if everything is too bright, and go to ISO 400 if everything is too dark.
   
Here's how I do it with regular focal plane camera and with a 3 stop ND:
1. Screw on a 3 stop ND filter in front of your lens.
2. Set your flash exposure on FULL power.
3. Set your camera exposure with ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/125 second. During bright daylight, this will usually nail the exposure of the sky at +1EV according to Sunny 16 rule, but the surface will be right at 0EV, which is what we want.
4. Without turning on the flash, test the exposure on the camera first, and see how the scenery looks like. If it's too dark, change the shutter speed to 1/60. If it's too bright, go down to ISO 100 or f/8.0.
5. Now turn on your flash, and shoot your subject with your flash aimed to him/her from 45 degree upper left or upper right at about 40cm away from your subject. Hold your flash using your left hand and aim as best as you can, or if you have someone to assist you, ask them to hold the flash for you. Check how the picture turns out to be with the flash being added. If the subject is too bright, dial down the power on the flash to 1/2 or 1/4. With focal plane shutter and full power flash, you can only increase flash power by bringing in the flash closer to the subject, as dictated by Inverse Square Law.
6. Alternatively, if both the scenery and the subject is either too bright or too dark, you can compensate by adjusting the aperture or ISO. Go to f/4 if everything is too dark, and go to f/8 if everything is too bright. Alternatively, if your lens doesn't go to f/4, compensate the ISO instead and go to ISO 100 if everything is too bright, and go to ISO 400 if everything is too dark.
   
Composition wise, we are talking about environmental portrait, so we need to balance the scenery with the subject as best as we could, so that both are complementing each other in the composition . I usually go with rule of thirds and just use 1/3 for the subject and 2/3 for the scenery. It usually works. Alternatively, you can also use more negative space, or go the opposite direction and have your subject stands out more in the picture. A matter of taste, it's your call. Experiment with many different look to get the best result.
    
Light-angle wise, I would recommend severe side lighting to achieve Rembrandt light so that you can get more dimension out of your subjects. That means you can fire the speedlight anywhere between 45 to 90 degree horizontally, while keeping the light slightly higher than the height of the person. If the light is too on-axis, it'll look very fake and not pleasing at all because it is a hard light source without modifier. Also be cautious, Rembrandt light isn't always the best choice for lighting people with lots of wrinkles on his/her face(old people mostly), so use this technique carefully. But don't let this rule hinders you, experiment with your light angle often and see what works for you and what doesn't.
    

But I Need Soft Modifier!

Okay, if you insist, go get a Rogue FlashBender or similar bounce modifier. It's small, light, flat, portable, and it'll help to give you a slightly softer look from close range, and it'll help reducing harsh shadow and make fall-offs more gradual. It's gonna eat some flash power though, so keep that in mind!
     
Here are some examples of what you can achieve with this technique and set of gears:

   

       

 

          

         
That's all for this post, I hope you find this Traveling Light With Your Light post helpful, and if you like it please share it with your friends. Thank you, and God bless you!