Photography - White Out and Gel Lighting

In this photography lesson, we learnt how to a 'White Out' and also learned how to use 'Gel Lighting'. This is something that I found really interesting, and I loved all the different colours I could contrast with eachother. You can get so many outcomes for a background with gel lighting effects. 

First, we were taught how to create a 'white out'. 

White Out - when the background is over exposed creating a white background without any shadows

For this type of lighting arrangement, you need to make sure that you have two extra lights to complete the white out. They also need to be symmetrical and also angled at the same distance apart from each other and from the background setting. 

To prepare the lighting to get the best possible outcome, you need to make sure, firstly, that the lights are all the same, and the same watts too. There's a red strip on each lamp that needs to be turned on - the button for this is at the back of the light. It's either labelled cell or a picture of an eye - this is called he slave, once it's active, all three lights will flash together in sync. 

Use the light metre reader against your model to get the correct lighting for the light near the photographer at the back. The two lights facing the background need to be a light level higher than the back lighting. So if the back lighting is on F8, the back two lighting on the background need to be put onto F11. 

Due to there being more lighting, it's obviously a lot brighter than what can be expected and this could reflect on to your model. To reduce this from happening, use a polyester boards either side of the lights near the model so it blocks out the extra glare. 

Gel Lighting is done with using one or more extra lights with a sheet of coloured plastic sheet of paper. To attach these to the lighting, you need to use a 'barn door' 

These come either in a round or square shape. As you can see in the picture above, there are clips in each corner of the barn doors. You pick the plastic sheet colours of your choice, and attach it to the clippings. Play around with the position of the lightings and with the gel colours to get different effects and outcomes till you're pleased with what you see. Try placing them to the front  side of the model to get the lighting on her face. Or try placing on behind the model to light up the background. 

Here are some examples of how our practise with gel lighting came out: