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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Education Field Instructional

Quick Portrait Tip: Gel a Flash to Make a Scene Look Like the Golden Hour

Chris Gampat
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05/22/2017
2 Mins read
Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Gel a Flash to Make it Look like the Golden Hour

Today, we’ve got a really quick portrait tip for everyone and it involves creating the look of the Golden Hour when the sun isn’t setting. Granted, sometimes the best time to do this is during the blue hour or at a time when you’ve got everything nearly perfectly lined up in the frame.

So how do you do it?

Essentially, you take a flash and put a warm filter gel over it. But before you even do that, balance your camera’s white balance to daylight in order to ensure that the color variable in the scene doesn’t change at all.

This all started when I pitched the idea for a recent project to the couple: Eli and Grace. Eli was taking a bit longer to get ready and by the time he was ready the sun was already down. So it fell to Mark (my lighting assistant) and I to recreate the look of the Golden hour.

To do that, Mark got to a higher elevation and placed the flash in just the right spot. After the flash was gelled it started to create the effect of sunlight coming down. Ensuring that the camera was automatically balanced to daylight also really helped here.

What’s really cool about this is the lens flare that many modern lenses try to keep down at all costs. However, I feel like that eliminates character in the scene. This however, doesn’t do that. There’s character and there is also the specific scene that the couple are making when expressing their love for grilled cheese.

The scene was shot using an Adorama Flashpoint Zoom Lion flash and an ExpoImaging Flash gel. The camera and lens were the Sony a7 and the 35mm f2.8 Zeiss lens. The settings were ISO 1600, f3.2 and 1/50th. That gave us just the right ambient light and flash output blend. Why ISO 1600? Because the flash output was being nerfed by the gel–something that you always need to consider when working with gels.

Personally speaking I’ve got no problems even keeping this shot wider because the stand can look almost like a tree branch due to the depth of field effect.

adorama camera daylight depth of field flashpoint gel gelled flash golden hour portrait sony sunlight zeiss
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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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