I’ve finally gotten a chance to use my Orbis flash bagel (previously discussed in parts I, II and III) for some real photography, and guess what? It actually seems to work!

As you might recall from parts I, II and III of this series, the Orbiz is a gizmo that attaches to a conventional DC-powered electronic flash unit and turns it into a ringlight, which emits light that appears to be shadowless because it comes from around the camera lens. You also might recall that originally I didn’t think much of the Orbis because of its jiggly, floppy mounting system… but that I was able to stabilize it by adding some rubber spacers and a retaining strap, turning it into something I hoped I could use as a very efficient fill light.

To  cut a complicated subject down to ludicrous oversimplification, the way you do studio lighting is this: (1) Position a key light so it creates shadows that define the shape, volume and texture of your subject; and then (2) Apply fill light to lighten the shadows created by the key light enough that the camera can see detail in them and give the finished image the appearance you want: dramatic, bright, moody, or whatever.

Softly diffused fill light gives a clean, open look -- but needs a lot of lighting power and equipment.

Because you’ve positioned your key light to create the shadows you want, you don’t want your fill light to confuse the issue by creating extra shadows of its own.

I’ve always handled this by filling the scene with a big wash of softly diffused light, bounced off the back wall of my working space.

I like the clean, airy look it provides (see left) — but I don’t like lugging around the heavy AC-powered flash gear it takes to blast that much light. Packing up the flash units, moving them into the work area, setting them up, and then breaking down and moving out everything often seems to take more of my time and energy than the actual photography!

To do at least some of my studio-lit shots with a small, portable kit of battery-powered flash units, I needed to find a controllable way of filling shadows that was more efficient than my blast-of-light diffusion technique. So, enter the ring light, in the form of the Orbis flash bagel.

So when the organizers of a new dance company, Ballet Nebraska, approached me about doing some “non-traditional” dance photos — a little edgier, a little more contemporary, a little less polished-looking than the ones I usually try to shoot — I figured this was the chance to try out this technique.

We set up for our session in a dance studio. I wanted to retain a subdued hint of this environment; I needed to tone down the studio’s white walls; and I wanted something that looked a bit out-of-the-ordinary. The solution to all three requirements turned out to be a 12×24-foot black mesh tarp from Harbor Freight Tool.

To hang the tarp, I got lucky: there was an exposed metal heating duct along one wall, so I simply stuck four strong magnets onto it and clipped the tarp onto them with bungee cords. This gave me a nice wide “stage” around which the dancers could move freely, without constantly worrying about running off the edges of a seamless paper or muslin backdrop. As a bonus, it meant I didn’t need to bring background stands.

For key lights, I put two Nikon SB-600 flash units on light stands and set them up on opposite sides of the shooting area. I zoomed the flash units’ heads out to their maximum setting — 85mm — so they’d produce a fairly tight band of light. I set the stands slightly behind the action area and aimed them slightly forward so the light would define the edges of the dancers’ bodies. Stage lighting designers call this back diagonal lighting.

To fill in the shadows created by the key lights, I relied on the Orbis bagel, fitted onto a Nikon SB-800 flash unit. The flash, the Orbis, and my camera — a Nikon D300 with a 35mm f/2 lens — all attached to the Orbis Arm bracket. I mounted the bracket to a tripod, just because I didn’t want to have to hold it up all afternoon (the bracket is plenty sturdy, but all that weight adds up!) I topped off the whole stack with a Nikon CLS-800 controller, which let me adjust the power levels of all the lights from behind the camera.

That was it, and it worked swimmingly. Since my subjects were all over the frame, I didn’t even try to rely on Nikon’s TTL flash system — I just set the lights’ power manually using the CLS-800 controller. (Since I wanted to shoot at wide apertures to keep the background soft, I generally ran the flash units at 1/4 or 1/8 power. A pleasantly-surprising side effect was that I got through the whole four-hour session without needing to change batteries in any of the flashes!)

By varying the balance between the SB-600s at the sides and the Orbis on the camera slightly, I could create a variety of subtly-different looks:

Natasha Grimm

Erika Overturff

Bret Samson

No, I’m not going to give up my “white look” or all the stuff I need to lug around to create it. But it’s great to have an alternative — especially since I was able to pull it off using nothing more than small bag with three battery-powered flash units, two compact lightstands, a sack of bungee cords, and a handful of magnets! Oh, yeah, and a ring-flash bagel…