Nicolai Brix – CTO gels with speedlight flash

When working on location where the availble light is going to be a part of the overall lighting in the picture it’s important to balance the temperature of the extra light you add. If you don’t, you will get different temperatures and this in general don’t lead to good results.

In this example, I used a small Nikon sb900 flash.

In the hotel room I had some lamps with bulbs in and I needed to get the “cold” light of my flash to have the same temperature as them.

For that you can use gels.. basically a color correction filter you put in front of your light source. When there is incandescent (bulbs), it’s a CTO you have to use. There are several different strengths of the CTO starting from 1/4 CTO to 1/2 CTO ending with the Full CTO. In the example of this hotel room I used a full CTO.

When I shoot on location I break my shooting up in steps. First I balance my exposure according to the availble light.

When the exposure is like I want it to be, I add the flash light.

If I do all of this it in steps, I can see where I have problems and easily deal with them.

Here is the final image, you can see that the white of the sheets is good after I have balanced it and exposed it according to the light I have produced with the flash plus the available light:

View Nicolai Brix profile.