Flashy coloured gels

Make use of the lastolite strobo Kit to colour your portraits

We show you how to splash colour into portraits using coloured gels for your model and background

01 position the model

Place your model 10-20ft in front of a background and have them move a quarter turn towards the left or right. Position yourself at an angle towards them. You might also want to leave some space on one side of the frame.

02 Starter Settings

We recommend f/8, 1/200 sec shutter speed and ISO200. This should give decent depth of field, synchronize the shutter with the flash duration and keep noise to a minimum. These settings can of course be tweaked later.

03 trigger the Lights

We linked one Speedlite on the hotshoe to another off-camera. If you want to position both on stands instead, use a flash transmitter on the hotshoe of your DSLR to fire them. Turn on the lights and make sure they’re set to the same channel.

04 highlight the model

With a yellow coloured gel on the flashgun attached to our hotshoe, this is the light that we’d be aiming towards the model. As this is the key light, it needs to be slightly brighter than the backdrop. We set it to half power and fired off a quick test shot.

05 Light the background

We put a blue coloured gel on the other flashgun and placed it on a stand further back, slightly out of frame, aiming at the backdrop. We tilted it up to give the light a round shape. We set this Speedlite to 1/16 power and took another test shot.

06 recolour and reshoot

Now is the time to play around with your flash power and zoom, as well as introduce different hues into your setup. There are 14 different gels in the Lastolite Gel set, and complementary colours can look particularly effective together.