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If you put a coloured gel on your flash and then take a photo, the foreground of your image (everything lit by the flash) will be the same colour as the gel.
What if you put an opposite coloured gel on your lens to cancel out the effects of the gel on your flash? Now the foreground of your image (lit
by your coloured flash) will be back to normal colour, but your background (ie NOT lit by flash) will be tinted by the effects of the gel on your lens.
So you could put a red tint on you flash, a blue tint on your lens and end up with a blue background.
Of course, some experiments will have to be made to find the right gels to use together. Oh - and it might be easier just to use photoshop...
Colored Flash
http://www.alienbees.com/filters.html
[DrCurry, May 06 2005]
[link]
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I don't know if it would work quite right, but the
experiments might come out looking good. |
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Thinking about it, any background light would still be
filtered through the (say) blue lens, so your subjects
would still come out looking blue. |
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Want to try an interesting effect? Try
this: find three coloured gels - a good
red, blue and green set. Shoot an object
with the camera on the tripod, but set
the camera for multiple exposure. Use
only a single flash light source. Shoot
one colour's shot, move the light
position, shoot another colour, move
the light position even more, shoot the
final colour. That's all on one frame. |
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The results are a largely correctly lit
object, in something approximating
white light, but you'll notice it has three
sets of misregistered shadows, each of
magenta, cyan and yellow, forming red
or green or blue where they overlap. |
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I once even had a set of front-of-lens
filters that could achieve the same
effect (Hoya 'pop' filter set). |
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By the way, Mikey, think about the word
'filter' for a sec. If you filter (which is
what a gel is) a light source, you're
allowing only a partial spectrum
through. If you throw filtered light onto
the background of a shot, then place a
different filter on the lens, you're
filtering out at the lens, a portion of the
spectrum that most likely didn't even
make it out of the background gel. For
example, a red gel for the background
light will filter out all the stuff that isn't
red. Placing a green filter over the lens
will remove anything from the scene
that isn't green, including the red from
the background. You're
subtracting, using band-pass
filtering, twice. |
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You used to be able to buy paired filters
for exactly this purpose. I'll see if I can
find a link. |
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[later: nope, can't find anything] I guess
it was fairly obscure. |
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For those querying whether this would
actually work and, if so, how, the
answer lies in the the word 'tint'. The
effect is generally done with fairly weak
filters resulting in pastel tints. |
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Look into painting with light. Some beautiful work has been done with long exposures on color film, using colored filter covered flashlights to illuminate chosen detail in different colors. |
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As a gaffer in a previous life I can tell you that you've
confusd me. |
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Great, like white spots weren't bad enough... |
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Another fun thing to do is get some IR film (Ektachome-IR or Kodak HS-IR) put a #85c filter on your flash and take pictures in low light. Very cool results. |
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I've taken a lot of photos recently of subjects lit by both artificial and natural light, with color balance issues just like the ones you seem to be after. |
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But when I used the flash unit, it overwhelmed both. I would suggest modifying your technique: use two flash units, and just put the filter/gel on the one lighting the background. But far from being half-baked, I would point out that this is a well-established lighting technique. |
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DrC that works fine indoors. This is more
of an outdoor technique where you are
using the flash to provide fill on a subject
against a distant background. |
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Ah, that changes everything. It hadn't
occurred to me that it was outdoors. I
had in my mind a studio scenario with a
few electronic flash heads and a
background roll behind a subject. Yes -
ignore my latter para. |
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