When I was still learning how to use strobes for my portrait shoots, I used to have the notion that I should always use them to light the subject. Well, actually, in most cases, this is true. But how about if I only have one strobe light (I only had one when I started..I guess most of us do) and needed to light the background as well? Solution? Either use the strobe light for lighting the subject and let the ambient light for the background or vise versa.
In this photo, I chose to light my subject with natural (ambient) light and used my strobe to light for the background.
Our team wanted a shot of our subject by the entrance of her house. The challenge is, the frame covering our shot wasn't evenly lit, and I came to the shoot with only one strobe(out of laziness basically). Luckily, I had enough ambient light to work with.
The solution(and set up) was actually very simple. Here's how I did it.
Since I only had one strobe to work with, I placed our subject in a spot where I can fully utilize the ambient light. In this case, we placed her at the left side of the door. This is a sweet spot for the ambient light and she would not be covering that path leading to her living room. The light falling in this area is about half a stop over the light falling onto the living room behind the brick wall. That was fine since I wanted a bit of separation for my subject and the background. I metered for this and set my exposure for this lighting. By doing so, I got the exposure I wanted for my subject and the living room. But the small hallway between her and that brickwall was 3 stops underexposed because there was very little ambient light falling unto it. So I put my sole strobe behind her at camera left (just outside the frame), set the power to match the ambient light and bounced it off to the ceiling.
And that's it! One very simple set up using just one strobe.
Hope this helps. Happy shooting!
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