Sometimes photographers will take a black foamcore board and attach it to
a stand and call this a flag too. Still other photographers like to refer to flags
and gobos as cutters,which basically do the same thing—block, diffuse, or cut
the light in some sense. Choose whatever term you like best, but remember
that all three terms refer to placing an object in front of the path of the light
before the light hits the subject or is reflected back into the camera lens.
The effect of flags, gobos, and cutters varies as the object is moved closer
to or farther from the light source, and the best method to see how they work
is to have a subject sit on a chair and start placing a black card between your
subject and the light source.Gels.
Gels are usually made of tough, somewhat heat resistant acetate material. They
are available in many colors and strengths. I like to use CTOs and sometimes
the Rosco #02 Bastard Amber or straw-colored gels to add warmth over my
subject or at the edges of my subject’s body in the form of accent or rim light-
ing. You can also use gels to color a background or create dynamic color ef-
fects in a shot.
While some gels, such as the^3 / 4 CTO gels, serve specific purposes, like con-
verting the Kelvin color temperature of flash into the color temperature of
tungsten, others are used more for personal taste. Some gels help add or sub-
tract contrast too, like diffusion gels. They are normally opaque or white in
color and made from strewn fabric threads. Rosco makes several variations,
and depending on how the thread is woven, shadows can be slightly shifted
from their original axis, and the variable of softening the light also changes
from subtle to dynamic.LIGHT MODIFIERS 89Here is the lighting set-up for using
gels to change the color of the sky
(as discussed in chapter 2). In this
photo, Ashley is illuminated by a stu-
dio strobe fitted with a 22-inch
beauty dish. The beauty dish has a
Rosco green gel attached via electri-
cal clamps. The photographer, from
one of my Virgin Islands glamour
photography workshops, has his
camera custom white balanced to the
now green flash. The camera will
then add the opposite color, to re-
move the green cast, in this case ma-
genta (purple) which will give the sky
a magenta color saturation. The
amount of magenta saturation is
controlled by the shutter speed; the
higher the shutter speed, the deeper
the saturation of magenta will be for
the background sky. The lower the
shutter speed, the less magenta
color saturation of the sky.