Getting a Black Background in Bright Daylight With One Light

Bright midday sun and a pitted concrete wall are poor ingredients for a dark, moody portrait, yet one small gridded flash can turn them into exactly that. Learning to shut out ambient light, shape a single source, and then finish the file with careful retouching gives you a look you can repeat almost anywhere with very little gear.

With the camera set to shut out as much ambient light as possible before the flash fires, Glyn Dewis builds a one-light portrait outdoors in full sun. His settings land at f/16, ISO 125, and 1/250 s, and he stays within sync speed instead of turning to high-speed sync or ND filters. The light is a 100 Ws Westcott FJ100 at nearly full power, fired into a 15-inch octabox with a grid and held high so the light skims straight down the front of the face. The grid keeps spill off the background and leaves shadow on both sides, almost like a narrow strip of light running down the subject. Dewis locks the camera on a tripod with eye detection on, which gives his subject one fixed point to look at while Dewis moves the light around freely. Separating the camera from your hands like this makes it much easier to experiment with light position without losing your composition.

The sunny 16 rule explains why this works as well as it does in direct sun. In full sun, f/16 with a shutter speed close to the reciprocal of your ISO gives a normal daylight exposure, so f/16 at ISO 125 and 1/250 s sits only about a stop under. That explains why a faint trace of the scene survives even at the lens' smallest aperture. The flash wins on distance. Light falls off with the square of the distance, so a small unit held just outside the frame puts far more light on a face than it would from across a room, while the background, farther from the source, gets much less of it. Indoors, where ambient light is often several stops darker, the same settings produce pure black and leave the flash with power to spare. You can carry the look from a sunny parking lot to a store floor or a spare bedroom because your shutter speed and aperture handle the ambient light while flash power and position handle your subject.

A small change to the reflector makes a big difference in the eyes. Laid flat just below chest level, it left the eye sockets dark. Tilting the far edge up toward the subject bounced the gridded light back into the eyes and revealed plenty of detail. In Lightroom, Dewis uses the Iris and Pupil mask, tightens it with the Feather and Edge sliders, and adds a touch of exposure, texture, clarity, and dehaze. In Photoshop, his rule is to fix whatever jumps out first, which here is shine down the nose. He paints over it with the Remove tool set to Auto on a new layer, then drops that layer to about 50% opacity so some natural shine returns. The Spot Healing Brush handles the most obvious divots in the concrete behind him.

Most of the lift comes from dodging and burning on a separate layer filled with 50% gray and set to Soft Light. Dewis keeps the Dodge tool at a low 10% exposure and builds up gradually, holding Option or Alt to switch to the Burn tool with the same settings. Wherever he brightens a highlight, he darkens the areas on either side, which carves shape into the eyes, nose, brows, and mouth. The same approach exaggerates the folds in a white shirt. If you overdo an area, you can paint over it with a soft brush set to 50% gray, and the adjustment disappears without touching the original pixels. The effect sneaks up on you, so look away from the screen and come back before judging it.

The edit continues well past that point. Dewis applies his "2010 technique," a two-pass sharpening method that makes a close-up face seem to come forward off the page, and he adds a skin texture effect using a filter that normally serves a different purpose. From there, he adds background blur with Lens Blur in Camera Raw, a subtle warm grade in Boris FX Optics, and a soft proofing step comparing rendering intents before printing on FotoSpeed Natural Soft Textured Bright White 315 with a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-300. Switching from relative to perceptual rendering visibly changed the contrast in the proof, and the final A4 print still held a trace of the concrete wall's texture.

The video above shows the exact settings for the sharpening passes and the skin texture trick, and Dewis walks through the whole print setup in it as well.