Flash Photography Lighting Gels

Video Transcript

"This is Mark Bowers from bowersphotography.com in Utah, and this segment is flash photography lighting gels. What I'd like to show you is there's a lot of gels that are available out there. Usually you can find these in theatrical supply stores and some nice photography stores. There's hundreds of different colors that you can get. Some of my favorites, I bought in sheets. You can get them in, some of my favorites are blues and greens and purples and reds. There are some things that you don't have to spend a whole lot of money on. What I've done mostly with my gels is because I shoot with a flash that's very low power, it's two hundred watts or less, so that I can actually put the gel against the flash and it's not going to melt. One of my favorite ones is this Kodak film that I just rescued from the garbage can, not very expensive. In fact it was free. I put duct tape on the back and I wrapped it the same diameter as the gel and I just put it right over the flash tube and at low power, this just puts out the most beautiful brown color that you imagine. Another thing I want to show you is how the lights look on a background. I've got a little spotlight here and this can show you, kind of this is a red gel, and we'll just put it on the background. Now this particular spot is a hot light. It will melt the gels and so you have to have some space between the gels and the backgrounds. That's a red one, here's a blue one and you match the backgrounds with the color that you want to show."