Images Were Shot Minutes Apart With Same Background And Same Single Light Source – The One On the Left Has A Purple Gel Added

Neither of the images above have been through Lightroom or Photoshop because I wanted you to get a pretty solid comparison without a bunch of post production editing. I did minor tweaking in a free online program, but I didn’t have my wife, who does my editing, work her usual magic on the images above.

I got my first exposure to color gels around 1983-85 when I assisted an editorial photographer. He used gels on a regular basis. That was back in the FILM days. Although he did have a polaroid back on a 35mm camera for testing, he didn’t shoot too many test shots. He really knew his stuff when it came to using color gels.

For the images above, the difference is really one single purple color gel. The images were shot minutes apart with one single studio light source. Notice how the background color is different in the image on the left with the gel used, but amazingly, it’s the same background as the image on the right with no gel used. Just looking at the two images above and knowing the only difference is a single gel should be enough motivation for you to try something different with your photography.

Rosco is a popular maker of photography gels in case you want to do some research online or find gels/filters locally. They make the small gels for a standard hotshoe mount flash and they make larger gels like the one that I used above on my studio strobe. I got the kit that I pulled this gel from at my local camera store: Southeastern Camera in Raleigh.

The gel kit that I bought came with a large variety of color options. Rosco actually refers to it as a filter kit which can be found via this link on their website. They are 12 x 12 in size.

Whether you are using a hotshoe mount flash, studio strobes or both, you may want to pick up a pack of color gels to explore some new options with your photography.

This post was NOT an in depth lesson on using color gels and trying to find the right gel for the right lighting situation. That can get pretty intense depending on how deep you want to go. You may want to check out YouTube for some videos that will help you get further educated about using gels in photography. This post is just to get you thinking about the possibilities and having you take the next step to entering the photography gel world by actually owning a few gels to use for your work.

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As for an ND (Neutral Density Filter), that is something different entirely. ND filters are numbered based on how dark they are like ND2, ND4 and ND8 with each being darker or you can think of it in STOPS: ND2 = 1 Stop | ND4 = 2 Stops | ND8 = 3 Stops. That means that if you are shooting outside and the sun is so bright that you have to set the f/stop at f/16, you can use an ND8 and have the same exposure at f/16 as you would at f/5.6. Hmmm… Why would you want to shoot at f/5.6? Shallow depth of field is one key thing that comes to mind. But you are thinking that you could just shoot at a faster shutter speed at f/5.6 and problem solved. Not really, if you are using your flash outside that syncs at 1/200th and you really want that f/5.6 shallow depth of field. There are other reasons to us a ND filter, but I’ll leave you with this video to learn more about ND filters. It’s a 15 minute video. If that’s too long, just search YouTube for other ND Filter videos.

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