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Hopefully, you enjoyed the first part of this guest post on flash photography. Now it’s time for the last part, which I’m sure you’ll enjoy as well!
Lesson #6: Flashes are good at light, but great at creating shadows
Even though I was concerned with removing shadows in the last lesson, it’s important to remember that sometimes shadows can look cool.
I had noticed this little flower that was growing in the most unlikely of places, and knew that I had to photograph it. But the day I had time, the light was dull and grey and absolutely shadowless. It just didn’t look good. So what I did was that I placed a flash off camera, a few meters to the right of the flower. I didn’t use any softening devices at all; this was all direct flash.
The small blip of flash made the flower cast a nice shadow. In addition the flash added some color to the scene, so that what really was a gray day looked like a sunny afternoon.
Conscious use of shadows can be used with great success and effect when photographing people. Sometimes it elevates a scene from mundane to great. This nude photo by the Flickr user sneaks85 is a great example:
The light is great of course, but it’s the shadows that accentuates the model’s body and curves. So be aware of shadows: Shadowless lighting is not an ideal in itself. It can be, but surprisingly often it’s not.
Lesson #7: Sometimes light should come from behind
We’re so accustomed to seeing subjects lit from the front, that merely placing the light behind the subject you’ll create a more «edgy» look. Not only that, but sometimes you should think more about lighting little than much.
In this case I just wanted to light the rim of the faces, so both models here hand-holds one flash each. They hold them just below the edge of the frame and tilts them a little upwards. The flame is caused by stray light from one of the flashes.
Even though in one of the lessons above I say that you should mix available light and flash light when you can, in this particular case I wanted to remove all available light. So the combination of a small aperture and high shutter speed rendered the parts that are not flash lit black. It was really only the edge of the faces that were lit (often referred to as edge lighting).
This another example using the same technique, but with a twist: I keep enough available light to render the bodies somewhat, but an overexposed background creates a high-contrast silhouette look.
Lesson #8: Light can be colored
Flash light is white or neutral. The great thing about white light is that it can be colored. Wrap a sheet of colored plastic over the flash head, and you suddenly have a colored light.
This can be used a lot of ways. One obvious way is to color whatever it is you’re trying to photograph. In this photo I’ve placed a blue plastic gel over the flash. The scene is as ordinary as running water from a tap, but the blue light gives the water an unreal, almost metallic look.
Lesson #9: Go manual
After dabbling with flash photography for a while, you’ll see that when the computer inside your camera makes every decision for you, the results will be pretty average. The computer will always try to expose perfectly, and a perfect result in a computer’s mind is a photo that includes as much tonality between totally white and completely blown-out as possible.
The strange thing is that the world is seldom as average as this. Now’s the time to take charge. Start with exposure compensation. Just as your camera has exposure compensation functions for letting in more or less light than what your camera has chosen for you, the flash will probably have the same possibility. So try to output more or less light from the flash using flash exposure compensation. Learn when your flash/camera combo makes good decisions for you, and when they don’t. You’ll soon see that you’ll get better photos once you’ve mastered this.
For many this will be enough fiddling around, but for those of you who want to take it a step further: Go manual. There are several reasons for going manual, one of them can be if you are using one of the eBay radio trigger sets. Then you have no choice but to go manual. But manual is also an option if your TTL/automatic system gets fooled by sudden changes in ambient light. With manual settings you’re ensured that flash output stays identical from exposure to exposure.
Manual control of flash is hard to grasp at first, because it involves some head calculations. But when you get the grip on it, you’ve got more control than ever. Flashes providing manual control gives you the opportunity to tell it to blast at 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc., of full power. Some flashes let you reduce as much as 1/128. The lower the power, the faster the flash will recharge. An unexpected but cool side effect of lowering output power, is that the time the flash is actually lit shortens. Imagine photographing droplets: The shorter time the flash lights, the more frozen the drop will be.
Final lesson: Experiment! Sometimes wrong is right!
This may be the most important lesson. Sometimes wrong is right. Experiment with output, with reflecting light off wrong-colored surfaces, overexpose, underexpose; be amazed by how things did not turn out like you thought (and make notes when these wrongs actually looks good).
As I’ve shown above, with flash you can: turn dull days in to colorful days; freeze droplets; make bodies more interesting; simulate movement.
In short: Experiment. Flash photography is fun!
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