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.

Signs of life, by Jo Christian Oterhals on Flickr

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:

nude, by sneaks85; on Flickr

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.

Don’t give up, by Jo Christian Oterhals on Flickr

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).

Eve and Adam 2009, by Jo Christian Oterhals on Flickr

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.

Doing the dishes, Tron style, by Jo Christian Oterhals on Flickr

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.

Halo, by Drippy2009; on Flickr

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!

If you liked this post, you may also like:

1. 10 tips to get you started with flash photography, part 1
2. 9 tips to make this year’s Christmas photos better than last year’s

Used to the mediocre output of the built-in flash, lots of photographers dismiss using flash for lighting altogether. But if you upgrade to an external unit and you use it when and where it’s really useful, you’ll be able to achieve results you wouldn’t have otherwise.

These are the first 5 tips on this topic. The other 5 will be published in another article in a couple of days. So stay tuned!

High Speed Photography, by phatmax95 on Flickr

Days are (on the northern hemisphere at least) still dark. This means that for most amateur photographers, daylight’s gone by the time they’ve got a few minutes to spare for photography. If you’ve ever thought about venturing into flash photography, there’s probably no better time than right now.

But there are many myths concerning this, the two biggest being that flash light is always ugly and the second that it’s difficult to do right. This keeps many from using it. Personally I don’t find it particularly hard, neither do I find flash light particularly ugly.

Below you’ll find a few lessons that I personally find useful.

Lesson #1: If a built-in flash is all you have, use it

Although most of the lessons here will tell you that light looks best off-camera, sometimes on-camera flash is all you have. You may not get photos sutiable for publishing in fashion magazines this way, but at least you’ll get photos that are better than they could have been.

This sensational photo by Flickr user kittenmoon proves my point:

Shopping for dinner.., by kittenmoon on Flickr

A self portrait in front of a fantastic sunset made possible by a small P&S and a kiss of light from the built-in flash. Without the built-in flash, this would have been a photo of a silhoutte in front of a beautiful sunset. But with it, the photographer’s got a smashing self-portrait. In short, this may be one of the best examples that you should use whatever light you have with you.

The built-in flash can help you get rid of harsh shadows when photographing outdoors and in daylight, combined with high ISO it can help you get nicer indoor pictures, etc. You probably have a built-in flash. Use it.

Lesson #2: Equipment matters

Some people claim that great equipment doesn’t make great photographs. Up to a point they’re right. But when it comes to flash there’s still a minimum of equipment needed. At least you’ll need a flash, and regardless of what I said in lesson #1, you should preferably invest in an external unit.

If you don’t have one, now’s the time to buy. Go for an external flash with as much output power as you can afford. Preferably you should buy one that has a head that can be tilted and rotated. Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, etc., all produce flashes for their systems, but there are also lots of third-party vendors of flashes for your camera. This means that you have lots of options, and you’ll always be able to find something that suits your budget.

If you can, get one that can be triggered by your camera even when it’s off camera. Although most camera makers now have this facility built-in, some SLR models needs a second flash or a special triggering device to achieve this (most notably the Canon EOS series). If you’re on a tight budget, you can opt for radio triggers instead. They can be found on eBay for less than $50.

You’ll probably have to operate your flashes manually with these, but doing that is actually easier than it sounds at first. Personally, I use the triggers on the photo for just about anything now (click photo to see them on eBay). This kit may not suit you, but for me it does the job.

Lesson #3: Mix available light and flash when possible

If you normally shoot your photos using P or «green square», try flipping the command dial over to aperture priority.

Spread em, by Benny Vision on Flickr

On the fully automatic modes, the camera will normally shoot at your cameras flash sync speed – usually somewhere around 1/125 to 1/250 depending on what camera you have. It will completely disregard what shutter speed it should have chosen to expose the ambient light correctly.

Sometimes you may want to remove available light altogether, but in all I think those situations are fewer than the opposite. They do exist, however. See Lesson #7 for an example.

Lesson #4: Use second curtain flash sync

When mixing ambient light and flash, you’ll sometimes experience that shutter speeds drop too low to render everything sharp.

No need to panic, though. The flash will help freeze your subject and render it sharp or semi-sharp. The downside is if your subject moves. Then you’ll see «ghosting» or «speed trails».

This can look good, however, if your camera is able to synchronize flash to second shutter curtain (also called “rear curtain”), i.e fire the flash when the shutter’s closing instead of when it opens. With this function enabled, the frozen, sharp version of your subject will come after the ghosting has occured. The ghost effect will then look like speed trails and give you a natural sense of speed and direction.

Boom, by keithpyt on Flickr

Looking at the image I’ve used to exemplify this, taken by Flickr user keithpyt, you’ll see a great use of slow shutter speed and second curtain sync. The biker is nice and sharp, and the trails give you a feeling of speed. Had the photographer not used second curtain flash sync, however, it would have looked as if the biker flew backwards. The result is in this case a great photo.

So use second curtain sync as often as possible. You should probably leave your flash on second curtain sync all the time. (If you use a radio trigger set like the one I mentioned above, you may experience that second shutter sync is impossible)

Lesson #5: Light looks best when it come from anywhere else but the camera

You’ve seen it outdoors: Light almost never comes directly from behind your back. As long as you just have a built-in flash you don’t have much choice in the matter. But if you also own an external flash: Why insist that flash light should come from your forehead?

Direct flash will create harsh light and shadows, that more often than not is unflattering for your subject. If your subjects are close to a wall, deep shadows will dominate the background. And in dark rooms they’ll get the dreaded red eyes. In short: Unless that’s the effect you’re going for, avoid direct flash.

The solution is to get the light to come in from somewhere else but the top of your camera. What’s great is that you can do this without taking the flash off your camera. If you’ve got the rotatable and tiltable kind of flash you’ve got plenty of possibility to bounce light of walls, ceilings, etc. The ability to bounce will alone open a world of possibilities for creating more subdued indirect light effects.

Portrait before Christmas, by Jo Christian Oterhals on Flickr

In this example I’ve fixed a flash on my camera. I’ve rotated the head 180 degrees and tilted it a little upwards, so that it actually fires partly into the ceiling and a wall behind me. A nice side effect of this technique is that it creates a soft, nice shadowless light, almost like a large softbox. No deep shadows in the face here, and none in the background. A great side effect is nice and large catchlights in his eyes.

One shortcoming of this technique is that the walls should be white or as close to white as possible. If they’re not, the reflected light will have added some of the color of the surface it reflects from. Unless you’re converting your images to black and white later on, this is something you’ll have to be aware of.

If you’ve got the kind of flash that can be remotely controlled by your camera, this problem can be avoided by placing the flash off camera somewhere to the left or right of the subject.

End of part 1. Check out part 2 next week!

If you liked this post, you may also like:

1. 10 tips to get you started with flash photography, part 2
2. 9 tips to make this year’s Christmas photos better than last year’s
3. Take pictures in aperture-priority mode